The telegraph. Kamalik was the bombshell announcement from Nigel Farage we've been waiting for all day. I've changed my mind. So I am going to stand in this election in the Essex seaside town of Clapton.
He's going to stand. He's going to become leader of the Reformed Party. And he's going to stay in place, he says, for five years. So he's chosen to save Britain over fighting for Trump in America.
So for that news that just happened and why is transgender back in the political debate? And we'll be paying tribute to the former rugby league star Rob Burrow. Welcome to the Daily Tea with me, Kamal Ahmad. I've been out on the streets meeting an awful lot of people.
Interestingly, a lot of young people. And I'll tell you this, and you won't have got this yet. And the pollsters won't yet have picked this up. But I promise you, after 30 years of experience in this game, something is happening out there.
There is a rejection of the political class going on in this country in a way that has not been seen in modern times. Welcome up. It's a moment coming. Absolutely a moment.
Rumors swirling all day. Then suddenly Nigel Farage earlier today said he's going to announce an emergency statement at four o'clock. We've just listened to that and watched it. One of the main things he said is that he's not only going to take on the leadership of Reformed.
So this is effectively a coup really, Kamal. I've got people already briefing me. No, this was all Richard Tice's idea. I think the jury remains out on that.
I think Nigel Farage has realised last week that he's made a catastrophic error in backing out of this election, prioritising his alliances with Trump rather than with the electorate here. He's had a change of heart, so he's not only taking over as Reformed leader. He's also going to stand in Clackton. You might be asking yourself, well, why Clackton?
Probably because it's got quite a purple history when it comes to UKIP support. So that was the constituency of the defector Douglas Carswell who went from the Tories to UKIP back in the day. We actually wrote a story about this. I've just looked it up.
Our colleague Ed Malnick, who used to be the Sunday political editor, wrote in January, the seat where Nigel Farage could beat Tories if he stood as a Reformed candidate. And that story quotes a survey carried out at the time in Italy. So this is just after Christmas in the new year by Salvation saying that the Essex constituency would enable the former Brexit party leader, now Reformed leader, to pick up 37 per cent of the vote compared to 27 per cent for the Conservative incumbent if he stood there. So that's why they've chosen it.
He's up against a candidate called Jars Watling who's the current Conservative MP. He's fighting the seat again. But basically it seems as if it were Farage with Reformed, he's got a 10 per cent head start. And just another observation quickly came out.
Farage's argument, and I questioned him myself about it because I had to interview him on GB News last week. His argument was, Richard, so let's call this early election. I haven't got time to regroup. I haven't got time to get all of the data I need in order to fight a seat.
You know, I can't fight a local campaign and a national campaign. And I questioned him on that. I said, well, no, of course you can, because it's not like he's a normal candidate. He's got that recognizability factor.
Everybody knows who he is. He's got millions of followers on social media. He's been on GB News for the past few years. So it's not as if the people of Clackton would be scratching their heads going, well, who's the Reformed candidate and what do we know about him?
It wasn't a convincing argument. I also think that a lot of people have said, look, you are squandering your man of the people credentials. I said to him myself directly, it's a massive contradiction in your positioning here. On one hand, you're saying Britain is going to head in a hand cart.
You know, the Tories are rubbish, Labour would be even worse, but by the way, I'm not standing, I've bottled it. He was accused of being for it. Clearly, he's had a period of reflection, realized he's about to squander all of that man of the people credentials that he's built up over the course of this extraordinary political career of 30 years. And he's decided the time is now to strike.
And it comes after reporting in the Sunday Times at the weekend about how he thinks he can reunite the right. He couldn't do that unless he stood for Parliament and won a seat. So, question for the Conservatives, how do they respond? One of Sunak's major reasons we've discussed this a few times for going for an early election was to catch reforms still doing up their shoelaces.
And so it proved. So for the first couple of weeks you wrote to the weekend, he'd had a better campaign than many imagined because whoever Richard Tice is, he's no Nigel Farage. And he just doesn't get the cut through that Nigel Farage can get. And also Farage's honoree president wasn't really much of a role.
