Sir Kenny Dalglish is Right: Cancer Should be Private – A Lesson it Seems Many Need to Learn

When it comes to his recent reaction to making the terrible discovery he has cancer, Sir Kenny Dalglish is a role-model for us all – especially in terms of his desire to keep the whole thing completely to himself, and thereby to act as a role model for absolutely nobody. Sadly, the great former Liverpool and Scotland forward accidentally revealed this news to the world nonetheless, by unintentionally posting a private message to the general public in what he called an “inadvertent social media post”. In an admirably self-aware and self-effacing statement, the 75 year-old declared that:

I am currently undergoing treatment for cancer. Unlike my mobile phone use, the treatment is going well. Ideally, this would have remained private because that’s the way it should be, but my useless technology skills have forced my hand. Obviously I did not mean to make this matter public so I would appreciate it if the privacy of my family and myself are respected. As ever, thank you to the wonderful medical staff who have shown incredible care and discretion, not just for me but for many, many others. They are a credit to themselves.

And Kenny is a credit to himself too, particularly for that key sentence: “Ideally, this would have remained private because that’s the way it should be.” It should be, yes, but often now isn’t. In our current Oprah Winfrey society, where a state of victimhood has become an all-encompassing moral ideal, a strange new medical syndrome has arisen – that of what may be termed ‘aspirational cancer’, whereby those who contract the condition exploit the situation for truly sick self-publicity purposes. 

Melanoma Gibson

A few weeks after Dalglish accidentally came out as being ill, so too did former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. But, again, he was effectively forced into announcing he had advanced prostate cancer by the fact he was in the middle of filming another series of his popular Clarkson’s Farm reality TV show. Doubtless some social media trolls will accuse him of opportunistically having ‘cancer for advertising’, but I don’t think that’s likely to be the case at all: if only we could say the same about all cancerous celebs.    

Some such persons don’t even truly have cancer at all. In 2024, the social media accounts of Bollywood actress Poonam Pandey announced to her millions of fans the unexpected news that the 32 year-old had died of cervical cancer, having “bravely fought the disease” behind closed doors. Then, a mere day afterwards, Pandey rose from the dead: the whole thing had been a stunt intended to ‘create awareness’. “Suddenly we are all talking about cervical cancer, aren’t we?” Pandey asked. No, everyone was simply talking about Poonam Pandey instead, which was probably the point all along.

Even worse was Belle Gibson, a young Australian woman who in 2013 launched a money-spinning ‘cancer survival app’, detailing to all and sundry how she had survived cancer via unconventional means – the snag being that the true ‘unconventional means’ she had survived cancer was by not having the disease in the first place. According to her own utterly false account, after being diagnosed in 2009 and given only six weeks to live, Belle had successfully turned to alternative medicine, upon “a quest to heal myself naturally… through nutrition, patience, determination and love”.

After being exposed, Gibson disappeared from view, resurfacing again in 2020, now wearing an Islamic headscarf and pretending to be a member of the Oromo Ethiopian immigrant community, into which she said she had now been “adopted” as “a blessing from Our Lord, from Allah”. Her new name was “Sabontu”, she told journalists, switching between English and her new foreign tongue, and Ethiopia was now her “home”, the Oromo were “our people”, and she was toiling tirelessly to help them overcome their unspecified state of alleged oppression. When questioned about the precise nature of Belle’s connection to them, however, actual Oromo representatives in Australia claimed never to have heard of the woman, saying: “She is not a community member, and she’s also not working with the community. … She has to stop.” In fact, rather than working for the Oromo, Belle reportedly appeared to be working in a humble Melbourne supermarket, under the false name ‘Mel’ (surname ‘Bourne’, presumably?)

Why would fantasists fake such a terrible thing as having cancer? Probably for the same reason Gibson also pretended to be black and Muslim; quite naturally, fakers tend to impersonate those whom society lends high status towards, who today are designated victim-groups like Africans, Muslims or cancer sufferers. Obviously, cancer victims really are victims, but you’ll note how grifters rarely impersonate those with low-status conditions, only those with widespread public sympathy around them. Neither Gibson nor Pandey would have been able to gain money or attention online if they had just smeared some cottage cheese over their privates, posted a photo to Instagram, and claimed to have gonorrhoea, for example.

Cancer is the answer

To conceive of their cons in the first place, people like Gibson would first have to encountered real-life role models to emulate. One classic example was that of early 2000s reality TV star Jade Goody, who, following a diagnosis of cervical cancer in 2008, enlisted the services of prominent PR guru Max Clifford to ‘manage’ her disease for her.

The 27 year-old Goody endlessly sold slight variations on her ordeal to the tabloids, making millions from photos of her post-chemo bald head, in what she said was merely an attempt to safeguard her two small children’s financial futures before she died. Perhaps you can’t blame her, although some critics felt her antics profoundly tasteless, one satirist setting up an even more tasteless website called ‘When Will Jade Goody Die?’, offering a prize iPod to whoever most closely predicted Jade’s date and time of death. Yet, simply by claiming she was ‘raising awareness’ of cancer, Goody was able to head off much criticism of her conduct before it had even really begun. Personally, I was already aware of the condition’s existence, myself.

In the years since, several previously unknown figures have become celebrities only because of their cancer, most famously Deborah James, better known as ‘Bowel Babe’, who was diagnosed with bowel cancer aged 35, before dying of it in 2022, aged only 40. Nonetheless, in those five short years, James managed to fit in having an entire new media career, which was certainly more glamorous than her previous existence as a schoolteacher. In 2014, Belle Gibson had been awarded a special “Fun, Fearless Female” award by Cosmopolitan magazine, something which makes me, as a Misanthropic, Miserable Male, feel profoundly depressed. A decade later, Deborah James seemed to be hunting the exact same award.

