Invasive Lobular Breast Cancer (ILC) is the second most common breast cancer and constitutes 15% of all breast cancer diagnoses in women, but currently there is very little public awareness of it or clinical research into the disease.

Tristan Loraine now heads the campaign group Lobular Moonshot Project (LMSP), after the organisation’s founder Dr Susan Michaelis, wife of Mr Loraine, died from the disease last year. Dr Michaelis was originally diagnosed in 2013 and received treatment, however Mr Loraine said: “Then in 2021 it spread to her spine and we thought hang on a minute, how’s that possible, for eight years you’ve been on a breast cancer treatment, so how does the disease spread, that doesn’t make any sense.”

The couple were then informed that the treatment Dr Michaelis was on, wasn’t specific for the type of breast cancer she had. After researching the illness, they discovered the woeful lack of research and that many clinicians were aware that it is classed as an ‘unmet clinical need’ despite 22 women being diagnosed with it every day in the UK.

In May 2023, the couple launched LMSP. Mr Loraine said: “We need to go beyond just educating, we need to change this.” The Moonshot approach means that a multidisciplinary clinical team would aim to investigate all aspects of the disease over a 5-year period.

The disease behaves very differently than the more commonly known ductal breast cancer, which often presents as an external lump. Lobular cancer rarely forms a lump and often goes undetected on mammograms and ultrasounds. Despite this, generic ductal breast cancer testing and treatment pathways are still given to patients with ILC.

Mandy Vere from Liverpool was diagnosed with Lobular cancer in 2023 and was one of 66 women who took part in a silent vigil in London on the 22 April this year. Twenty two women stood in silence at the vigil for 22 minutes at three different locations - Downing Street, The Department of Science and Industry and The Department of Health, representing the 22 women diagnosed daily.

Ms Vere said: “It was very moving to stand in silence…we all went from our three different locations, we joined together and we all sang You’ll Never Walk Alone which obviously for a Liverpudlian is very, very moving.”

Often ILC is missed on mammograms or ultrasounds, so it is frequently diagnosed later. However, Ms Vere was one of the luckier ones who was called back for tests after something had been detected on her routine mammogram.

Ms Vere said: “They thought it was about one centimetre, but it turned out when I actually had the surgery to remove it, it was three and a half centimetres and that’s nowhere near as big as some women I’ve heard of, but at least it was diagnosed, I was fortunate.”

Ms Vere explained that it is very typical of Lobular cancer to be found to be much bigger during surgery than in initial detection. For Ms Vere, early detection meant she didn’t need a mastectomy and instead was treated with a lumpectomy and radiotherapy.

Although Ms Vere is currently well, she expressed concerns that should the disease come back she doesn’t feel fully confident that it would be found again during a follow up mammogram test.

ILC has a higher risk of occurring later and metastasising. Ms Vere said that post breast cancer treatments are based on the same monitoring protocol for ductal cancer, meaning she will be monitored for five years: “After that I’m not going to be monitored anymore; the little we know about lobular so far, is that it can recur later, up to ten years or more and more frequently than ductal does.” She added: “We all are aware that we’re being treated on a protocol for a different disease.”

Last July, a week after Dr Michaelis death, Mr Loraine and other campaigners met with Wes Streeting and Chief Scientific Advisor, Lucy Chappell, who said they would help by trying to ‘draw down funding’; however, they didn’t commit to find the £20 million needed for the research.

Last year’s expenditure on the NHS was £242 billion. The Moonshot Project is asking for £4 million a year for five years, for ILC research. In the meantime, patients are just receiving generic breast cancer treatments. Mr Loraine said: “One of them is on a treatment that’s costing the state £4,000 a month and it’s not even designed for her disease, it’s ridiculous.”

Mr Loraine argues that in the long term properly funded research that could lead to targeted treatments would save the NHS money.

Manchester Breast Centre, who have partnered with LMSP, have had a team of clinical experts ready to go since November 2024 and are currently just waiting for the funding to start the five-year research project.

Campaigners are frustrated with the lack of movement and commitment from the government. After the vigil in April, a meeting took place with Lord Patrick Vallance, the Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation, who has agreed that a moonshot approach is necessary and has recently been in conversation with the Medical Research Council.

However, Mr Loraine and other campaigners believe the situation is now urgent and for many women, including Dr Susan Michaelis, it’s already too late. Mr Loraine said: “The last thing I said to her was, I promise you I’m going to win…and she just took her last breath, so I have to win.”

To find out more about Lobular Breast Cancer visit the www.lobularmoonshot.org.

I first entered the gender debate a few years ago having experienced the direct impact of it due to the work I was doing – a women specific project. I was shocked, bewildered and confused and like so many of us it led me down the rabbit hole. It created a need in me to seek out fellow travellers who were also rather concerned about this bizarre and harmful ideology. This process opened my mind and engaged me in a breadth of cultural and political issues reaching far beyond my initial concerns.

