Westminster saw Dame Esther Rantzen at her most public. It was here that she collected three honours over 24 years, here that she stood on the Mall for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, and here, in the committee rooms and lobbies of Parliament, that she fought her last campaign. She died today aged 86, at home in Hampshire, surrounded by her family.
Three trips to the Palace
Rantzen was appointed OBE in 1991 for services to broadcasting, after 18 years fronting That's Life! (Hammersmith Magazine tells the story of the programme). The CBE followed in 2006, this time for services to children, twenty years after she founded Childline. Then, in the 2015 New Year Honours, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to children and older people through Childline and The Silver Line.
She was invested by the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace on 25 June 2015. Seven years later, on 5 June 2022, she was back outside the Palace gates as one of the national figures taking part in the Platinum Jubilee Pageant, in a photograph released by Downing Street that shows her, at 81, thoroughly enjoying herself.
An outsider's view of Parliament
She was never a party politician and tried only once to become an MP, standing as an independent in Luton South in 2010 and finishing fourth (Bedford Magazine has that story). But she understood Parliament as a campaigner does: as a place to be pushed. That's Life! pushed it on consumer law and organ donation. Childline's launch in 1986 pushed it on child protection. The Silver Line, founded in 2012, pushed it on the loneliness of older people, a subject that had never before had a national voice.
The final campaign
In January 2023 she announced she had lung cancer; by May it had reached stage four. In December 2023 she revealed she had joined Dignitas, the Swiss assisted dying organisation, and asked MPs for a free vote on changing the law. Her intervention did more than any other single voice to put the issue back on the Commons agenda, and in November 2024 MPs voted to give the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill a second reading.
She was, by then, too ill to travel to Westminster and watched the debate from home. In February this year she said her cancer medication had stopped working, and on 10 September she said she had become too physically fragile to make the journey to Switzerland. She died in England, at home, the outcome she had spent three years arguing that others should be able to choose.
Dame Priti Patel, the former Home Secretary, said today: "From That's Life! to launching the charity Childline to the many causes she championed, Dame Esther Rantzen was a remarkable journalist and campaigner."
What she leaves in SW1
Her family said her "legacy of compassion and understanding will live on in her charities Childline and the Silverline". Childline, now part of the NSPCC, and The Silver Line, now part of Age UK, both still lobby in Westminster on behalf of the people who ring them. Whatever Parliament finally decides on assisted dying, the debate will carry her name for a generation. Her family story, which reaches from a Warsaw Jewish quarter to a Spitalfields cap-maker, is told by Warsaw Magazine and Tower Hamlets Magazine.
Dame Esther Rantzen across our magazines
Each Firefly title is remembering a different chapter of her life. Read the others:
- Hemel Magazine: her Berkhamsted beginnings
- Harrow Magazine: the Edgware schoolgirl
- Oxford Magazine: Somerville and the Oxford stage
- Camden Magazine: Hampstead, home for half a century
- Hammersmith Magazine: That's Life! at Wood Lane
- Southampton Magazine: the New Forest cottage where she died
- Bedford Magazine: the Luton South campaign of 2010
- Tower Hamlets Magazine: the Spitalfields cap-maker
- Warsaw Magazine: the family story that began in Warsaw
Sources: BBC News, ITV News, Hello!, Wikipedia, the family statement issued by Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox, Somerville College, Hampshire Life, the Advertiser and Times, Jewish News, The Jewish Chronicle, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, UK Parliament election results. Images via Wikimedia Commons, credited individually.
