Exclusive
David Cameron On Guardian Editorial: "Death Knows No Privilege"
19 September 2019, 06:51 | Updated: 19 September 2019, 06:56
David Cameron has given his first response to the controversial Guardian editorial stating he had 'privileged pain' by telling LBC: "Death knows no privilege."
The opinion piece on the Guardian website read: "Mr Cameron has known pain and failure in his life, but it has always been limited failure and privileged pain. Even his experience of the NHS, which looked after his severely disabled son has been that of the better-functioning and better-funded parts of the system. Had he been forced to wrestle with the under-staffed and over-managed hospitals of much of England, or had he been trying to get the system to look after a dying parent rather than a dying child, he might had understood a little of the damage that his policies have done."
That paragraph was removed following a Twitter storm and he received a personal apology from the editor.
But responding to the column in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, he said: "There is no privilege in holding your eldest born child in your arms as their live drains away.
"Death knows no privilege.
"From the little I saw of it, I couldn't understand what they were trying to say.
"Fortunately, it's been deleted and apologised for, so I think we can leave it there."
Mr Cameron revealed he didn't actually hear about the controversial paragraph until it had already been deleted after complaints on social media.
Speaking about it for the first time, he said: "Luckily, I have deleted the Twitter app from my phone. I was using it to receive a lot of news, but I was finding myself spending too much time checking out on this, that and the other.
"As a result, this whole argument about the Guardian editorial passed me by. It had been published, complained about, withdrawn and I got an apology from Kath Viner, the editor of the Guardian, before I'd hardly ever seen it."
