As someone who earns a sizeable crust from expressing his opinions, Piers Morgan is usually a stranger to the fine Scottish art of swithering. Indeed, the average watcher of the Sunday politics shows would be hard-pushed to think of any subject that stumps him.

That has changed recently with Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults with less than six months to live. The bill, which comes before the Commons on Friday, applies to England and Wales. A separate bill was introduced in the Scottish Parliament by Liam McArthur MSP in March this year.

Appearing on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg yesterday, the former GMB presenter and newspaper editor said he had “been round the houses” on assisted dying. “Normally I feel certain about almost everything, but on this one I’ve changed my mind quite a lot,” he said.

Also on the panel were former Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries and the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, both of whom spoke movingly of their experiences with a family member who was dying.

Morgan is not alone in his hesitancy about assisted dying. Across the Sunday newspapers and politics shows the personal mixed with the political as guests set out the arguments in favour and against.

The divisions within parties go all the way up to Cabinet level. Despite Downing Street making it clear to ministers early on that they should avoid taking a position publicly, some have done so. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, is opposed. He wants more support for palliative care. Yesterday he was joined by Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood. In a letter to her constituents in Birmingham Ladywood, she said: “I have always held the view that... the state should serve a clear role. It should protect and preserve life, not take it away. The state should never offer death as a service.”

All MPs will have a free vote on Friday, but if the bill succeeds Streeting and Mahmood would be the ministers directly involved with implementing assisted dying.

Liz Kendall, Work and Pensions Secretary and the minister on Sunday show duty, was asked on Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips how Streeting and Mahmood could stay in their jobs having voted against the bill.

“I’m not going to criticise either Wes or Shabana, who are good colleagues and have strong opinions about this,” said Kendall.

She will be voting for the bill. “The safeguards are much stronger than last time and I’ve always believed in giving people as much power, control and choice over the things that matter to them as possible.”

A poll for the Sunday Times showed 65% of the public were in favour of assisted dying, with 13% against, and 22% undecided. A clear vote in favour, then. But go deeper into the survey by the More in Common think-tank and the picture becomes more complicated. In a smaller survey, 74% did not believe the NHS as it is now would be up to the job.

Away from domestic news, Phillips’ show looked at the elections in Ireland this Friday, while Kuenssberg interviewed Jean-Noel Barrot, the French Foreign Secretary. Barrot said Keir Starmer’s move to “reset” relations between the UK and EU was “more than welcome”, pointing out that he was the first French foreign secretary to visit London in six years.

The biggest foreign interview in town was not on television but in the Sunday Times. Some two and a half years after she left politics, Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor, has finally published her autobiography.

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 is published tomorrow by Pan Macmillan, which is also publishing Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, due in August next year. Might the former First Minister of Scotland be able to pick up a few tips from Merkel?

Reviewers will hope she doesn’t follow the former Chancellor’s example when it comes to word count. At more than 700 pages, the Merkel memoir is one of the more heavyweight offerings from political leaders in recent years.

Then again, the former Chancellor has a lot to pack in, starting with her early life in East Germany. She goes on to detail her ascent through the political ranks and some of the key decisions she took in office, including opening the doors to more than a million refugees. The policy was widely applauded internationally but some within Germany have since blamed it for the rise of the far right.

In her 16 years as Chancellor, Merkel watched many presidents and prime ministers come and go. Among the more unpleasant encounters she had was a meeting with Vladimir Putin, who allowed his dog to wander around the room, much to the Chancellor’s obvious alarm. (Fear of dogs is something else Merkel shares with Nicola Sturgeon.) “I could tell from Putin’s facial expressions that he was enjoying the situation,” writes Merkel. She says she took the advice of the royal family to “never explain, never complain” and carried on with the meeting.

At a White House photocall with then US president Donald Trump her offer to shake hands was rebuffed. “He wanted to create conversation fodder through his behaviour,” she says.

Brexit is covered in some detail, something else the Merkel and Sturgeon memoirs will likely have in common. The former Chancellor says the 2016 referendum result “felt like a humiliation, a disgrace for us, the other members of the European Union - the United Kingdom was leaving us in the lurch. This changed the European Union in the view of the world; we were weakened".

After the referendum, she says she was “tormented” by the question of whether she could have offered more concessions to get the UK to stay. She concluded, however, that it was simply not possible given the politics in Britain at the time.

The Scottish press will be hoping Ms Sturgeon does not take Merkel’s closed-door approach to life outside politics.

As Decca Aitkenhead, who interviewed Merkel for the paper, writes: “Anyone hoping to learn all about her private life will be disappointed. Of her first husband, all she writes is that one morning, three years after marrying, she left their apartment ‘with a suitcase in my hand’, and the following year they were divorced.”

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021, £35, Pan Macmillan, published Tuesday