On her own account, Jade Goody’s “la-la” was examined at the Princess Alexandra hospital in Harlow just before she went to India at the beginning of August last year. The hospital gave Goody the okay to travel to Mumbai, where she had been signed up to appear in the local version of the reality-television show Big Brother — known in India as Bigg Boss.

Almost as an afterthought, in Goody’s version of events, the hospital invited her to have a cervical smear before she went on her way. Goody submitted to the test, but was still unhappy at the intense pains down her leg and the excessive vaginal bleeding she was suffering: on their own, either could be a warning of the cancer; taken together they ought to have been a red alert.

At the age of 27, Jade’s entire existence was based on the fame her chippy cockney persona had earned her. She would say she had been “nothing” before she became famous as a Big Brother contestant in 2002. Big Brother had created Jade, and Big Brother had destroyed Jade — exposing her to public hatred and ridicule after she was accused of racism during Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. She had lost everything, was still only just clawing her way back two years later, and now here she was in a hospital.

In the brief seven-month span between her diagnosis and her death, it was repeatedly suggested that her own slapdash attitude towards her health may have contributed to the cancer that killed her. But we now know that other factors were also at play.

Jade was an easy and convenient target to blame for her dying. But could anything have been done much earlier to save her before the cancer took hold?

The radical hysterectomy that she underwent a few weeks after her return from India was only just a failure. Would it have helped if she’d had the surgery sooner? These are among the questions that arose in the aftermath of Jade’s death in March — questions that The Sunday Times Magazine has set out to answer.

So who killed Jade Goody? It was much discussed and widely accepted at the time of her death this year that she herself was to blame for failing to have an earlier smear test. Yet if there was an “at risk” register for cervical cancer, Jade would have been right up there at the top of the list, from the time of an initial sexually transmitted infection in her mid-teens.

As Jade so rudely discovered, fame is all very well, but there is not much point in being dead famous. Though my, how famous-Jade loved being loved by us, as she lay dying. Jade was forgiven. And being “tragic Jade” made her more marketable than ever. She made £1m in her last days — deliberately exploiting her death to create a trust fund for Bobby and Freddie, the two sons she was leaving behind. In the end, as at the beginning, Jade had nothing to sell except herself. There was no time then for reflection or recrimination.

But now, at a distance of some months, and with future generations of young women in mind, it seems important to ask: where was the NHS in the last two years of Jade’s life, during her repeated hospital admissions and sometimes hysterical attempts to seek attention for her gynaecological problems? To be sure, Jade did not always turn up when she was supposed to, for tests. But she was there at the hospital often enough — and it is still unclear what happened.

Everyone who knew her says that Jade was highly driven to escape her miserable origins in southeast London.

Her earliest memory of her father was of him injecting himself at the end of the bed. He had ended his life pretty much as she first remembered it — dying of an overdose while injecting himself in the men’s toilets of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Bournemouth.

I asked her last PR representative, Mark Thomas, if Jade used to talk about her father. “Yeah, she used to say it put her right off a Kentucky.” Kate Jackson, a television producer who had become close to Jade, said she was making a joke of it, of course, to mask her feelings. In truth, she was very affected by her father’s death and by his general absence in her life beforehand.

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