When Kim Leadbeater walked out of the chamber of the House of Commons into parliament’s central lobby, she was embraced by some campaigners who did not even know if they would be alive when the vote came.
“Overwhelmingly the sense is relief,” she said. Her close colleague the Labour MP Lizzi Collinge was near to tears. For the Conservative Kit Malthouse, standing nearby, it was the culmination of a decade of campaigning within his own party. More than 20 of his colleagues – more than he expected – backed the bill.
But even in the voting lobbies MPs were texting each other with doubts the bill would pass, so high was the tension on both sides. When the speaker read out the numbers, Keir Starmer, a longtime supporter who has tried to stay studiously neutral, allowed himself a small smile. Some opponents, many of them veteran Labour female MPs, looked deeply shaken.
For Leadbeater, the vote came at a difficult time. Sunday would have been her sister Jo Cox’s birthday, and last Monday was the ninth anniversary of the MP’s murder.
In the six months since the bill was first voted on, opposition has grown more vocal. Leadbeater felt it personally when MPs who she hoped would support her have moved against the bill. And the attacks, particularly on social media, have become more personal.
When she voted, Leadbeater said she would think about a lay preacher with terminal cancer she met in Yorkshire – Pamela – who spoke of how she believed that the God of her own faith did not want suffering prolonged.
“I’m fully respectful of everybody’s views when it comes to their personal faith,” Leadbeater said in her office, speaking to the Guardian on the evening before the vote. “But the way she spoke about her religion and how that has informed her thoughts as a dying woman, I thought was very, very powerful.”
Leadbeater hopes the bill will get its royal assent by October, but that will be the beginning of a four-year process to implement it, overseen by Whitehall officials. Many questions remain: how it will be funded, whether the NHS will oversee it or private providers and whether it will be free at the point of use.
It will be implemented by the Department of Health and Social Care, although Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has told allies he will not seek to impede it. The day-to-day work will be handed over to the care minister, Stephen Kinnock, who backed it.
And there remain some assisted dying supporters in parliament who feel the bill is a missed opportunity, especially for those with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s who will not be eligible.
In the public gallery on Friday, there were rows of campaigners, many of them in tears, with one clasping their hands in prayer. There have been deep bonds formed within both sides in parliament, Leadbeater was surrounded by supporters on the party’s left and right, from Jake Richards to John McDonnell.
In front of her were some of the bill’s most active and thoughtful opponents, a group of female Labour MPs new to parliament, Jess Asato, Polly Billington and Melanie Ward. Those women each had deeply personal reasons for their opposition, such as having long careers fighting for vulnerable women and disabled people.
Almost all of those who spoke – for and against – talked about some of the hardest moments of their lives, deaths of parents from pancreatic cancer, a sister with brain cancer, friends dying too young.
Some supporters of the bill said they wished at times Leadbeater had taken a harder line. “Kim has tried to be too constructive with people – you can’t negotiate or work with people whose sole intent is to kill the bill. And that’s what’s frustrating, because whatever you give them, give them an inch and they take a mile,” one MP said.
There is still deep unease among advisers in No 10 about the bill’s passing and, until the 11th hour, there was a live discussion over whether Starmer would abstain on the vote, especially given the Iran situation.
But, as some staffers acknowledge, it would have had echoes of Boris Johnson heading to Afghanistan to avoid a vote on Heathrow. The public, whatever the PM says about neutrality, will assume this is a Labour government endeavour. “Perhaps there is a lesson here about not promising parliamentary time to Esther Rantzen,” one quipped.
The prime minister himself had been deeply conscious of not wanting to appear to influence MPs. He had personally admonished Streeting for doing so before the last vote. But his very presence in the yes lobbies would always be a factor for some.
For some MPs, there is a feeling now that the government should take ownership of the issue, as David Cameron did on equal marriage. “Why not try and take credit for something good? A lot of people really like it,” one MP said.
For the most passionate, the issue has dominated the last few months in parliament. But they are in the minority. For others, it was in the week of the final vote that they began to turn their minds to whether the agreed-upon safeguards were robust enough.
The message from opponents was that it was no longer a vote on the principle, but on the detail. “For some of us, this has been our lives for the last six months,” one senior MP said. “For some colleagues, they just haven’t thought about it at all and didn’t engage back until this week. How do they really feel about being responsible for wrong or compelled deaths? That was the question put to them.”
Other opponents of the bill raised concerns about the highly imperfect nature of a private member’s bill, starting a bill from scratch with no heft of a Whitehall department or legislative experts.
“It’s been a shocking indictment of our process generally, MPs are suddenly realising that,” said one. Leadbeater has argued to MPs that the bill has had exactly the same level of expertise and input from civil servants as any other.
Significant practical changes have been made to the bill since November, including the removal of approval being needed from a high court judge.
That was taken out on the demand of the Ministry of Justice, fearful of how it could gum up the courts even further. Now the process will include a panel of psychiatrist, social worker and senior lawyer.
That has been met with concern among some of those professions too. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said it feared clinicians could be tied up with those decisions, rather than helping patients navigate their depression, which might enable them to recover enough to want to live longer.
For some these concerns were crucial to changing their votes. The Labour MP Josh Fenton-Glynn, who previously abstained, said the safeguards were not strong enough. He said: “I don’t legislate for me, I legislate for everyone including those with complex disabilities.”
Dr Simon Opher, another Labour MP, said it was clear there would be people for whom the safeguards would not be robust enough.
“What I realised in the process was that no matter how many safeguards were put in place, almost everyone who was against the bill were steadfast in their views.
For many new MPs, being part of such a defining moment of social change so early in their parliamentary careers has been intense. “It’s been an incredibly emotional and at times overwhelming process to be part of, especially as a new MP,” the Lib Dem MP Tom Gordon said.
The issue has dominated their postbags. But since November, most who spoke to the Guardian have noticed a concerted increase in those who were against the bill.
“It’s one of the first issues in my life where I have actually seen signed petitions on paper – people who have gone door to door or passed it round a church group,” one MP said.
In the final hours before the vote, opponents thought they were getting closer. A campaigner even offered to fund a private ambulance for the Alliance MP Sorcha Eastwood, an opponent of the bill, who had Covid and feared she would miss the vote – though she eventually tested negative. But though the majority has been slashed, it is still substantial enough to mean peers are unlikely block its progress.
The bill will now pass to the House of Lords where it is expected to be shepherded by the Labour peer Charlie Falconer. But it is a process that is still very unpredictable.
“I thought the spreadsheet for us was hard,” one MP backing the bill said. “That is a different level – will they turn up? Do we even know who they are?”
