A love affair that even death could not end: In a moving interview, advertising genius Maurice Saatchi explains why he breakfasts at his wife's grave every day Beloved Josephine died 16 months after being diagnosed with primary peritoneal cancer ' Coming to terms and moving on are expressions of betrayal and unforgivable selfishness,' he says Determined to cure cancer, starting with Medical Innovation Bill Maurice Saatchi and his late wife, Josephine: 'We were one person,' he says There is a supposition among experts on grief that in time the bereaved "move on" and "come to terms" with their loss. For Lord Saatchi, whose wife died two years ago from a swift and merciless form of cancer, there will be no such remission from mourning. He dismisses the platitudes of the self-help industry with quiet scorn. Coming to terms and moving on are expressions of betrayal and unforgivable selfishness. They mean the lover has abandoned the loved," he says. For this reason, every morning he goes to the tomb in the bluebell wood on his Sussex estate in which his wife Josephine Hart is interred, and eats his breakfast beside her. It is a habit he never intends to relinquish; any more than he would dispose of her clothes or fail to set a place for her at supper. "In snow and rain I go," he smiles. It is of the greatest importance to do that. I eat my grapefruit cocktail and if I'm not there - if I'm in London - I find it very difficult. It's a pretence, a fiction, I know, but it's still pleasing. We would always have our breakfast together and a chat, and that chat is still important. But now, of course, I talk to Josephine and there are no answers . . . His voice trails off. Oh look. This is impossible," he sighs, his eyes blurring with tears. Momentarily, he has to leave the room. Maurice Saatchi, 66, and his beloved Josephine, who lived for just 16 months after doctors diagnosed primary peritoneal cancer - which develops in the abdomen - were, it seems, two halves of a perfect whole: that death has wrenched them apart is, for him, a source of blistering anguish and sorrow. But grief is also a potent motivator, and it is the force that has propelled him to make an ambitious claim. Lord Saatchi intends to cure cancer. He does not, of course, profess to be a specialist in medical science: his field is advertising. He and his brother Charles famously worked with the Conservative Party - he produced the 1979 "Labour isn't Working" poster and ran the Tories" 2005 election campaign. However, last December he launched his Medical Innovation Bill in the House of Lords. And through it, he hopes to change the law that inhibits brilliant, creative doctors from implementing new treatments that could pave the way for a cure for this most obdurate and cruel of diseases. Lord Saatchi believes that fear of prosecution for medical negligence is deterring doctors from trying out innovative treatments. At a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine this week, he argued that the law, not a lack of funding or brain power, is impeding medical progress and forcing cancer doctors to stick to traditional treatments which - particularly in the case of virulent cancers such as the one that killed his wife - simply do not work. "It is striking the whole regime of treatment for the cancer that killed Josephine is exactly the same as it was 40 years ago: the drugs, their administration and the surgical procedures are all 40 years old," he says. And the survival rate - which is nought - and the mortality rate (100 per cent) is exactly the same as it was then, too. After losing his wife Josephine to cancer, Lord Maurice Saatchi is determined to help scientists find a cure for the disease But doctors know if they divert from these well-worn treatment paths and attempt an innovative treatment, and then something goes wrong and there's a trial, they will be found guilty of medical negligence. "Because the question will be asked: "Did the doctor fulfil the standard treatment procedure?" If he did, he is innocent. If he didn't he's guilty. That's why thousands of women's lives are wasted: because they have been endlessly subjected to the same failed experiment. Lord Saatchi's Bill, if it wins the support of Parliament, will enshrine safeguards and codes of practice in the law. Reckless experimentation will be prohibited: "We can't have patients" lives put at risk because they're being treated like laboratory mice," he says. But responsible medical advances will be encouraged. "The point of the Bill is to change the law in order to shift the balance towards innovation and away from complacency and apathy," he says. Of course, it is loss that propels him. He remembers with awful clarity the day - December 17, 2009 - when his life changed irrevocably. He refers to it as "the day that will live in infamy." It had begun propitiously enough. Josephine, his wife of 27 years - an author whose best-selling novel Damage was acclaimed by the late poet laureate Ted Hughes as a "masterpiece" - had talked on Radio 4 about the value of poetry. She'd had a tummy ache for a few days and, as we were going to Sussex for Christmas, I suggested she get some antibiotics from the doctor. Josephine lived for just 16 months after she was diagnosed with primary peritoneal cancer She was reluctant. It was just a mild stomach ache. But she went because I insisted. It was about 10.30am. She rang me half an hour later and said: "The doctor has examined me. He wants me to see a specialist. She'd asked if it could be left until after Christmas, but the doctor had told her no. She had to go now. So she went to see the specialist in Harley Street. It was about 12.30 when she rang to say she had to have a CT scan. Again she'd asked if it could be put off until after Christmas. Again the answer was no. By lunchtime that day, Maurice Saatchi was sitting in the waiting room of a London clinic waiting for his wife to return from the scan. She'd been away longer than other patients and I wandered around the corridors looking for her. A doctor approached. I said: "Do you know where Josephine Hart is?" He looked down at his papers and said: "Yes. I'm looking after her. "I asked if she was all right and he told me: "We've found some stuff." I said: "What stuff?" And he said it wasn't for him to say. I'd need to see a more senior doctor. Here he breaks off again: he weeps. It is impossible, he says, to describe how he felt without resorting to clichés. There was trepidation. Fear. "But we weren't anticipating what was going to happen, which was beyond any possible imagining," he says. So he and Josephine, who had been told to return for a meeting with a senior consultant at 5.30pm that day, wandered the