And there's a lot of complaint from people like Alistair Campbell, certainly, of course, on the Labour ticket. But people saying, why was Farage being given so much airtime? And of course, the broadcasters have some rules about who they're giving airtime. So there could have been some limits to the amount of work Farage could have done in broadcasters.
So Sunak's gamble, one plank of Sunak's gamble has gone. The other plank, of course, was that Labour were also going to be a bit behind. So this announcement must send a chill through central office for the Conservatives, because their big worry is that they get eaten on two sides. They get eaten by people floating to Labour or to the Liberal Democrats on their one side, on one flank.
And on the other flank, reform really starts to make inroads into their seats. And now much more likely is the possibility of real collapse for the Conservatives. Nigel Farage has said, and Richard Tice, who was the warm-up man for Nigel Farage, and I think that's always been slightly his role, said that this would now be an immigration election. I must admit, Farage, you're absolutely right.
He is a proven campaigner. Philip Johnson wrote a piece just after local elections about Nigel Farage. I colleague here at the Telegraph, the columnist, and he said it was the bland leading the bland. And Farage is right about gingering up the campaign.
I must admit, and looking through some of the candidates that reform have had to already say are not standing for them, the whiff of core-dite around this election now, around the issue of immigration. Tony Mac is the present candidate in Clackton. He has been criticised for comments about Muslims, and I'm doing open quotes there, as if Muslims are a lump of people who will think one thing. The tone of the debate, it'll be interesting how much does Farage think about?
If this is an immigration election, and some reform candidates have been talking about too many minorities and too many immigrants, there's got to be a fear either, there's a lurch away from the right in totality, and this actually helps labour. Because people say, well, if that's the kind of right that is coming here, I don't want any part of it, particularly if Sunat tries to bend right. Or we have a campaign which will make many people feel very, very worried, which becomes a battle over how many foreigners do we let into this country. Two responses to that.
First of all, where does Sunat pivot from here? Because does he try to outright Nigel Farage? That's really hard. So does he then pivot to the moderate middle and say, come on, I know he's a great campaigner, this bloke can't govern.
Look at the people who's got around him. Reform aren't ready. As you say, they've had a problem with their candidate selection already. They've now got a table 630 candidates by Thursday.
That's why Nigel Farage is tying this for now, by the way, because the deadline, I think, is the end of play on Thursday or Friday morning. That's a problem. These people aren't professional. Trust me, I've been prime minister.
I handled furlough during a pandemic. You're safer with me than stama, or indeed pharroch. Having said that, that appeal that we've just listened to isn't just an appeal to the righties. It massively reminded me of the Brexit campaign.
It's an appeal to the Red Wall. He actually referenced people. He talked about plumbers, I think, in electricians and white and bad men. He's saying he's trying to appeal to people of all political hues who agree on the following statements.
Britain is broken and it needs to be fixed. So that's a cross-class, cross-party, cross-ideology, cross-generational. I hate to use this phrase for giving it retail offering, but that's what it is. It's consumerism.
Some people might call it populism. It's an unashamed come with me because this lot don't know what they're doing. Successive governments have failed you. They failed you on the NHS.
They failed you on immigration. They failed you on housing. They failed you on the economy. Britain's not been growing enough.
Come with me. It's a little bit reminiscent playing off. William Hague back in the day. Common sense revolution.
Come with me and I'll give you back your country. Let's see if that works. The dynamic between him and Richard Tice intriguing, there's tension there clearly and maybe Richard Tice gets credit for taking one for the team. If I was in CCHQ now, I would be tearing my hair out.
We've seen the internal polling in this newspaper, which is just representative of that group of people on the right from both moderate to the reform supporting. We found that among our readership, those who voted for conservative in 2019, 28% say that they won't vote conservative again and that number is split between half wanting to vote for a form and half saying don't know. I've lost count of the number of readers that I've interacted with below the line on comments who say they wouldn't vote for a form now, but they would if Nigel Farad was at the helm. He knows this pollsters are predicted at that at the moment.
