“I’m not a woman given to crying in public. I’m a bit old. I’m not part of that generation which emotes and talks about personal stuff,” says Siobhain McDonagh, the Labour MP. “It doesn’t feel that comfortable.”
In a moving speech in the Commons last month, her voice broke as she described being there when her sister, Margaret McDonagh, collapsed at a party in November 2021, and was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. The peer was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most common form of brain tumour. It is the disease that killed the Labour former cabinet minister Tessa Jowell in 2018.
The MP decided public discomfort was a “price worth paying” in a campaign to improve the chances of brain tumour patients like her
