Back in 2010, as health and social care secretary, he unveiled extensive proposals to overhaul social care, only for them to collapse amid rightwing media hostility and furious political rows about “death taxes”. He would be accelerating Louise Casey’s review of social care, which under Keir Starmer had been slated for 2028, effectively pushing it back into a putative Labour second term. There would be investment and focus on the social care workforce, boosting pay and training. Blame for the dire state of English social care lay with his generation of politicians, he said. He strikingly compared the inequity of social care in England with the privatised US healthcare system: “The vulnerable pay with everything and it can completely leave them with nothing.”