The ‘bionic Brexiteer’ who lost his limbs: what Craig Mackinlay did next
A sudden bout of sepsis in 2023 cost the Conservative MP his arms and legs – and nearly his life. Now a life peer, he explains how he’s fighting for fellow amputees. Warning: contains a graphic image
Some time after he first fell ill and some time before he had his arms and legs amputated, Craig Mackinlay had a series of vivid dreams.
In one he was the king of Gibraltar. In another he and his Tory colleagues found themselves sinking a fleet of Iranian frigates. The fleet had been given to the Iranians by the French. In another he had returned to the UK on a battleship and he was injured. Stretchered into Westminster Hall, he was unable to stand up — the Scottish nationalists wouldn’t let him.
How much of this is Freud’s royal road to the unconscious and how much is down to the significant amounts of morphine Mackinlay was on at the time is unclear. The dreams were “incredible” but he was dreaming them on the high-dependency unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in central London as his life hung in the balance.
Until September 2023, Mackinlay was just another backbench Tory doing what backbench Tories do. A deputy leader of Ukip for three years in the 1990s, he defected to the Tories in 2005 and found his way to parliament in 2015, beating Nigel Farage in South Thanet one year before the EU referendum. By 2019 he had become one of the so-called Brexit Spartans who saw off Theresa May’s last-ditch EU deal – at the celebratory dinner they very deliberately drank Chilean wine, not French. A year later he’d joined the Common Sense Group of Tories taking on the “woke ideology” of the National Trust and its “intense hostility to western civilisation”. He was pro-fracking. He was anti-net zero. Or, as he puts it, he “enjoyed aggressive politics”.
Today the 58-year-old, an accountant by trade and the son of a Kentish greengrocer and garlic importer, is still all of those things but he has another cause — one he pursues with the zeal of a survivor. He wants to raise awareness of sepsis, a condition that kills 48,000 people a year and very nearly killed him. He also wants to change the way Britain’s National Health Service treats amputees.
“If I’d waited for the NHS I’d have been in a wheelchair for the best part of a year,” he says. “Then I’d have needed huge amounts of support to get my muscles working again.” That’s before we even get to the Captain Hook arms they tried to give him.
The Thursday in late September 2023 started like any other — a feisty appearance on Jeremy Vine’s radio show, a bit of constituency work, a meeting of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and then home for dinner. The next morning Mackinlay was due to fly to Turkey with his Hungarian wife, Katalin, now 45, and their daughter, Olivia, 6, but in the evening he began to feel unwell. He was sick several times in the night and by the morning the dawn taxi to the airport had been cancelled. Katalin, a pharmacist, called 999.
“At that point she did say, ‘Could it be sepsis?’ because it was just so unusual,” he says. “I didn’t have a temperature but it was the most ill I’d ever felt. When the ambulance crew arrived they were fighting like hell not to take me in — maybe my blood sugar was low, maybe I should just see the GP.”
Eventually the crew were persuaded to take him the 5km from his home in Rochester to the emergency department at Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham. “I was waiting in the triage area and very suddenly I turned an absolute blue colour, like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They got me on a trolley and within half an hour I was in a coma. It was full septic shock — failing kidneys, failing liver, the works. Usually you get a few days’ warning with sepsis and, because there are medical people in my family, we might have had a chance to work out what was going on. Maybe I would have got the antibiotics in time. But there was no time.”
Over the coming hours and then days, the doctors gave him a 5 per cent chance of survival. “I’ve got something to say on assisted dying now,” he says, “because in the first couple of days they were suggesting to my wife that they could let me go, you know, just turn everything off … like putting the dog to sleep.”
With further spousal advocacy (“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her”), Mackinlay was eventually transferred, still in a coma, to St Thomas’ in a very slow ambulance — any bruising caused by Kentish potholes could have been fatal. After almost three weeks he was brought to consciousness and to bad news.
Sepsis is the body’s heavy-handed response to an infection — in this case, suspected pneumonia. As the body overreacts, blood pressure drops, organs fail and circulation to the extremities grinds to a halt. “Who knows why I was one of the unlucky ones?” he says. “But I do wonder if I have a genetic predisposition.” When Mackinlay was 16 he had post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, an auto-immune response to a bacterial infection, and spent the next decade on antibiotics. His mother, usually fit and healthy, died with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 78. He has spoken to medical researchers trying to establish a genetic link, he tells me, and hopes that it could help with detection.
