We as City of London and Westminster residents are right to demand the very best of the NHS, given the huge sums of taxpayers’ money it consumes each year (more than the schools, defence and policing budgets combined).

Inevitably an MP’s direct personal experience has a strong bearing on his or her views on ethical and moral issues, which are rightly subject generally to a free vote in parliament. My own father’s terminal cancer and death almost twenty years ago, for example, played a fundamental role in formulating my own views on pain relief in the latter stages of life. As his next of kin, I played a role in working with our