One year after his dear friend’s passing, Brian Clarke, the eulogist at David Thompson’s funeral, thinks the late Prime Minister was fully justified in keeping the state of his illness to himself.
In his reflections on the first year of Thompson’s passing, Clarke said: “I could understand that people may think that a Prime Minister’s health is not just the business of the Prime Minister and the business of his family, but because he is a Prime Minister it is the busines of the country, and as a result of his office everyone is entitled to know. I understand the force of that argument.
“On the other hand, my personal experience is that if you are struggling with something as difficult as a life-threatening illness and you have to maintain a positive attitude, and you have to convince yourself that this is something that you can beat. You cannot at the same time look at a camera and tell the world that you are suffering from a terminal illness,” he said.
“So I think that he was fully justified in keeping the state of his illness to himself, so that he could maintain that state of mind which he required to carry him through because he never resigned himself to that fate.”
His full story in the SUNDAY SUN
