So, having run out of time in the House of Lords, Kim Leadbeater’s well-intentioned but deeply flawed Assisted Suicide Bill is finally dead. Apparently, Leadbeater regards the attempt by the House of Lords to address the Bill’s flaws as “undemocratic”. And Esther Rantzen – who was given less than six months to live some three years ago – is gutted.

However, it seems peers did not apply enough garlic when driving a stake through the Bill’s heart, because – according to a report in the rabidly pro-assisted suicide Guardian – Leadbeater and her fellow ideologues plan to “table an identical [Private Members’] Bill in the next parliamentary session, which would prevent peers blocking it again, as the Lords cannot stop the same Bill twice.”

In fact, simply tabling an identical PMB in the next parliamentary session would not necessarily prevent the House of Lords ‘blocking it again’. For that to be the case, as the Hansard Society has explained, the House of Commons would first have to pass the new but identical PMB without amending it. Which would require the Commons Second Reading, Committee Stage, Report Stage and Third Reading of the new but identical PMB to be blatant charades. Which doesn’t sound terribly democratic to me.

Furthermore, in contrast to the current, 2024-26 post-general election session, the next parliamentary session is likely to last just the normal one year, not two. Which means the House of Lords would not have to spend very long trying to address the new but identical PMB’s flaws for the Bill to run out of time once again.

To my mind, this is the kind of public policy swamp that awaits unprincipled campaigners who, rather than do the hard work of persuading an electable political party to make a manifesto commitment to implement their chosen policy in office, try to shoehorn the policy into the Statute Book via the undemocratic ‘back door’ that is the grossly anachronistic PMB process.

Evidently, it is possible to navigate such a putrid swamp when the political party in question is led by someone as devoid of integrity as Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer KC. But there’s plenty of reason to think that Starmer will not be Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister when any new but identical Assisted Suicide Bill gets voted on in the House of Commons, six to nine months from now.

Indeed, there is good reason to think that, by then, the Labour Party will be led by one of Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Andy Burnham. And Rayner, Streeting and Mahmood are all strongly opposed not just to Leadbeater’s PMB, but to the very idea of NHS-assisted suicide. Unlike most of their Cabinet colleagues, all three voted against Leadbeater’s PMB at Third Reading in June last year.

Somewhat characteristically, Andy Burnham appears to have fluctuating and flexible views on the matter. But, given that he has yet to find a route to becoming an MP, he currently seems unlikely to be Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in late 2026, when – subject to Leadbeater or an ally having their numbered wooden ball picked out of a glass bowl by a white-gloved Bridgerton extra – the new but identical Assisted Suicide Bill would be making its not very democratic progress through the House of Commons.

Or maybe we will have three years of chaos and a new but identical Assisted Suicide Bill with Ed Miliband, who voted for Leadbeater’s PMB in June 2025. Beam me up, Scotty.