David Cameron has said he has changed his mind on assisted dying and supports the bill to legalise it ahead of its first Commons vote this week.
The former prime minister, who previously opposed changing the law, said he had been persuaded by the safeguards in the bill and believed it would achieve a “meaningful reduction in human suffering”.
Cameron is the first former prime minister to declare his support for the legislation. Gordon Brown, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have all indicated that they are opposed to it. Tony Blair has not expressed a view.
On Friday MPs will vote on legislation that would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill patients who have less than six months to live.
In an article for the Times, Cameron said he was persuaded that the bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, a Labour backbencher, was “not about ending life, it is about shortening death”.
He wrote: “When we know that there’s no cure, when we know death is imminent, when patients enter a final and acute period of agony, then surely, if they can prevent it and – crucially – want to prevent it, we should let them make that choice.”
The former Conservative prime minister said he was previously opposed to legalising assisted dying because he feared that “vulnerable people could be pressurised into hastening their own deaths”.
But he wrote that the safeguards in Leadbeater’s bill were “extremely strong”. They include a requirement for two doctors and a judge to approve decisions, and for the judge to speak to at least one of the doctors.
Cameron said he will vote in favour of the bill if it progresses to the House of Lords.
David Neuberger, the former president of the supreme court who ruled against high-profile assisted dying applications, including those of Debbie Purdy in 2009 and Tony Nicklinson, told the Guardian he supported the law change.
Neuberger said he believed the status quo was failing “the fundamental aims of the law – to respect people’s right of personal autonomy, and to protect the vulnerable”.
MPs supportive of the change are confident it will pass its first legislative hurdle and appear to have built up a lead in the Commons, despite high-profile interventions against the bill from Wes Streeting, the health secretary, and Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary.
Seema Malhotra, the migration minister, became the latest minister to declare her opposition to it on Thursday. She said she would vote against assisted dying as she did in 2015, citing “the pressures that could be put on vulnerable people” and protecting those with disabilities.
Keir Starmer has not said which way he will vote but backed assisted dying in 2015 and promised to make time for the issue to be debated in this parliament.
Starmer made that promise to actor Esther Rantzen last year after she revealed she had stage-four cancer and was considering ending her life in Switzerland.
Asked whether the prime minister should be taking a more active role in the debate in the run-up the vote, Rantzen told LBC on Thursday: “I think he did the right thing … This is a personal issue of conscience, and I think he is taking it very seriously”.
“During the last debate, he supported assisted dying because, as DPP, he’d come across so many heart-rending cases when compassionate bereaved families were being investigated by the police for assisting with suicide, which is the mess that the current law makes poor families in that situation go through.”
“It’s appalling. I don’t understand how anyone can support the current law, and I believe Sir Keir doesn’t support it himself”.
