For the third day in succession, the House of Commons addressed itself to the welfare of older members of our society. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, it became clear as the day wore on, had been unusually cast as the relief party.
Monday and Tuesday and various aggressive elements in the House had been actively discussing how they were going to shut down the most famous and best-loved care home in the country. It wasn't entirely clear why, but it was something to do with it not being "modern" enough, and because everyone else had shut down theirs, with the sole exception of Lesotho, henceforth an international by-word for backwardness. Besides, the space was needed for a new clubhouse for professional politicians, who would be imbued with important virtues not given to the home's existing residents, such as being chosen from a list of party apparatchiks and a much higher certainty of being of the Liberal Democrat persuasion.
The House, having voted to shut down the home by a huge majority, turned up to hear Mr Lansley try to salve their consciences by explaining how, in a more general sense, he wanted to be kinder to the older generation. Perhaps in honour of his subject, Mr Lansley had arranged for his hair to be greyer than ever. He presented a shocking and undiluted burst of white so that, looked at from above, the Secretary of State resembled nothing so much as the product of one of those megawatt torches available from petrol stations for £2.99 with any purchase of fuel. The torch had come, he said, to make a statement on the "future of care and support for adults in England".
Mr Lansley was expected. Ever since the weekend he had been popping up on the media to announce confidently that the Government would, once and for all, be clearing away the uncertainty around how the dear old folks would pay to be looked after, once their own faculties had deserted them. It was to be, he promised, a "watershed moment". His white paper, he told the House, "represents the greatest transformation of the system since 1948". The ambition of the rhetoric was the most certain guide we had to the fact that Mr Lansley would have very little in practice to offer.
And so it proved. Mr Lansley's big idea was that pensioners would not have to sell off their homes to pay for their care. No indeed: it would fall to their heirs to sell the place off instead after they had died. This represented a major triumph for the sod you generation, though the Secretary of State didn't quite put it that way. There was also much in the statement about clear and consistent eligibility criteria for care. Was there no end to the largesse that Mr Lansley was prepared to shower upon these needy creatures?
Andy Burnham, the Shadow Health Secretary, didn't know whether to praise or scorn the statement, so he did both. He started off in welcoming mode, pointing out that many of Mr Lansley's ideas must be good because he - Mr Burnham - had thought of them first. He took this to be a "positive sign of the developing consensus between the parties". This was soporific stuff, certainly for Mr Burnham's deputy, Diane Abbott, whose eyelids headed downwards followed soon enough by her entire head. It was a shame she dropped off for she missed Mr Burnham's peroration. He wheeled on the Alzheimer's Society to denounce the entire white paper as a "massive failure" (though presumably not those bits that were Mr Burnham's) and said that it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne to blame. This, one surmises, was another sign of the developing consensus between the parties: it is increasingly common ground on both sides of the House that Mr Osborne is to blame for everything.
Earlier, at Prime Minister's questions, a Labour backbencher, