When I was diagnosed in the summer of 2021, I felt a bit more bewildered than shocked as any retired academic might who has just been told they have prostate cancer. But I was certainly cheered up a bit when my consultant told me, ‘We’ve got it early, it’s eminently treatable and it won’t kill you’, words which resounded in my head for at least the next two years. After an almost medieval biopsy experience, treatment began with hormone therapy – to cut off my supply of the testosterone which nourishes this type of cancer – followed by radio therapy. However, a bone scan suggested cancer cells might have spread beyond the ‘capsule’ which house the affected gland. The precautionary antidote? OMG! I howled inwardly – six chemotherapy transfusions.
Once you are drawn into the NHS’s cancer ‘system’ you know you are seriously ill but the doctors and nurses really are rather wonderful: warm, friendly, cheerful and laid back in a kindly professional way. Facing an approximately year-long sequence of different intensive medical attentions to my ageing body – I was 75 at diagnosis – was not an especially reassuring prospect. My wife, destined to be a terrific support throughout this extended unpleasantness, and knowing of my obsessive academic interest in politics, suggested a writing project might provide a helpful distraction… Hmmm, I thought, what about that project I had begun on ministerial promotion way back in 1998? When my sister also suggested the same thing, my mind was made up.
I’ve always been interested in how government recruited and advanced people into serving the English then British state. Henry VIII eschewed possible aristocratic rivals by employing the son of a butcher (Cardinal Wolsey) and then the son of a publican (Thomas Cromwell) as his right-hand men. I was fascinated at how interest and ambition drew men within the orbit of democratic government and fuelled their advancement up to cabinet level and beyond to the top job of all. I had interviewed over a score of senior politicians including Nigel Lawson, Dennis Healey, Cecil Parkinson as well as journalists like Anthony Howard and colleagues such as the amazing Peter Hennessy. On top of that I had spent several days in the Kew National Archives investigating No 10 personnel files.
But there had been a snag – most of my writing up to that point had been producing textbooks, initially for MUP and later Routledge. Such books require regular updating – Politics UK is now approaching its 11th edition – and combining writing up with teaching and admin meant my project was nudged onto a back burner right up until retirement in 2014. Then I guess constant guilt at my unfinished study was pre-empted by travel and the seductions of a more leisurely lifestyle. Then came the illness and it was as if it were meant to be. Even when laid low by chemo I found sitting in front of my computer screen every day after breakfast, checking out my very substantial collection of political biographies and filing cabinet full of notes, was indeed the very best way of losing myself from my cancer dominated life. It was an escape which also promised something productive from a life-threatening experience.
Colleagues proved very supportive and I received helpful inputs from the likes of Andrew Adonis, Kevin Theakston (Leeds) and my old co-author Dennis Kavanagh (Liverpool). After 20 months the manuscript was ready to submit and, after a few hitches with preparing for publication, ‘Just like Us? The Politics of Ministerial Promotion in UK Government’ was published by Routledge in August 2024. Someone jokingly suggested I dedicate my book to my errant prostate gland but chose instead my wife, children and my oncology consultant.
I’ll finish this little not too unhappy story – I’m now well into remission – by reminding male readers that one in eight men will contract this condition – it has an excellent survival rate if caught early enough and the best way to do that is to ensure regular PSA (prostate specific antigen) tests are taken!
Author Biography
Bill Jones is Hon Professor Political Studies University Liverpool Hope University and before that Director Extra-Mural Studies, University Manchester. He is the author of several textbooks and journal articles on British politics as well as the illness inspired work described above.
