AA Gill, the award-winning writer and restaurant critic who died on Saturday aged 62, described in his final article how the NHS could not give him a potentially life-extending cancer treatment.

In a 4,000-word essay chronicling his final weeks after being diagnosed with what he described as the “full English” of cancers, Gill wrote affectionately about the NHS, saying it “represents everything we think is best about us”.

But he said he was denied immunotherapy – a pioneering treatment for cancer that costs up to £100,000 a year – that might have helped him live longer and was the weapon of choice for “every oncologist in the first world”.

“The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), the quango that acts as the quartermaster for the health service, won’t pay,” he wrote.

AA Gill on the cover of the Sunday Times magazine. Photograph: Sunday Times

A consultant told Gill that the treatment – which is about four times the cost of chemotherapy – would be “particularly successful” with his kind of cancer and that he would have recommended it if the writer had had private health insurance.



“What Nice doesn’t say about the odds is that immunotherapy mostly works for old men who are partially responsible for their cancers because they smoked. Thousands of patients could benefit,” wrote Gill. “But old men who think they’re going to die anyway aren’t very effective activists. They don’t get the public or press pressure that young mothers’ cancers and kids’ diseases get.”

He added: “As yet, immunotherapy isn’t a cure, it’s a stretch more life, a considerable bit of life. More life with your kids, more life with your friends, more life holding hands, more life shared, more life spent on earth – but only if you can pay.”

In an addendum to the article in the magazine, the Sunday Times confirmed that since finishing the piece, Gill had started taking the drug, known as Nivolumab.

Gill, a former smoker, was diagnosed in the autumn with lung cancer that had spread to his neck and pancreas, with tumours that were inoperable and unsuitable for radiotherapy.

Gill opened his restaurant column three weeks ago with a declaration that he had “an embarrassment of cancer”. “There is barely a morsel of offal that is not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy,” he wrote.

In his final article, Gill, who previously said he wanted to have his treatment on the NHS owing to a sense of “human connection”, drew attention to the health service’s performance in international oncology rankings. The UK has the worst cancer survival rates in western Europe, a third lower than those of Sweden.

Writing in the Sunday Times magazine, he said: “It was the first question I asked my oncologist, Dr Conrad Lewanski. ‘Why is this such a bad place to get cancer, when we have lots of hospitals, when we teach doctors from all over the world, when we’ve won more Nobel prizes than the French?’ ‘It’s the nature of the health service,’ he says.”

Gill ended the article by recalling a conversation he had had with a cancer nurse. “(She said) ‘You’re supposed to be with me down in chemotherapy. I saw your name. Why are you up here?’,” he wrote.

“‘Well, it turns out the chemo isn’t working.’ Her shoulders sag and her hand goes to her head. ‘F***, f***, that’s dreadful.’ I think she might be crying. “I look away, so might I. You don’t get that with private healthcare.”

In an interview in the news pages of the Sunday Times on the day he revealed he had cancer, Gill also said he regarded himself as having been lucky to have lived so long, having recovered from a period of alcoholism in his 20s.

In the early 1990s, Gill was married for five years to the current home secretary, Amber Rudd, the mother of his elder daughter, Flora, and elder son, Alasdair. In 2007 he fathered twins, Isaac and Edith, with his partner of almost 25 years, Nicola Formby, who was always referred to in his articles as “the Blonde”.

His death on Saturday morning was confirmed by the Sunday Times, for whom he was a longstanding columnist. The editor, Martin Ivens, said in his memo to staff: “He was the heart and soul of the paper. His wit was incomparable, his writing was dazzling and fearless, his intelligence was matched by compassion.

“Adrian was a giant among journalists. He was also our friend. We will miss him. I know you will want to join me in sending condolences to Nicola Formby and his children.”