I think they're polling at about 10 or 11% that could go up to 16, 17, 18. That is apocalyptic for the conservatives in many seats. Interesting. We're going to speak about Kenny Badenock a little bit later in this podcast about transgender issues, but she said very clearly in interviews this morning.
Nigel Farad was not a conservative and would not be welcome in the conservative party, so they have to make a decision. Do they want blue water between them and Faradge, or do they want blue water between them and Labour? If you look at what the public say are the reasons for them voting, cost of living economics and the future of the NHS, immigration is high. But remember the discussion we had with David Davis, just after Rishi soon, I could call the election, and David Davis says, yes, people think immigration is very, very important, but it's not the thing they actually vote on.
When it comes to election day, that will now be tested to destruction. But the argument from Faradge will be this one, and it's a clever one. Even if you're not directly worried about immigration or immigrants, we're going to make all of your problems with the NHS about immigration and immigrants. We're going to make all of your problems getting on the housing ladder about immigration and immigrants.
Isn't that a big problem for the discussion and debate in this country? If every issue is laid at the doors of immigrants? This has got to have a whiff that must make you feel uncomfortable. I think if he's going to weaponise it to that degree, then he may merit criticism for trying to stigmatise immigration and immigrants as being responsible for all of the country's ills when we all know that there are greater issues than that.
But I'm merely saying that he's just gone on screen telling us that he wants to make it an immigration election. Do people actually care about that as a fundamental thing? Maybe they care more about pot holes in the street getting the bins out and getting the children into the right primary school. But if he's going to make it about that, he's going to take his gloves off on that issue, some will be absolutely repelled by it, others will be attracted to that rhetoric.
If there is the big pivot, this could be, as you say, this huge pivot moment for the right as what kind of right do they want to be. And for me, the idea that they can win through that agenda appears to me to be really difficult to believe of this country, where we are much more relaxed, benign, what might be scarred as progressive, although I hate the use of that word, I'm sure you do as well. But this idea that we are actually quite comfortable in the diversity of this country built with immigrants for many, many decades and centuries, that's the kind of country we are. Control is obviously the issue, is one big issue and the numbers that have increased hugely.
But for very good economic reasons, if he's going to say the NHS problem is immigration, the NHS solution is immigration, social care, et cetera. I'm just talking about how he might politic this. The other thing is, by the way, what this does give rocket fuel to is the Tory destructors. So you can say as many people do, you know, I'm voting reform because I want to destroy the Tories and the counter narrative to that is, well, hang on, you're just letting labor in because they're not going to win any seats.
If, however, you're saying, I'm going to vote reform because Nigel's now at the helm, he's committed to it five years, he will win Clackton and be pouring through the dregs of what's left of the Tories in some bid to unite the right in future. That doesn't make it such a kind of dead-headed proposal, does it? It actually gives, it's not just a protest vote. It gives people the idea that they may have some influence over the future of conservatism, both big C and little C in this country.
It was interesting that he said it's not about a vote for reform being a vote for labor. It was about a conservative vote is a wasted vote. If you don't vote for reform, you're not going to get the change. So you're right, he has changed the message pretty intensely.
Quite a moment, Camilla, and really interesting to see what the results are going to be in the polling over the next few days. Well, having talked about an issue as controversial as Nigel Farage and his retaking of the reform helm, we're also going to be grasping the nettle with our next conversation, which is going to be about transgenderism. Far more calm. Kamal, after labor have gone big on defence today, the Tories have decided to fight a different war, the gender wars, and one can question the wisdom of that with everything that's been said and done in this space in recent years.