Prior to this I had confidently described myself as a socialist, to me this wasn’t just about my politics, my values and morality hinged on my political and social outlook. My sense of self, my friends and loved ones were all very much wrapped up in socialist leanings. I hated capitalism which I had often described as evil – a deeply flawed system that prioritises profit over people, a system obsessed with wealth and status creating an ever-increasing gap between poor and rich. I had grown up in a family and around friendships where virtually everyone I knew, to one degree or another, shared the same world view. My auntie was a labour counsellor; my brother was an active member of the labour party and CND from the age of 13 and later a trade unionist. I visited Greenham common as a child; I marched the streets with family members singing Give Peace A Chance. I prided myself on my anti-violence and CND badge collection, my favourite of which was a silver broach of two hands breaking a gun in half.

Every election that thatcher won, my family were devastated and in turn so was I, Thatcher was a ‘terrible’ human being, who snatched milk away from children, invested unimaginable amounts of money into building the most destructive of all weapons ever made, that threatened our existence as human beings. She destroyed the lives of the miners and the families and communities around them and unemployment was at an all-time high. Did I really understand the politics? Of course not. It didn’t seem like a political issue for my young brain it was a moral issue, everyone around me seemed to be hurting because of Thatcher and her choices – she was bad, horrible, perhaps even evil. As a 10-year-old I wrote her a letter on my petite typewriter imploring her to ban the bomb.

In 1997 at the tender age of 24, the seemingly endless reign of the Tories finally came to an end. I remember the elation, the excitement along with some reservations, was this going to be ok? Were things going to get better? Was Tony Blair left wing enough to make a real difference to people’s lives?

It’s worth a note here, that as much as I cared deeply and viscerally about these issues. I had little knowledge of the in’s and out’s of politics and policy, my views came from my heart not my head. Part of the reason being, is that my lovely left-wing family, were actually quite a cesspit of dysfunction, the internal dynamics of which were not very ‘kind’. As probably the most sensitive and vulnerable member of the family, I had been left to the bottom of the pile and endured far too much abuse and neglect to be able to think straight about anything really. My mental health and my life were in too many tatters and chaos to have any real capacity to be able to intellectually engage with or inform myself about the nitty gritty of politics, philosophy or the ideologies of the left or the right. But as far as I was concerned, I was on the good side, the side of love and peace, the side of social justice, the side of fairness and equality.

Being a part of the ‘right side of history’ was, in my mind, unquestionable. These bizarre alien people who voted tory must be either inherently bad humans or at the bare minimum, selfish and misguided.

Looking back, it seems really quite extraordinary, but I honestly don’t think I had ever even met an example of one of these bizarre creatures called ‘Tories’ until my late thirties, or if I had, I certainly never engaged in a conversation with one. I mean, the general workplaces I inhabited were within the social care setting or the arts – certainly there may have been some Tories lurking in those environments, but I doubt they dared out themselves.

One of the first proper conversations I had with one of these odd beings was with a couple I met on a family caravan holiday in Devon. I was on my own with my daughter and our kids got on like houses on fire, so we, the parents would natter away with each other while the kids played. They were lovely people, lovely parents, lovely kids, we talked to each other very respectfully. I found myself being deeply curious as to the thoughts and reasoning attached their conservative politics. And what I learned was that these folks had far more in common with me than I had thought. Fundamentally, they sought surprisingly similar outcomes for a society as myself. The difference was the methodology of achieving these outcomes was vastly different than mine. But the crux of it was that we all wanted a fair, decent, safe and free society.

Not long after this experience I struck up a friendship with another single parent locally, I lived in a very labour constituency in Bristol that had been red since time began. Demographically it had been a white working-class area that had, over the years, become gentrified beyond recognition. Two ugly tower blocks were probably the last standing monuments to its roots, and I happened to live in one of those. It was a great community, don’t get me wrong, but it was jam-packed with middle-class socialists who’d waxed lyrical about their extensions. I felt alone in my single parentdum and my household situation, to the point where I would wince when asked where abouts on the hill I lived, I would often omit the tower block and just mumble the street name.

The unlikely friendship I struck up with the only other single parent I knew there at the time taught me a lot. He was a staunch lifelong tory, privately educated who owned property. he had found himself the sole carer of his son in an area where he felt like a fish out of water. Our kids had a fabulous friendship and we would take refuge in each other’s company. Many an evening as the kids played, we talked till the early hours, whisky in hand. Politically we were polar opposites, we had fiery debates, heated discussions, some things he said sounded shocking to me, bordering on racist, we challenged each other repeatedly, we sometimes went round in circles, but at the end of the day we laughed, we hugged, we took solace in each other’s company and to one degree or another we made each other think. There would inevitably be points in the conversations where we would concede that we could see what the other meant or where they were coming from, now and then we even agreed with each other. We had different ideas on how we create a safe, free, decent, fair society. He was an admirable loving dad and underneath our differences there was a basic respect and care for each other. Looking back perhaps the things we did have in common brought us together more than the things we didn’t, single parenting can be a lonely endeavour and for different reasons neither of us felt like we quite fitted into the community we found ourselves in.

