REMEMBERS SON SEBASTIAN AS SHE IS HONOURED BY THE KING
Wearing a smile as bright as her colourful jacket, Anne Diamond beamed with pride as she was invested with her OBE in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
The journalist and GB News presenter – who received news of the award on the same day she was diagnosed with breast cancer – was honoured by the King and the pair exchanged a few words and grasped hands in a show of warmth and mutual respect.
Anne, 69, received the award for her services to public health and charity, including her tireless campaigning for research into sudden infant death syndrome (Sids), or cot death as it is more commonly known.
SAVING LIVES
She began raising awareness of Sids in 1990, when she and then husband Mike Hollingsworth, whom she divorced in 1999, lost their son Sebastian when he was four and a half months old.
The following year, she joined forces with the Lullaby Trust and health authorities to launch the Back to Sleep campaign telling parents that babies should sleep on their backs, not their fronts.
The campaign has been credited with reducing the number of cot deaths from around 2,000 babies a year in the 1980s to 200 now.
Speaking after her award was announced in the New Year Honours, Anne, who began her career in regional news before becoming a star of daytime TV for both the BBC and ITV in the 1980s and 1990s, said: “This OBE is literally a crowning achievement to everyone who helped me and upon whose groundbreaking research my campaign was based.”
She added: “This is also testament that the media can be a force for good. By the Government’s own report, 80 per cent of parents who got the life-saving advi
