After a lifetime’s advocacy for the public model of healthcare and a career as an NHS psychiatrist, he died alone in hospital
The call from the hospital came at quarter to seven on a Friday morning. My father was at the end of his life. By the time we arrived, it was too late to say goodbye or to comfort him.
My dad was the greatest man I will ever know. He was my hero. It feels cliched to say it but he really was. He was my political compass and my intellectual lodestar. Born Ali El-Gingihy in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1932, he lived through the second world war and the watershed 1956 Suez crisis. Like many of his generation, he idolised progressive, independence leaders such as Nasser, Nkrumah, Lumumba and Nehru. He taught me that the world may belong to its rulers, but that it should belong to all of us.
