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Tessa Jowell says she is 'not afraid' as she speaks out about battle with brain cancer

Liz Bates

2 min read

Tessa Jowell has declared that she is “not afraid” as she described her “distressing” battle with brain cancer.


The former Labour minister, who was pivotal in the delivering the London Olympics in 2012, insisted she would fight on against the debilitating condition and praised friends and family for their support.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, she told of the moment she was diagnosed last year. 

She was on her way to a centre for children event when she had a seizure that left her unconscious for three or four days, the peer explained.

“It was distressing… Now my life is day by day affected by [the] tumour and affected by the uncertainty of what my cancer is actually going to mean,” she said.

But Baroness Jowell, who served in both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Cabinets, was adamant that she would not be beaten.

“I am not afraid,” she said. “I feel very clear about my sense of purpose and what I want to do, and how do I know how long it is going to last? I am certainly going to do everything I can to make it a very long time.”

Ahead of a House of Lords debate on cancer care today, she called for riskier treatments to be available to patients and championed the use of adaptive trials.  

“The important fact about an adaptive trial is that it can start, not achieve what you want and then move on to the next version… That’s how we get the pace of change happening very quickly,” she said.

Baroness Jowell also suggested that more global cooperation between hospitals could improve outcomes for sufferers.  

“I got to the point in the NHS in London where I couldn’t be given any more treatment. But it was very clear that if I went to Germany then I had a chance of taking out this immunotherapy – a new experiment. I was and I am prepared to try that,” she said.

The former Olympics minister went on to praise her friends and family for their vital support and thanked well-wishers, from whom she has received around two and half thousand letters.  

“I don’t think you can do it on your own unless there are other people who share your feeling, who will actually join you and say ‘look what we’ve got to do’.

“I have so much love in my family, my children, my close friends. It is the most extraordinary, blessed and recreating sense, and I feel that I want that to be experienced by so many other people as well.”  

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