Kemi Baidnock, who's the Women and Equality's Minister, has said that if they win another term in office, the Conservatives will change the Equality Act. And it's a specific wording in that act that she's referring to. So at the moment, that piece of legislation, created by Labor in 2010, protects sex. What Baidnock is saying is that that interpretation of sex over the course of recent years has changed, and it doesn't reflect the biological fact of what gender people are at birth, and that's then had an effect on people who were born male using women-only spaces.
She says it's created some ambiguity. So what she's proposing is that that word sex is turned into the fuller term, biological sex. In practice, that would mean that when somebody wants to use a woman's only space, the person running that space would have to look back to what that person was born as, a man or a woman, and then base their decision-making on the biological sex of the person. This would then, she claims, mean that you could not have lawsuits, hugely incendiary debates about the use of women-only spaces.
And indeed, of course, it would have wider ramifications when it comes to the guidance issued on toilets, on sports, on any other avenue of public life. This was Kemi Baidnock, today being questioned by Michelle Hussein on BBC Radio 4's Today program. If we look at the origin of the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act, it's quite clear that the intentions in the law are being misinterpreted just because of changes, you know, social changes. And what we are trying to do is re-emphasise that sex in the law means biological sex.
It always has gone, but there's been a lot of misinterpretation, and we are adding that clarification so that the law is clearer. Okay, so then, in the context or circumstances of a women's refuge or rape crisis center as you put out or a women's prison, is the only relevant paperwork and original birth certificate? Well, an original birth certificate is where your biological sex is recorded. For the vast majority of people, this is not going to be an issue.
The change is impacting those people who have not been clear on what it means for someone to be transgender, is the holding of a gender recognition certificate, what it means. And we are re-emphasising not just what the law says, but also that there have always been exceptions in the Equality Act for single sex spaces. It is the redefining of sex that is the problem. Michelle is saying there, getting to the point around if, at birth, you're biologically a male in the law, can your sex change to allow you access to different spaces?
And Kimi Badenot said that wasn't an issue that she was trying to deal with. Labour say that the present law, which as you say, Camilla was passed in 2010 by the Labour government, does already protect spaces. And John Healy, who's the shallow defence minister actually, but he was on the round of media interviews today because the Labour were talking about defence. And he said that the Labour Act in 2010 already provides protections for single sex spaces for biological women.
It already provides a definition of a woman and that sex and gender are different. He then said, what is needed is clearer guidance, as you say, Camilla. This issue around sports and refuges and other areas and toilets. Four service providers from the NHS, two sports bodies and prisons.
And what single sex exemptions need to be and the best way to be able to do that is in guidance, not primary legislation. For me, this is such a difficult area. I need to stay in my lane. I think what I did like about what Kimi Badenot said today is that part of this conversation is taking great care for people who are going through a process and are suffering gender dysphoria.
As you say, and we said at the top of the programme, this has been such an angry conversation and often lost in that conversation are for trans people, the pain that they go through, the abuse and discrimination they face. And there's a signal that the Conservatives have heard that but still recognise the need for women-only spaces and greater clarity for the law. What I find interesting about John Healy's suggestion that the act already protects women-only spaces is that clearly it doesn't, because what we've witnessed in recent years is that women-only spaces aren't being respected and that's why this debate has come about. Also, when he talks about guidance, guidance is needed.
Well, guidance is great if it's followed. What we've seen, particularly when it comes to the trans guidance for school, this newspaper, our colleague Haley Dixon did a really interesting piece, some weeks back, where she basically found that a number of schools in the southwest were completely ignoring the guidance and actually teaching the children something completely contrary to the Equality Act. So you could beg the question of the Conservatives, why are you saying that you need to amend this act now? You've been in power for 14 years and you're talking about amending legislation when we're fighting an election?
That is such a problem, isn't it, Camilla? Almost everything the Conservative Party say during the campaign can be answered with that exact allegation. Well, hang on a minute, haven't you been in government since 2010? Camilla, for you, as you say, the telegraphed also you have campaigned in this issue, that's not too strong a word.