Something I learned through this friendship, was how demonised those on the right of the political spectrum felt when enveloped in an environment dominated by the left. Our children were at the same primary school and one parent often rocked up at the school gates with a T shirt on that said All Tories Are Rats with a demonic rodent to illustrate the point. I started to think about my friend and how that might make him feel as probably the only tory in the village (or at least openly). Prior to this, over time I had started to feel discomfort with some of the rhetoric of the left, in particular from my own brother, whom T shirt man exemplified. I began to feel a little protective of my novelty tory friend and to ponder on the motives and mindset of the hard lefts demonisation of Tory’s. I began to question the motivation for this, if we, as the left, want to change ‘hearts and minds’ is insulting and humiliating people on the right the way to go about it? What does humiliating and insulting our political opponents achieve?

I feel well positioned to step into the shoes of T shirt man for a minute.

Did he feel good about himself displaying his T shirt? Damn right he did, he will have enjoyed the smiles, thumbs up and back slaps from his tribe.

Did it boost his ego and affirm his righteousness – 100 %.

Did he want to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of conservative voters? - absolutely not.

T shirt man was virtue signalling, he cares not about debate, discussion, he has virtually no curiosity or interest in how other people’s world views are formed, he sees tory voters as ‘other’ and morally inferior.

The discovery of the insanity of the lefts support of gender ideology, like many other lefties I know, has been really destabilising. The moral and ethical rug we were standing on has been pulled from under many of our feet, disorientating us and throwing into question everything our ‘comrades’ have told us. it’s not just our political worldview that’s been destabilised, it’s our values and morality, its existential, it’s our core beliefs about ‘what is good and what is bad’, ‘what’s right and what’s wrong’, it throws out the ultimate human question that deep down haunts every single one of us – ‘am I a good person?’

Charlie kirk was killed for having the same sort of debates that me and my friend had over the kitchen table in the small hours. The same debates that probably happen around many a kitchen table. Charlie kirk did it publicly and I can’t help but admire that, because he put himself out there at a time where the open window of debate and conversation has been closing to the point of suffocation. This is why society needs people gutsy enough as Charlie kirk to start opening that window, no matter which side of the political divide we are on. Over recent years, since I became engaged in the gender debate and beyond, I have met and conversed with born again Christians, people who support Palestine, people who support Israel, people who voted for Brexit, Communists, Trump supporters, and pretty much everything in between. My life is so much richer, more interesting and intellectually stimulating for meeting these people and for talking to people across the political and cultural divide. I have absolutely grown as a person for it, in fact, more than that, I have been forced to grow up.

We have a choice, we can choose to be curious and interested in the whys, the how’s and the what’s of where other people may be coming from or we denounce, shut down and silence those with different views and ‘other’ them. We can demonise others and refuse to engage or hear what they have to say and why they are saying it. We can choose to have a society where peoples world views other than our own (that may well provoke strong and difficult feelings in us) are outed from public life, either by murder or cancellation. Alternatively, we can choose to have a society where no matter how difficult it might be, we do our best to rub alongside each other and tolerate other opinions for the sake of a fair, safe, free and decent society. No political or social system will ever be perfect; there is nothing wrong with striving for better and being passionate and driven about that. But there is something very wrong with an outright refusal to even try and understand opposing positions on how to get there. There is something deeply wrong with dehumanising those with different world views than our own, to the point where we enjoy and relish violence against them.

We are frightening young people, frightening ourselves, we are frightening our children by ‘othering’ and demonising those that don’t agree with us. We are creating siloed groups who are convinced the ‘other’ is of imminent danger to them. We are creating a situation where we are genuinely afraid to hear different opinions. Somehow by hearing other views, we will be infected by the ‘other’ so to even listen is a danger to our moral code. Human beings have a unique asset – our imagination and our imagination can create beautiful, incredible things it can also make monsters out of the ordinary. To manage our imaginations, we need to check in on ourselves and with others, check our information and step back to avoid inhabiting the darkest parts of our human condition.

The more we shut down genuine conversation and refuse to hear each other, the less we understand about each other. Rumours, whispers and our imaginings can get wildly out of hand. The less tolerant and more fearful we become of different world views; the more violent, unstable and dangerous society becomes – that is most definitely something that me and Charlie kirk would have agreed on.