streets. It was very cold. Steady, slight sleet," he remembers. We walked around for three hours and stopped for a coffee. Then we went back for the consultation. It lasted two minutes. Josephine was finished off in three words: Malignant. Advanced. Inoperable. Each word was worse than the one before. The doctor described the situation accurately and correctly. There was nothing more to say. There still isn't. All that followed was the working out of those three words. As Josephine said: "It's over in a second." And she never cried, never shed a tear. It was unbearable. She said "I am doomed" and she was. She survived just 16 months. So, what was to be done? More tests. The endless unfolding of the standard procedures: biopsies, endoscopies. And then the six-weekly cycles of chemotherapy, which caused complete hair loss. But that is the least of the bad news. The worst is the nausea, the vomiting, the fatigue and the fact that these drugs make you very vulnerable to fatal infections such as MRSA and septicaemia, because you have no immunity against them. Meanwhile, the drugs are ineffective because cancer develops resistance. Maurice and his brother Charles, pictured together in the 1970s, were successful in the advertising industry I wonder why, if the doctors" prognoses were uncompromising and if the drugs were barbaric and ineffectual, Lady Saatchi continued with these treatments. Her husband gives the obvious answer: "Because they tell you "There is always hope" and "Every case is different." They are well-meant and kind sentiments and we took them to heart. You want to believe there will be a miracle. But, of course, there wasn't. And Maurice Saatchi's induction into the harrowing world of cancer treatment left its indelible mark. "I witnessed scenes that would not be permitted in a Hollywood horror movie," he says. The chemotherapy ward is the equivalent of death row, and the arm of a patient makes a heroin addict's look attractive. Did he ever wish to speed the end of his wife's suffering? "No, no!" he cries, emphatically. The hope did not end; not until two months before she died and they started to measure her life expectancy in weeks. Then all hope ceased for ever. Of course, he was resourceful and constructive, too. He ransacked the world for information and discovered that the future of cancer science seemed to lie in mapping the genome. He discovered, too, that Harvard University medical school had made some breakthroughs with less toxic therapies. But his wife's doctors were insistent: they had no option but to plough on, relentlessly, with their prescribed regimens of treatment. And palpably they failed. Josephine died aged 69, on June 2, 2011. Maurice and Josephine met after he graduated from the London School of Economics; she was four years his senior. They worked together at the Haymarket Press in London, where for a while she was his boss. He recalls an early date at an Indian restaurant: "I tried to pay by cheque. They asked for ID and I only had a police speeding summons. Josephine was impressed. She was, he says, quite simply his inspiration: "She taught me to read," he says, by which he means she made him love and value poetry. Despite chemotherapy treatment, Josephine died aged 69, on June 2 2011 Their union was a romantic one: "We repeated our Paris honeymoon for 26 years," he says. The same hotel, the same tables at the same restaurants in the same order. At the end she was, says her husband, quite remarkable in her fortitude. Three days before her death, when she was no longer able to eat or drink and was as fragile as a sparrow, when she had tubes and wires attached to her 12 hours a day, she left her hospital bed to attend the opening of a Poetry Week she had organised. A cast of great actors were to give the readings at the Donmar Theatre in London's Covent Garden. "I bought her a wheelchair," says Saatchi. Top of the range. Very chic. It would be a Hollywood entrance. We agreed an ambulance would be no good. So we went by black cab. With a ramp! Two nurses put on her lucky shoes and she was wheeled across the street in the rain into the cab. She went on stage for rehearsals, but she was tired and went back to the dressing room. Fifteen minutes before curtain up, I said to her: "We must go back to hospital." She agreed. After that, the last thing she had to say as she left was: "I just want to rest." " Their relationship, which produced a son, Edward, 28, was intense. There was no need for protestations of love; they knew the extent of their devotion to one another. "When Josephine was in hospital, she said to me: "Our life is ruined." She was right. We were one person and my life with her was pure peace and harmony. Actually, it was true love. I still talk to her all the time. When you leave, I'll tell her: "A nice woman came round . . ." I'll discuss it with Josephine as soon as you've gone. Again he blots away a tear. The response, of course, will be an achingly empty silence. I ask if he has ever contemplated suicide. "I think of it continuously," he says quietly, evenly. "But my friends say: "You must consider the position in reverse. What would you want if you were dead? Wouldn't you want her to move on? And the answer is: "No, I would not." But, of course, I would not want her to commit suicide. So he observes the daily rituals that give him comfort. The tomb, standing within its temple in the bluebell wood - which, in a fortnight, will be a blanket of cerulean blue - awaits him. An M is already inscribed on it in readiness, next to Josephine's J. Meanwhile, he says, he attempts to continue life as if his wife were still in it; he tries to carry on her work with poetry and literature. "I do the best I can," he says. I'm trying to maintain everything as it was. I will continue to lay the table at meal times for her; to set out the newspapers in the order she liked to read them. I take great encouragement from Queen Victoria, who still had the table set for her husband Albert 40 years after his death. But what consumes him, aside from his abiding and remorseless sorrow, is his Medical Innovation Bill. There will be those, he concedes, who say that grief is not a good basis for law. He counters: "Nor is it a disqualification from rational thought." Lord Saatchi has applied his considerable mind to years of exhaustive research. He has done so for his beloved Josephine, in the simple hope that others will not have to suffer as she did. "If one mother, child, father, brother, sister can be saved from a disease that is relentless, remorseless, merciless, and from treatments that are medieval, degrading and ineffective, that would make me happy," he says. And what a blessing for us all it would be.