🎙️ What’s This Episode About?
Richard Angell is the Chief Executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s leading HIV charity, and was born, as he points out himself, just a month after it was registered as a charity in January 1984. He joins John at home during Labour Party conference week in Liverpool, which does at least mean he was already in the city.
Richard begins with the history: how Terry Higgins became the first named person to die of an AIDS-related illness, how his partner Rupert was turned away from his hospital bed because their relationship wasn’t recognised, and how the friends who founded THT in response were initially rejected by the Charity Commission because queer causes weren’t considered charitable at the time. Forty-four years on, Richard leads the organisation working to end new HIV transmissions in the UK by 2030, and he talks through what that actually means in practice, from automatic HIV testing now rolling out across nearly half of England’s A&Es, to the Formula Milk funding that took thirty years of asking to secure.
The conversation gets into the parts of the work that don’t always make the headlines: the people living with HIV who aren’t taking their medication because of stigma, the communities where new transmissions are rising and which are less connected to LGBTQ+ spaces and services, and the blood donation rules for people on PrEP, where Richard is candid about the nuance involved and why a safety-first approach sometimes means advocating against positions some of his own community holds.
There’s also a genuinely brilliant story involving Boris Johnson bursting into a Ministry of Defence meeting, hair ruffled, to announce a policy change that THT had spent years engineering from the outside, and which the people in that room had absolutely no idea was coming. It ends with the ban on people living with HIV serving as military pilots being lifted, just three years later than intended, but lifted.
It’s one of the most informative conversations Proudly Said has had, and one of the most quietly impressive people John has sat across from.
Follow Richard on Instagram at @richardangell and find out more about the Terrence Higgins Trust at tht.org.uk.
🗣️ Why Listen?
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