Evan Harris looks flustered. His phone is continually ringing, he has a mountain of papers in front of him, and he doesn't know what to think about first. The Lib-Dem MP for West Oxford and Abingdon has just announced that he is standing down as health spokesman because his 29-year-old girlfriend has a terminal brain tumour. Overnight, the press has elevated him from diligent if obscure parliamentarian to selfless would-be political giant who has sacrificed power for love, a future leader of his party who has prioritised real life over the career ladder, a role model, a national treasure.
Harris laughs, and insists that it is nonsense. He says that he has just done what the rest of us would do in horrible circumstances, that he is still passionate about politics, still an MP and that he hopes to be back on the front line at the "appropriate time". But, of course, Harris is aware that the appropriate time is an uneasy euphemism.
We are drinking coffee in the cafe of Portcullis House, where the MP's office is situated across the road from the Commons. Harris is a compact and youthful 37. His phone goes again. He apologises and answers. "Sorry," he tells me, "Charles's Office."
Harris says that he and his girlfriend, interior designer Liz O'Hara, feel important lessons can be learned from her treatment at the hands of the NHS. When she first went to her GP suffering from dreadful headaches, she was given headache tablets - fair enough, says Harris, himself a former GP; plenty of people have headaches and most doctors would dole out the tablets. When she returned still feeling awful, the doctor prescribed stronger tablets. Again, Harris has no complaints.
But a few days later she was referred to a London hospital, crazed with pain and vomiting. Harris (who was in Oxford at the time) phoned up and explained who he was and said that he was sure that she needed a CT scan on her brain. He knows that he was exploiting his position as an MP and doctor, but he says this is the point. Even with those advantages, they ignored him and sent O'Hara home without a scan, so what hope for the rest of us?
A week later, O'Hara, who was in Ireland, collapsed into a coma, and that was when glioblastoma multiforme, a highly malignant cancer, was diagnosed. She needed emergency surgery, but wasn't strong enough to be operated on. O'Hara was not expected to come out of the coma. Thankfully, she came round sufficiently for surgery, the operation was a success, so was radiotherapy, and now she is healthy - for the while. But this is the most aggressive kind of cancer: it always returns - and invariably kills.
Harris is quick to point out that he is not using his experience to damn the NHS, and that the failure to scan couldn't have altered the outcome. But, he says, he is convinced that O'Hara was not treated as she should have been because there were insufficient senior staff on duty through the night. "The sickest people come in out of hours and they are seen, by definition, by the most junior people who are working the out-of-hours shift. In medical circles they call it 'the treatment of the sickest by the thickest'. You're much more likely to get a consultant or specialist input during the day, and that seniority is priceless."
The second lesson to be learned, he says, is the need for doctors to listen to patients and those who know them best, and work with them rather than simply on them. "There is still an unwillingness for doctors to challenge their assumptions when confronted by a patient who challenges them. I know it from my experience 12 years ago when I was a doctor. I look back and cringe at some of the attitudes I might have had, and certainly some colleagues had."
Harris grew up in Liverpool. His parents were immigrants from South Africa who left the country because they disagreed with apartheid. At school, he loved to debate and campaign about issues of fairness - race, sexuality, equality of opportunity. It was the 80s and in Liverpool politics was polarised by Thatcherism and militant tendency. Neither appealed to him, so he joined the SDP. He found that his passions were split between medicine and politics and, as both were vocations, he decided that he had better stick with one. He gave up general practice 12 years ago.
Harris tells me that he would like to clarify something about his recent announcement - he is not giving up politics, he is merely standing down from the frontbench. Actually, he would like to clarify another thing - he is not nursing O'Hara, because she is perfectly healthy at the moment. And while he is at it, one more thing to make clear - she lives in Ireland, he lives in Oxford. "I still have a full-time job as an MP, but I'm just making sure that I have my spare time free to spend with Liz. She's well and fit and we want to do things together. And I can't do that if everything we plan gets frustrated by the fact that I have to come down to London to respond to the latest interfering pointless government health micromanagement nonsense. And there's plenty of it." He's still not averse to political point-scoring.
Did he have any idea that O'Hara was so ill? Silence. He doesn't seem to have heard the question. Just as I'm about to repeat it, he answers. "I mean, one of the things that concerns me is that, shouldn't I have seen much earlier? Should I have been even more pushy about the scan? Should I have said, 'No, we're going back in?'"
Has O'Hara been told how much longer she has? "The stereotype of 'so long to live' is rarer and rarer in medicine," he says. "And experi mental treatments seem to have improved survival rates. But you can't get away from bleak survival statistics if you're trying to see what's better than existing therapies. And 50% of people don't go beyond 18 months." He repeats that surgery and radiotherapy were successful and that she is young and fit, and it begins to sound like a mantra. "We've gone 16 months, and she's still well," he says quietly.
I change the subject, and ask if they've done lots of great things over the past year. Oh yes, he says, in many ways they've had the time of their lives. "As far as the money and the workload will allow, we're trying to see things she's not seen before. Neither of us were particularly well travelled before, so we've managed to get to a game reserve in South Africa, which was shortly after Liz's radiotherapy and was quite remarkable, and we went to South Africa for a second time for my parents' 40th anniversary. She's been to California for a week, cheap week breaks during the recess. Everything is crammed into recesses. We went to a cancer conference in Chicago." That doesn't sound quite so thrilling, I say. "No," he admits. "Well, I went to the sessions and she went shopping, which is right and proper. Oh, and we went to Paris, and Egypt. We've collected a few places."
And there is still so much more to do, he says. He pauses. "Actually, it's not a question of collecting things, it's a question of spending time together. And there's only so much joy you can get delivering leaflets in north Oxford with your boyfriend, I suspect."
His phone goes again. "Hi, Liz. I'm just doing an interview with the Guardian ... about you ... yes, I will." He puts the phone down, and says that there is just one more thing he would like to clarify. "And I hope this makes it into print. I wouldn't normally be keen, and nor would Liz, on parading our situation. But there is still this stigma about cancer, particularly the most serious forms. But it's so important to see this disease as something that can be treated and something you live with and not just die with. And as I say, Liz is getting on with her life."
