Veteran journalist John Humphrys talks to Hannah Stephenson about deaths in the family, and the inspiration for his latest book, The Welcome Visitor.

HE’S known for his gritty interrogations of politicians on Radio 4’s Today programme and as the quick-fire host on BBC2’s Mastermind, yet broadcaster John Humphrys is much less confrontational away from the BBC studios.

He’s actually surprisingly chirpy, even though we are meeting to discuss the most morbid of subjects, death.

He talks freely about the topic of his latest book, The Welcome Visitor, co-written with his doctor, Sarah Jarvis.

The book was inspired by the lingering, undignified death of Humphrys’ father, who simply didn’t want to carry on living after his wife died in 1990.

Humphrys senior turned to drink, downing at least a bottle of whisky a day. He eventually collapsed but was brought back from the brink by doctors and, in his final years, underwent a personality change as dementia set in.

Humphrys’ father became vindictive and vicious towards his loved ones and spent his last days in a mental institution for the elderly in Cardiff, growing weaker and longing for death. Eventually, he stopped eating and drinking – and nature took its course. He was 91 and had outlived his wife by 13 years, if you can call that living.

“It was ghastly,” Humphrys recalls. “It was hideous for him and for everybody involved with him. It can destroy your relationship with somebody you’ve loved your whole life. You didn’t want to see him because you knew how unpleasant it would be.

He wasn’t the person that we knew.”

Afterwards, Humphrys wrote a column about his father’s death and received more than 1,000 letters in response.

“There’s a huge number of people who are suffering in this country alone. There are about 800,000 people with dementia. That would mean by the time you allowed for all their loved ones, you’re probably talking about two to three million people who don’t know what to do or how to sort their thoughts out on it all.”

The main point of the book, he says, is to allow people to control their death as they have their life. He argues strongly for the legalisation of assisted suicide.

“My point is that if something ghastly does happen to you then you should have the ability to put an end to your life in conditions that are acceptable.

You shouldn’t have to traipse off to bloody Switzerland to do it.”

Last year, Humphrys’ younger brother Rob died from lung cancer in his fifties, just seven weeks after being diagnosed. Humphrys still feels guilty about the whole episode.

“The reason that I feel guilty, as everybody does in this situation, is that I wanted to be able to say, ‘If it gets unbearable or you decide you want to put an end to it, then we will be able to do that’, but we couldn’t’.”

Humphrys insists it shouldn’t have to be that way. He says his late ex-wife, Edna, a former nurse, had a much better death, although she was only in her early fifties and suffered pancreatic cancer.

“She was able to control the pain. My daughter gave up her job to care for her and in the last few months of her life she got a lot done and was getting regular visits from the Macmillan nurses.

“When the end was very close, they gave her as much morphine as she needed and she died without having been in really dreadful pain.”

Humphrys grew up in Cardiff, the son of a French polisher. He left school at 15 to work on the Penarth Times and then The Western Mail before joining the BBC.

Despite the morbid talk, he doesn’t brood endlessly about his own mortality. At 65, he is wearing well, but then late fatherhood – he has an eight-year-old son, Owen, with his former partner Valerie Sanderson – is keeping him fit.