Is Lord Hermer fit to be Attorney General?

Natasha Feroze· Host0:00

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Natasha Froze, and I'm joined by Tim Shipman and James Heil. Well, the Assisted Dying Bill is expected to die a death, as Tim's just said, in the Lords, and Lord Falconer has described it as failing due to procedural wrangling, not due to it failing on its own merits. Tim, is that fair?

Tim Shipman· Guest0:31

Uh, I don't think so because, uh, there was quite a strong body of support for this legislation when it first came out. Um, there's quite a few people who, uh, in the Commons, and to a degree in the Lords, I think thought, in principle, this might be the sort of humane way to go. But I think when a lot of people saw that bill, they then realized that the practicalities of it, uh, were, uh, much more complicated and difficult than they had imagined. And in the end, the bill got attacked from left and right. You know, you'd, you had, um, the sort of, uh, civil liberties crew objecting to some of the implications for old people, and the kind of religious conservatives on the right, uh, who objected to it for moral reasons. And in the end, a big enough sort of head of steam was built up that this has been stopped in its tracks. And there's lots of reasons why, uh, the, you know, the bill is dying. It's partly because it's flawed, it's partly because it's run out of time. But the reason it's run out of time is because we're in that period of wash up where the government has to decide what legislation,