We should all acknowledge the bravery and absolute resolve of Reginald Crew, the man who flew to Switzerland where he could be helped to commit suicide.

His reasoning that he was more afraid of living than dying was heart-rending in its simplicity.

For in his case, living meant facing the final, horrific throes of motor neurone disease. He was already paralysed from his neck down. He would eventually have choked to death in his own fluids.

We would never leave an animal to die in such a condition.

Whatever the arguments from pro-life campaigners about the value, sanctity and dignity of human life, there is no dignity in spending the last weeks of your life in such a state of physical degeneration and psychological terror.

If you wish to put an end to it all, you may. Committing suicide is not a crime in Britain. The crime is for anyone to help you. Being forced to live on in a morphine induced haze because the law forbids anyone to help is grotesque and inhumane.

And of course, the Catch 22 is that once you have reached that level of deterioration, you cannot kill yourself however desperate you may be.

It is time the law was changed. It is almost a decade since a House of Lords committee refused to do so. A rethink is long overdue. But while the Government may be reshaping the House of Lords, I am not convinced it is reshaping its attitudes.

It was the Suicide Act of 1961 that frustrated poor Diane Pretty, also dying from motor neurone disease, when she asked the Director of Public Prosecutions to allow her husband to help her die without being prosecuted as a result. He refused. Several appeals failed and the European Court of Human Rights confirmed their decisions.

Human rights? Diane Pretty was forced to end her life in a hospice where she finally choked to death last May. That is the way the law works.

However, hospice staff are the most capable, caring and sensitive professionals. I know they would have done their best to take the horror from Diane Pretty's final hours. It would also be my fervent hope that, in the end, they would not have allowed her to linger unnecessarily.

It is thought as many as one in three deaths in Britain are doctor-assisted. While, obviously, there are no recorded figures, there can be few doctors who have not either helped terminally-ill patients fulfil their wish to die or who know of colleagues who have done so.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for doctors who have had the courage and compassion to take such action.

Such an enlightened doctor could have spared Reginald Crew that stressful trip to Switzerland. Mr Crew could have been granted his last wish: To die with dignity at home.