Just tell me the journey that you've been through writing about this, because when this debate started, I felt much more than I was in a place that I felt comfortable with. I backed trans rights, I backed that people should be supported, that it's a very difficult journey, that it's a very small number of people, and there are so many other issues around equality for women, violence against women in all sorts of different areas, crime, that this seems to be such a small thing. But you've started in a different place where you could see something around medicalisation, the threat to the idea of protection for women in so many different areas. I'm interested in that journey that you've been on.
Well, unfortunately, it's been hard to discuss and to actually speak honestly about what I do believe, because every time I've opened my mouth or put pen to paper, somebody shouted transphobe at me or called me a TERF, trans exclusionary radical feminist. My position in all this was looking at the issue not just as a woman, but as a mother. And I felt that it was a safeguarding issue, because we first started doing stories about the Tavistock Clinic, this is the gender clinic in London, kind of the main focus for a lot of this debate. We started doing stories because we had a whistleblower, a professor who came to us and said that it seemed as if puberty blockers were being prescribed to teenagers without really any clinical evidence base for doing so.
And as time's gone on, that's been revealed to be true. We had the report by Dame Hillary Cass suggesting that this idea of gender affirmation at the expense of evidence-based care had let a generation of children down. So looking at it from that perspective, you know, we were talking about whether we're going to do this topic and people felt awkward and anxious about it. That in itself as a kind of advocate of free speech annoyed me.
I don't understand why we can't speak about this subject in a respectful, reasonable manner without people saying you're cancelled because you've spoken out. My point has always been that my belief is that biological sex is immutable. If you're born a man, you remain a man. You might describe yourself as a transgender woman, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
And if somebody wants me to recognize them with their chosen pronouns, I'm more than happy to do that. I've total respect for what you're saying about the abuse that trans people have suffered as a result of the toxification of this debate. But may I say that it's the tiny minority of extremists that have not made lives great for trans people, as well as those who have been overly gender critical and offensive towards the trans community. I'm not up for being disrespectful to anyone, so I'm quite happy to respect people's sex changes effectively and their pronouns.
But I'm never going to say that biological sex is mutable, and I'm never going to advocate that being taught to children in schools because it's scientifically factually wrong. And just because I've come from that position, people have tried to suggest that I'm a bigot or that I should be cancelled or that I should be fired. And I've said no, because we must be teaching our children biological fat. Of course we must also be discussing gender fluidity, homosexuality, transgenderism.
But I think if you don't have a clinical evidence base for what you're teaching children and what you're telling children in a clinic, then you are on really shaky ground. I have to fill out a form if my children are given CalPolic School, and yet they're turning up at an NHS clinic, and in some cases being given puberty blockers on the basis of one appointment, less than an hour. If a child presents and they think that they're born into the wrong body and that they're male but they want to be female, I really want hours spent with that child in counseling, mental health treatment, to see whether they are absolutely certain that they want to change gender. And we can't have more situations like Keira Bell, who's the girl who went to the Tavistock, she changed gender, she had a mastectomy, she has lived to bitterly regret it and wishes she could reverse that decision.
Also, we had a situation with the Tavistock in years gone by I think pre-2010, where they saw maybe a couple of hundred of gender confused children, largely male actually, not female. The next thing we know, because of this campaign for gender affirmation, social media then fuels what I think has been a trend in people, young people identifying as a different gender. If that happens, you absolutely have to hold the medical professionals looking at this objectively one hopes to account to recognise that something's happening, and the immediate answer shouldn't be medicalisation. It shouldn't be well because Stonewall and Mermaid say that you're a transphobe if you don't look at the issue precisely from the patient's perspective, that you must.
I mean, these are children. Children are often really, really confused. I also found the argument from a lot of the LGBT groups that I was dealing with at the time of writing the stories, that they were afraid that children who were homosexual were afraid to discuss their sexuality, and so instead sort of saying that they were transgender when really what they were was gay. Kamina, the political argument about this has so often not been helpful.