Cancer isn’t really supposed to be fun, is it? But, to judge by the way the likes of Gibson and James promoted their respective ‘cancer journeys’, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. James did have enough self-awareness to anticipate this likely public objection, using a 2018 column in the Sun to argue that:

Cancer is not sexy. And it’s not fun. Nobody, myself included, tries to portray this hideous disease as such.

And yet, in this same article, James posed for photographs like these:

“I will never apologise for showing off my [surgery] scars, they are the reason I’m still alive,” James wrote. Certainly, there is indeed  no reason to be ashamed of your surgery scars. There is a difference between not being ashamed of your scars and giving the impression of being actively proud of them though, isn’t there?

Unhealthy personalities

In her very public quest to “tell cancer to fuck off”, Bowel Babe justified her conduct by saying “Cancer, or any long-term illness for that matter, ‘looks’ different for everyone”, reflecting in some way their previous in-built personality whilst still healthy: and James’s own pre-cancer personality was evidently a highly attention-seeking ‘Look at me – I’M FUN!!’-type one.

Yet it must be admitted that her reaction towards diagnosis was not likely to remotely resemble the average person’s response; was she not inadvertently pressurising other patients to pretend they were happy and living life to the full whilst undergoing what is in fact a deeply unpleasant and physically painful experience? Not at all, James said. “My way of doing cancer isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but then neither was my pre-cancer party lifestyle,” she admitted. “Through my social media I show my version of MY life with cancer – it’s MY story.”

But then, at the end of her Sun piece, she asks readers to join her online by revealing endless highly personal pieces of information about what is really supposed to be their own private illness: “Tell me your journey, show off your scars, share what keeps you smiling, or how you are giving two fat fingers to cancer.” I can’t see how this isn’t putting some kind of burden on people to react to their diagnosis in a certain way. What if nothing keeps them smiling?

The casual impression given by James of life with cancer was that it was little more than one giant hen-do. Apparently, for example, in order to ‘raise awareness’ of bowel cancer, it was somehow ‘necessary’ for her to dress up as a giant piece of poo, and then march up and down the central aisle of a train laughing, as below. By that logic, would it be equally as ‘necessary’ to have ‘raised awareness’ of AIDS in the 1980s by having Kenny Everett dress up as a giant foam penis with a blob of this very same infected brown material on the end in equal cosplay warning?

Imagine if you were stuck on that same train carriage, and you or a relative had just been diagnosed with colon cancer likewise. How would you feel? Because I would feel like marching her directly towards the closest on-train toilet and pulling the flush forever.

In sickness and in wealth

Perhaps the first notable person to relentlessly parade his cancer in public in Britain was journalist John Diamond, who wrote a regular column detailing the progress of his tumours for the Times in the late 1990s. Cheerfully calling himself “the man who has cancer for a living”, and “Mr Celebrity Cancer”, Diamond admitted he was writing a text-based soap opera for readers to consume, shamelessly commodifying his disease to the extent he allowed TV cameras to follow him to the very door of the operating theatre. For this he was largely lionised but, unlike with Bowel Babe in more recent times, back then there was still at least some meaningful pushback.

Media satirist Chris Morris, posing as a fictional hack journalist named Richard Geefe, published a series of columns in the Observer in 1999, the central conceit being that the editor had wanted his own Diamond-like cancer-columnist but, being unable to source one, had commissioned Geefe to commit suicide at a certain specific pre-agreed date instead. Geefe’s columns were then to be compiled into a hardback book for the lucrative Christmas market, Time to Go, and sold “for £16.99 a pop” to the emotionally incontinent. The only problem was, due to publishing schedules, the printers needed all the text six months prior to publication, so, complained Geefe:

I am having to write the end of my life now – committing myself to what I’ll be doing, how I will feel about it, and my exact method of blapping my lulu. It’s driving me nuts.

On the other hand, the exercise did give Geefe access to infinite amounts of teary-eyed sympathy shags from nubile young “moribunderast” women who began lining up outside his flat begging to have sex with him before he swallowed a whole bottle of paracetamol just in time to hit the crucial Christmas gift-book market. The whole thing was a great boost to the ‘dying’ man’s ego:

That was another first – realising how brave I was. When 40 independent strangers tell you how brave you are, it is difficult not to suspect they are right.

Soon, Geefe was accumulating other journalistic imitators:

The Sunday Times… [has] a reporter who’s just taken out a contract on his own life and is writing some terrific stuff about living in fear. The Mail on Sunday has an accidental injury man who gets something dropped on him or falls out of a window every week. And there’s a female writer at the Sindie who’s agreed to have her child kidnapped.

Morris/Geefe seemed to understand that, simply by announcing to the world you would be dead soon, you instantly achieved almost infinite leeway from our modern, touchy-feely society to act in whatsoever way you personally saw fit:

Channel Five, who’ve clearly heard of me but never read my work, have approached me with an idea called It’s All Right – He’s Got Cancer, in which the presenter pulls unforgivably cruel stunts on innocent people but gets away with it because he has cancer and is therefore understandably twisted. I pointed out that I have the big S not the big C. They’ve yet to come back to me on It’s OK – He’s Vowed to Top Himself.

It’s All Right – She’s Got Cancer; 20 or so years later, that was the very same, non-satirical, reality TV show Deborah James ended up living inside for real. But not Kenny Dalglish, thank God. King Kenny understood the right way to deal with cancer: by not burdening complete strangers with knowledge of something which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with them, and not making other people with cancer feel needlessly awkward for no reason. Hopefully, once he’s recovered, Dalglish could start a celebrity cancer-campaign aimed at raising awareness of the utter fatuity of most raising awareness celebrity cancer-campaigns in the first place.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.