‘King of Critics’ AA Gill reveals NHS could not give him new life-extending drug but says health service is ‘the best of us’
Writer died of lung cancer yesterday but used his final column to praise the public health service for its ‘human connection’ despite its shortcomings
STAR writer and food critic AA Gill, who died yesterday from lung cancer, has revealed the NHS could not give him a potentially life-extending drug.
The Sunday Times journalist broke the news in his last column for the newspaper, , in which he also said that the the public health service ‘represents everything that is best about us’.
The 62-year-old said that his doctor wanted to recommend him a course of immunotherapy to help him live longer but that it wasn’t available on the NHS because it costs £100,000 a year.
The treatment is about four times what a course of chemotherapy costs but is “particularly successful” at fighting the kind of disease he had.
Writing in his final column Gill, whose first names are Adrian Anthony, he said: “What Nice (the group that decides what drugs the NHS will pay for) doesn’t say about the odds is that immunotherapy mostly works for old men who are partially responsible for their cancers because they smoked.
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“Thousands of patients could benefit … But old men who think they’re going to die anyway aren’t very effective activists. They don’t get the public or press pressure that young mothers’ cancers and kids’ diseases get.”
He added: “As yet, immunotherapy isn’t a cure, it’s a stretch more life, a considerable bit of life. More life with your kids, more life with your friends, more life holding hands, more life shared, more life spent on earth – but only if you can pay.”
In his 4,000 word column Gill said “the National Health Service is the best of us” and had written a couple of weeks before that he wanted to use the public service because of its “human connection”.
He explained that it was not possible to be racist or sexist in the NHS because of all the different types of people who work there and that it brought out the “Blitz, ‘back against the wall’, stern and sentimental best of us” in caring for each other.
He explained that “it’s almost impossible to walk into a private hospital and not fleetingly feel that you are [prejudiced]: a plush waiting room with entitled and bad-tempered health tourists”.
His final words detail a conversation he was having with a young nurse while he was sitting on a bed in a cancer ward.
She came to find him and said: “There you are. I’ve been waiting for you all day. You’re supposed to be with me down in chemotherapy. I saw your name. Why are you up here?”
He replied: “Well, it turns out the chemo isn’t working.” He writes: “Her shoulders sag and her hand goes to her head. ‘F***, f***, that’s dreadful.’ I think she might be crying.
“I look away, so might I. You don’t get that with private healthcare.”
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