This idea of this rouse of this simpler campaigning issue, as you say, has not been helpful. It's about rights, but it's about rights of lots of different groups and often those rights are in conflict. The key point, though, is the medicalisation of this and controls over that medicalisation. And that's an important bit that obviously can be acknowledged, it's stepping into here and about safe spaces.
But the fact that we are still having this conversation, the Conservative Party are still saying there needs to be changes. Labour are saying we're happy with the Equality Acts of 2010. Means that for the public, it's difficult for them to know, is this going to be part of my consideration for how I vote in the election? And I'm assuming Kamina probably not.
I mean, does it register that much with people outside of the so-called Westminster bubble, or those who have got direct experience of this issue? Maybe not. But I think on a wider level, the shutting down of debate has affected people. And it's not, by the way, a case of, oh, you can't say anything anymore.
No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about us entering this brave new era where we cast around offensive terms about transgender people. That's not what freedom of speech is on this issue. What freedom of speech is on this issue is the ability to be able to be gender critical without it costing you your livelihood.
We must be able to express what we believe. So on a wider level, if people feel that their views are being shut down by a tiny, vocal, and, frankly, extremist minority, then I think this will appeal to them because they don't want to be bullied. And that was my point for women. I don't want women to be bullied.
I don't want children to be bullied. I want the best decisions to be made on the basis of the best clinical evidence. And it's important that people who are going through gender dysphoria issues are also able to have honest conversations and not to be bullied themselves and to be listened to. And it's if there is any reflection that the numbers may be increasing, as you say, because of a trend and because of, you know, the social media world we live in.
But also we are having a conversation about gender fluidity, which is better to have a conversation about it than to hide it. Precisely. I get that argument, by the way. The numbers have gone up because more people are talking about it and feel open about talking about it.
That may be the case, but it doesn't explain a sort of hundreds fold increase in the number of cases appearing at the Tavistock. Stay with us. We're going to be talking about the very sad death of Rob Burrow, the leads rhinos. Rugby star.
Next. Rob Burrow, the leads rhinos and Great Britain Rugby League star has died after living for four and a half years with motor neuron disease. His friend and fellow player Kevin Sinfielden, who can forget when he famously carried him over the line at the end of a charity marathon run in Leeds, paid his little mate a really glowing tribute. He said, today was the day that I hoped would never come.
The world has lost a great man and a wonderful friend to so many. You fought so bravely until the end and became a beacon of hope and inspiration, not only for the MND community, but for all those who saw and heard your story. I mean, I think the story of those two men's friendship has been so touching. It's really sort of warm the cockles of the British public to just see their love for one another, because we often hear about female friendships, but just the bond between those two players who I believe always sat next to each other in the leads rhino dressing room, literally for two decades.
So very, very close. So it's as much a story about MND as it is about just the support behind Rob Burrow as he was going through this extraordinary battle in his life after such an illustrious sporting career at the same club. When we went to Leeds University, it was an absolute legend in Leeds. Let's bring in another legend, telegraph legend, Chris Lancaster, who is our puzzles editor.
Chris, you're a special person because the number of people who say to me about the telegraph, yeah, I often just get it for the puzzles. We're like, well, okay, that's great. Chris, you compile them all, but also you've been touched personally by the story because you're also an MND sufferer. What impact has Rob Burrows and indeed Kevin Sinfield had on understanding and awareness of this condition for you?
I think it's had a huge impact. I mean, prior to my diagnosis, which was all that I really knew about MND was what I'd seen on TV. I never Stephen Hawking had obviously had it for many years. And the only Twitter point that I think I and many people have with it is having seen Rob's story.
It's an illness that is very hard to fathom. It's something that is completely incurable. It's always terminal and there's virtually no treatment for it. And having Rob and Kevin and what they've done for the raising awareness is fantastic, really.
It means that if you tell someone you've got MND, then there's a good chance that they'll know what they're talking about. What we're talking about was previously people just had no idea at all, largely. And it's also crucial as well in terms of, I think, raising funding as well. You know, because it's fairly rare, there's about 5,000 people have it in the UK at any one time.
