HODGES: Why has Starmer washed his hands of his right-to-die Bill?

The Assisted Dying Bill is dying. ‘There’s been a big shift in opinion during the past couple of weeks,’ an MP told me. ‘A lot of colleagues were minded to give it serious consideration but are now saying: “I’m not comfortable with this. It’s all too rushed. We need to stop and think”.’

Over recent days, the Bill’s sponsor, the Labour MP for Spen Valley, Kim Leadbeater, has been holding private meetings with MPs to try to reassure them.

Rigorous safeguards would be in place, she promised. The legislation would apply only to those who have a terminal illness. Any end of life decision would require the approval of two medical professionals and a high court judge. And there would have to be absolutely no evidence of any form of coercion.

But Leadbeater has run into one major problem in convincing colleagues over the moral and legal efficacy of her Bill. They don’t actually think it’s her Bill.

‘People respect Kim,’ a senior backbencher told me, ‘and when you speak to her she’s across the issue. But no one thinks she’s the one really driving this. It’s Keir Starmer who’s been pushing for it. And he’s vanished.’

A few weeks after July’s General Election, I was told by a senior Cabinet minister that Downing Street was encouraging Labour MPs at the top of the ballot for private member’s legislation to use the opportunity to introduce an assisted dying bill.

At the time, the story was strenuously denied by No10. But a few days later Kim Leadbeater announced she was, indeed, going to introduce such legislation.

I’ve looked back to see if she had previously shown any significant interest in this emotive and complex issue. A search of Hansard shows no previous interventions on end-of-life care, or anything similar.

She spoke in the King’s Speech debate shortly before the private member’s ballot result was announced, and covered a range of subjects – her constituency, the harassment facing female politicians, the NHS, education, war in Ukraine. Yet, assisted dying didn’t feature.

Earlier in the year she had taken time to introduce another private member’s Bill. But that was about road safety and driver’s licences.

The Prime Minister, in contrast, has been committed to supporting assisted dying throughout his professional career.

In one of his first decisions as Director of Public Prosecutions, he announced it was not in the public interest to prosecute the family of rugby player Daniel James who had helped him end his life in the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Two years later, he published specific guidance detailing when prosecutions should not be pursued. And this March he told assisted dying champion Esther Rantzen he supported her campaign, and pledged legislation would be forthcoming after the election.

So it has come to pass.

Those MPs are right, this is indeed Keir Starmer’s Assisted Dying Bill. But as has been his way since entering No10, after having introduced it, a chilly aloofness has descended, as he has begun to distance himself from his own piece of legislation.

Whether he backs it would ‘depend on the detail’, he suddenly announced last week. It was all about ‘getting the balance right’.

Which is a preposterous position.

Allies of Starmer claim he doesn’t want to be seen to be unduly influencing what should be a vote of individual conscience. But, if that was his aim, he shouldn’t have pledged to introduce the legislation in the first place. He shouldn’t have publicly stated he supported a change in the law. And he shouldn’t have encouraged Leadbeater to introduce the Bill.

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Starmer’s sudden attempt to backtrack from his longstanding advocacy of assisted dying simply isn’t tenable.

For one thing, it’s hanging Kim Leadbeater out to dry. Last week, she admitted she had found it ‘disappointing and quite upsetting’ after Health Secretary Wes Streeting publicly expressed concerns over the Bill.

Another problem is that by absenting himself from the debate, Starmer is starting to lose control of the political agenda. One minister told me they were becoming concerned assisted dying risked sucking oxygen out of the government at a time when they needed to be selling the Budget, and other key messages.

‘This was never supposed to be on the grid,’ they lamented.

But the biggest issue is that Starmer is becoming guilty of a gross abdication of national leadership. The prosaically titled Terminally Ill Adults (End Of Life) Bill isn’t just another bill. It represents one of the most fundamental moral and ethical legislative changes in Britain since the 1967 Abortion Act.

By choosing to introduce it, the Prime Minister has given hope to those who face the agony of having to fight to end their lives in peace, and with dignity. And he’s brought untold worry to those who live in fear of becoming a burden in their final years, or of living in a society where life is no longer sacred. So he can’t now say ‘nothing to do with me, guv’ and wash his hands of the issue.

If ever there was a moment for Keir Starmer to take a stand, this is it. He has publicly stated he wants a change in the law to give the terminally-ill the right to choose the time and place of their own death. Fine. So he must come out and fight for it. Not hide behind Kim Leadbeater. Or Parliament. Or mealy-mouthed platitudes about examining ‘the details’.

With the Prime Minister’s full authority behind it, the Assisted Dying Bill can still pass. But if Starmer continues to sit on the fence he has so hastily constructed, it – and he – will fall.

And then what will have been achieved? What will the point have been of the pledges, and the statements of support and – most crucially – the false hope?

I am yet to be convinced of the case for assisted dying. But the Prime Minister claims he is. The time has come for him to show some leadership, and make it.