A Folkestone granddad used his final moments before taking a lethal dose of drugs to urge MPs to back assisted suicide laws.

Andrew Barclay, 65, who had advanced multiple sclerosis (MS), ended his life at Dignitas on Thursday having travelled to Switzerland with his wife Sandra.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Mr Barclay, a former civil servant, said he suffered with his symptoms everyday and had made the decision to end his life.

But he said he was worries his wife, 67, could face a police investigation when she returned to the UK.

He told the Mirror: "We need a law that makes it a feasible option in Britain. It needs to be tightly regulated but why not draw the line where Dignitas has?

"It’s not easy to go there, you need medical and psychiatric reports and you need to carry out the final act yourself."

Mr Barclay was diagnosed with MS in 1992 and suffered a series of remissions and relapses with the neurological condition.

He was told in 2013 his condition had entered a secondary progressive stage, his symptoms would not improve and his health began to deteriorate.

Mr Barclay, who has spent the last three years in a wheelchair, was left devastated when he could not lift his two granddaughters, age two and four.

His struggle continued with immobility, incontinence, blindness in one eye and subsequent moods.

He said: "I want to be with the people I love, of course I do, but I can’t even lift up my granddaughters and whirl them through the air like a grandpa should.

"I want to express the love I feel for them but instead I’m grumpy, telling them off. Not because they are naughty but because of the way I physically feel.

"It makes me feel guilty every time I let slip an opportunity to show them how much I love them and that’s something I bitterly regret, but it’s not within my control.

"There are still genuine moments of happiness. But they no longer outweigh a life in which every single day is a struggle from start to end. So I have made this decision."

He told the Mirror it had cost more than £10,000 and 14 months of ‘fighting’ to die at the Switzerland clinic.

His wife Sandra said she has never spent a Christmas without her husband in nearly 50 years.

She said: "I will miss every single thing about him. It broke my heart but if you love someone you don’t want to see them suffer."

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of pro-assisted dying group Dignity in Dying, told the newspaper: "It is a tragic and unacceptable reality that seriously ill people like Andrew feel they have no other choice but to spend their final days travelling hundreds of miles to Switzerland in order to have the dignified death they desire."

In the UK, anyone helping or encouraging someone to take their own life can face up to 14 years in prison under the Suicide Act 1961.

In 2015, MPs overwhelmingly rejected a bill to legalise assisted dying.