Six people die every day. Six people are diagnosed every day on average because of its rarity. And the fact that it hasn't been in the national consciousness means that the attempts to find a cure or cure or effective treatments that hasn't been a great deal of work into those. So I think the awareness generated by Rob and Rob and obviously Kevin.
It may be too late for me to find a cure, but it really raises hopes that in years to come, whether it's 5, 10 or 20 years time, that awareness and that extra funding that comes with awareness means that it's far more likely that sufferers will have hope, which is present who is no hope. Chris, thanks so much to people like you as well for keeping the conversation going. Chris, can you just give us for people who haven't had much contact with MND? Could you just talk us through what the condition does and then how do you navigate that first moment?
As you said, Chris, when you first realized or had your diagnosis, you knew so little about it, I think it'd be brilliant just to hear from you what it is, what MND is and then how you've worked since the diagnosis. Yeah, MND is basically a disease that affects the motor neurons as the name suggests, which pass the signals between the brain and the spinal column and the spinal column and the muscles. And what happens is with MND, I believe, is that those motor neurons stop working. And because of that, the muscles that they work also start working.
My consultant, like in Ditter, having a leaf that is deprived of water. And if you deprive that leaf of water, then it will slowly die, it will wither and it will cease to have function. And that's what happens to your muscles in MND. And it affects different people in different ways.
The important thing is that it affects all your muscles. So, in my case, it started with twitching and weakness in one of my arms and hands. It then became also a leg and both legs and both arms. And, you know, so if you think of somebody who's got MND, you'll think of somebody in a wheelchair, probably, like a rubber bow.
But it's more than that. So I said, if there isn't a person to person, it'll mean you can't walk in time. It'll mean you can't use your arms and hands, which means you can depend on other people. It affects your breathing because the muscles in your diet family chest also die, so they start working.
So you'll need a ventilator at some point, probably, to just help you breathe. Which is a point I'm at because I have issues breathing lying down, so I have a ventilator at night. I sometimes use it during the day if I'm tired or I'm struggling. It affects your speech, so your speech gets weaker.
My speech gets worse after I've been talking for a bit. It becomes less clear because I've got issues with my tongue not working very well. You can't, you slowly lose the ability to chew and to swallow, which is particularly important, that that's managed. Because muscles in your airway also get weaker and don't work as well.
And it's very easy to inhale food into your lungs rather than swallowing it where it should go. And that can lead to pneumonia, which can kill you. And we know that the rubber died basically of pneumonia. So at the point of diagnosis, it takes a long time to also diagnose.
My case was fairly quick, it took nine months. But it can take two, three, four, five years. Surely because it's a case of drooling out other things rather than straight away having a simple test and saying yes, that's MND. Chris, we don't want to tie you out because we know that you've come on here and you've said to yourself that if you speak to for too long, you know, it can jeopardise you for the rest of the day.
Really briefly, what's helped you through this? If people are having to deal with MND, maybe they've got a diagnosis in their friendship group, their family, tell us what's helped you over the course of the months that you've known you've had this condition? I think the main thing that's helped me is my family. Yes.
You know, so it's the support of my wife, from my children, from the family members. And I think that everyone thinks about what below, and they see his friendship with Kevin Sintfield. What they won't have seen is his wife Lindsey and the support that she had given. You know, I think she's been his full-time carer, which is simply with MND.
It means everything from addressing them to taking some toilet and writing their bottom to my fiend them, whatever. You know, so it's that family that's really been the big thing for me. I'm sure that's the case for all people with MND. And those are the people who are the other heroes.
I think everyone thinks about Robin and Adam and Kevin, but there's his family as well around him who have been doing their role. Chris, thank you so much for just talking to us so candidly about this condition, which as you say, very few people know much about or indeed understand. And we wish you the very best. Thank you so much, Chris.
Thank you. Thank you. One of the Chris shared his own experiences and how people should respond to MND. It's a conversation that we'll keep going.
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