Not in time, of course, for Mackinlay. “When I came out of the coma I could see immediately that my hands were gone,” he says. “They were desiccated, like pharaohs’ hands — just black, gangrenous, dead lumps of meat — and they were starting to smell. I could still wiggle a couple of toes on one leg but the surgeon said I’d be better off with a clean amputation and a matching pair of prosthetic feet.”
In addition to his arms and legs he would also lose parts of his ear and parts of his nose. “They could have grown me another one, but they grow it on your forehead and it takes a year, so that would have been peculiar.”
His gums retracted, so he lost a tooth and the surgeons had to debride his lips. When I ask what that entails, he asks me if I’m squeamish. I lie and say I’m not and then wish I hadn’t. Parts of his lips had become necrotic — the dead tissue and slough had to be sliced and scraped away to prevent further infection. That’s debriding.
Almost two years later it’s hard to imagine quite how much damage Mackinlay’s body has endured. When we meet at his office in Westminster he is wearing all four of his prosthetics — he’s energetic and, despite having a blister where one of his prosthetic legs has rubbed, he appears to move with ease. He also has a firm robo-handshake. It’s only when he removes his “bionic” left arm to show me how much of the muscle and tissue surgeons had to cut away — and how much of his thigh muscle they then used to rebuild it — that I begin to understand. When I ask how he has adjusted psychologically to limblessness, he shrugs it away. “As long as I can keep my brain active, I’m fine,” he says.
On May 22, 2024, eight months after falling ill and only 32 days after leaving hospital, an emotional Mackinlay received a rare (and against regulation) standing ovation on his return to the House of Commons. Arriving for PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions), he apologised for wearing trainers and then thanked his wife and family, the Speaker, the prime minister and the two surgeons watching from the gallery “who took this lot off”. He then asked Rishi Sunak “to ensure that we embed recognition of the early signs of sepsis … if we can stop someone ending up like this then it’s a job well done”. He also asked that health ministers “allow the provision of appropriate prosthetics, particularly for multi-amputees, at the right time”.
Neither Sunak nor his health ministers would be in power long enough to fulfil those requests. Hours later Sunak called a general election for July 4. “I thought I’d have time for a phased return,” Mackinlay says. “I assumed that the election, if he’d had any sense, would be in November. Instead, my return to the Commons became my last hurrah.”
Faced with a short and difficult campaign, he decided to step down. “I might have got a bit of sympathy on the doorstep, but it was only going to go so far,” he says. “I’d have lost my seat and I’d have been back in my accountancy practice now feeling pretty annoyed.” Polly Billington, an environmental campaigner and close colleague of Ed Miliband, won the redrawn constituency of East Thanet for Labour but Mackinlay was saved from the political wilderness.
In one of his final acts as prime minister, Sunak nominated Mackinlay — along with Theresa May — for a life peerage. At the time Mackinlay said he was “overwhelmed at being elevated” to the Lords and to have that platform to “campaign for sepsis”.
Today Lord Mackinlay of Richborough has his own office in the Palace of Westminster — it’s quite pokey but he says he’s lucky, other Lords must share up to three per room or schlep over the road to Millbank. He has also had a Japanese-style jet-wash lavatory installed in the washroom along the corridor — a futuristic addition by Westminster standards. He shows me it when I ask how he wipes his bottom. “If I catch someone using it I usually shout at them,” he says with some small measure of glee.
As I shadow him around Westminster on a hot afternoon early last month, it’s continually striking how reluctant Mackinlay is to feel even the slightest bit sorry for himself. In the TV interviews he gave early on in his recovery, he came across as almost pathologically stoic. Cynically, I wondered if he was just playing a part for the cameras. Typical politician. I don’t think that now.
The schedule today includes back-to-back meetings with various charities and start-ups. It involves trudges through the innards of Westminster — up back staircases, down long corridors, a tiny lift here, a trio of fire doors there. Mackinlay marches from one place to the next with speed and determination. The whirrs and buzzes that come when he operates his robotic hands only add to the Robocop effect.
There’s a chap from the social enterprise Money Carer Foundation who wants to show him a new accessible payment device they’re working on. There’s the chairman of the Limbless Association and the joint CEO of the UK Sepsis Trust — all seasoned campaigners, all pleased to have Mackinlay and his platform on their side.
