Mo Haque back at the Extra office this week

IT is 10 years pretty much to the week that a very different Mo Haque walked into the Extra office.

Then, aged just 33, he had been told that stage 4 bowel cancer was inoperable and that his life could not be saved on the NHS. An experimental treatment called immunotherapy – then not established as it is today – was available at Universtity College Hospital to those with means to pay.

The initial price tag was around £250,000, an eye-watering figure for anyone, but particularly for a young man living on a council estate.

How would you react?

Well, first Mo asked a question: What can I do?

And then he went into overdrive promoting an online fundraiser page, more out of hope than expectation. Without any PR machine or influencers onboard, amazingly, £200,000 was raised in six weeks. The treatment was a success, his life was saved.

A decade on, Mo was back in the Extra interview room looking back on the journey, and with a copy of his new book, Absurd Hope.

“Last I time I was here I didn’t know how the story was going to end,” he told me. “Back then there was fear. But right now things are very different. I’m running two running clubs. I also run a personal transformation company that hosts retreats.

“I retrained as a Jungian coach – dream work, shadow work, working with symbols. I’m giving a talk on the weekend at a hypnotherapy conference.

“I went to Bali, and I was on this island and this guy on a boat came up and showed me the turtles in the sea. Everyone dived in. And I thought, I can’t swim. I got back to London and I started taking lessons. I’m learning salsa too. I’m not a dancer. I had that rigid stoic masculine thing about dancing. But I’ve lost all of that.

“These sorts of things you can do when you let go of all your insecurities, and just try.

“The book is about everything I took from the fundraising. And the incredible people I’ve met. And how I am using all that in my life but also now to help others.”

Mo having treatment for bowel cancer

The title, Absurd Hope, is an acronym presented in the self-help book as a framework to help the procrastinators out there find some of that get-up-and-go spirit.

Some of the most interesting passages are about ways to harness boredom in a creative way, and to fight back against the doom-scrolling of the modern day digital age. The A is for “audacious”, a nod to audacity Mr Haque felt was behind him refusing to accept his death sentence and from an oncologist who told him “there’s nothing we can do”.

The book suggests we should all be thinking of an audacious question to ask about our own lives.

Mr Haque, who is still living on the Ampthill Estate, was happy working as a university student development director when he first got diagnosed.

He said: “I did love my job. But I was held back. I did have the brakes on. I always had a view of what people would think, family and community, about my choices. But now I am very public about what I am up to. Now it’s just unapologetic.”

It has not been all plain sailing with turtles and latin footwork. The book tells how in 2023 the heavy toll of treatment brought an end to a project he had set his heart on, running a football / life coaching project for young people.

He was finally discharged by UCLH oncologists last year.

“It kind of drew a line under that phase of my life,” he said. “There had been pain. But at the same time I could look back on the incredible stories of love and connection.”

One of the real scandals of the Haque story is that an NHS patient was told their life could be saved if they paid huge sums for treatment. Not every online fundraiser has a happy ending after all.

But Mr Haque said that immunotherapy was now available to NHS patients that had particular genetic markers suggesting the expensive treatment would be effective.

He said he had written his book at home in a tower block overlooking Euston where day to day life was often made harder by broken lifts, gates and intercom.

“But you know when I see the positive side to the place too. When I see the kids playing in the playground, there are so many generations there. For the kids, I’m like the ‘OG’ of the place. I feel I can still get away with being a kid among them.”

He added: “The real challenge is with the HS2 works.” Perhaps the procrastinating ministers in government should get a copy of Absurd Hope to summon the gumption to finally pull the plug on the whole thing.