In December 2023, Dame Esther said that she was taking a “miracle” treatment for her lung cancer, adding that she might “buzz off to Zurich” – where assisted dying is legal – if it did not work.
A year later, she witnessed the House of Commons vote in favour of the first stage of a Bill that might make a medically-assisted death legal in England and Wales. A similar bill was introduced to the Scottish Parliament.
Although Dame Esther knew that she would not live long enough to take advantage of any new law, she said she wanted to protect other families from “the same agonising experience”.
“In the olden days, doctors would ease you out of life and the difference was it wasn’t necessarily with your consent,” she said.
In March 2025, her daughter confirmed that the drug that had kept Dame Esther alive since her cancer diagnosis was no longer working. They had always known that its effects would be temporary.
Last December, she told a newspaper that she was planning “an ‘official’ Christmas with my children and five grandchildren, slightly ahead of the real Christmas so that there will be more chance that I am actually alive to enjoy it with them!”
In September 2026, the House of Commons voted against the Assisted Dying Bill, a decision Dame Esther described as “a tragic day”.
She added that she was now too frail to travel to Switzerland to end her life.
“Everything I didn’t want to happen I’m having to go through now,” she said, “which means that the people I love and care about either cannot visit me, or when they do, see me suffering pain or indignity which will inevitably get between them and our shared happy memories, and may even overwhelm the way they think of me.”
The broadcaster and campaigner was once asked about what drove her to get involved in a multitude of causes.
“I need to be needed,” she said. “It’s what makes you get up in the morning, and makes you feel when you go to bed that the day has been well spent.
“There’s a real pleasure in feeling somebody needs your help and that you actually have made a difference.”