Here is a man, after all, who has spent the past decade in the cut and thrust of Commons politics. Ultimately it was the sort of factional politics the electorate grew very tired of, but it’s useful if you’re trying to shake up the way sepsis patients are treated. Martha’s Rule, brought in after the preventable death from septic shock of 13-year-old Martha Mills in 2021, gives patients and their families greater advocacy — if they suspect sepsis, for example, they can request a rapid review from a critical care team. Mackinlay wants a similarly extensive overhaul of patient rehabilitation.
Halfway through our afternoon together he takes a call from someone involved in the drafting of a new NHS England policy document on prosthetics. It is, says Mackinlay to me, to the person on the phone and to everyone else we meet, terrible. He is very happy to call a spade a spade and a wishy-washy NHS pathway strategy a wishy-washy NHS pathway strategy.
“The system that the NHS has created to look after people like us is beyond bad,” he says. “If you go into A&E with a wound on your arm, they don’t give you a hot bread poultice, so why are they still reaching for pre-Victorian prosthetics for amputees?”
The lowest point of his many months in hospital came on the acute ward at St Thomas’. Freshly relieved of his arms and legs and dreaming feverishly of his Gibraltarian kingdom, his wounds were still healing — each dressing wrapped in cling film with tubes to drain the exudate. When those dressings were changed every few days he could see ends of the bones the surgeons had sawn through. Despite being fascinated by the size of those bones (he has a degree in zoology from Birmingham University), he says “it was not a very pleasant experience”. That was not the low point, though.
“That came when they presented me with this fibreglass lower arm,” he says. “It had a rubber hook on it and if you’d showed it to William the Conqueror, he’d have said, ‘Yeah, my guys can knock that up.’ It’s that basic. If you’d only lost one arm, you might try to get on with life but with two of those hook contraptions, you’d only be good for pub fights and breaking windows. If you weren’t feeling disabled, you would be now.”
After a few months with the rubber hook, the next upgrade on the amputee pathway is a stainless-steel hook with shoulder straps — by bending in a certain way the patient can open and close the hook. “Those things have been around since the late 18th century,” Mackinlay says, his anger building. “Then, after another year or two, they’ll get you onto what they call myoelectric hands and they’ve been around since the 1950s. Those cost about £6000 each. Then, finally, you get these.”
Mackinlay shows off the intricate moves he can make with the advanced bionic hands he got privately. They pick up muscle twitches in his upper arms and translate them into hand and finger movements. He can type, he can pick things up, he can use a phone, more or less. The problem is that they cost about £40,000 each.
Is it unrealistic to expect the NHS to hand out state-of-the-art prosthetics?
“We’re asking amputees to go through all these hoops and they’ll end up with these anyway,” he says. “Each prosthetic has to be made in a workshop and we haven’t got enough workshop people. Each stage costs money and requires hours of occupational therapy. It’s two or three years of someone’s life and when you finally get manageable prosthetics, all the other stuff is wasted. It’s penny-wise, pound-foolish.”
Mackinlay has been vocal in his criticism of the burgeoning welfare state — two weeks after we meet he describes “a lifetime of handouts” as a “golden ticket” and says that people “are being taken for fools”.
But in the wake of the government’s watered-down attempts to reform the welfare system, he tells me it is the genuinely disabled who will suffer. “The number of claimants has risen by 40 per cent since 2018 while the number of people with long-term health problems has actually fallen,” he claims. “I have absolutely no problem with the state paying benefits to improve the lives of genuinely disabled people, but this clearly points to an operational change within the assessment system.”
His campaign to speed up prosthetic provision is, he says, entirely compatible with his criticisms of the benefits system. He gives me one more example. When you first start using prosthetics, the point where those prosthetics connect with your limbs can be very delicate — there are various coverings a patient can use to make wearing the prosthetic less painful. “And for more mad money reasons and again because they’ve done it since the 1950s, they start you on this cheap liner that gives no protection at all. I was stuck in hospital for two weeks more than I needed to be — at a cost of thousands to the taxpayer — because they didn’t want to give me a £1000 silicone liner.”
Recess starts on Thursday and Mackinlay is looking forward to “a fair bit of travel with my family and maybe some peace and quiet”. After a decade in the Commons it has taken time to adjust to the more collegiate and thoughtful tone of the Lords. “It’s a different game to be played,” he says with a smile straight out of House of Cards, “but it’s nice to be here and still to be part of the legislature of the country. Frankly, it’s nice to be here at all.”
The Sunday Times
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