Our best hope for the right to choose a peaceful death petition is for our to reach 100,000

DAME Esther Rantzen has urged Daily Express readers to help her achieve long-awaited assisted dying reform, declaring: "We're so close now."

- Giles Sheldrick

The terminally ill campaigner, who has stage four lung cancer, is spearheading our push to demand MPs debate an issue that could affect every family in the UK.

They will be forced to act if her petition submitted alongside this newspaper and charity Dignity in Dying - attracts 100,000 signatures. Some 85,000 have pledged their support in less than a month.

Mother-of-three and grandmother-of-five Dame Esther, 83, who was diagnosed with cancer last January, said: "Must terminally ill patients travel alone to Switzerland to obtain the gentle, peaceful death we would surely all choose?

"Our best hope is that our petition reaches its goal of 100,000 signatures, which will ensure it is debated in Parliament. We are so close now."

Our campaign is backed by high-profile figures, including broadcasters Jonathan Dimbleby, 79, and Dame Jenni Murray, 73, cookery expert Dame Prue Leith, 83, and ex-Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, 45.

On Monday, historian and royal biographer Jonathan told of his sculptor brother Nicholas's fight with motor neurone disease, which has left him mute and unable to eat.

The interview moved former That's Life! host Dame Esther to tears and reinforced her view that the existing "cruel and outdated" laws must be changed. Jonathan said of Nicholas, 78: "Despite the great efforts of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, his NHS team and his own extraordinary resolve, every day is a terrible endurance test for him.

"He has not an ounce of self-pity but wants readers to know what it is really like.

"So, writing on a pad, he said, 'I can't speak, I can't taste, I am fed through a tube into my stomach, I can't control my bowels, the drugs make it impossible for me to read, I choke, and some days every breath is a terrible effort.

'A change in our current, cruel law would surely be the legacy Nicholas' courage deserves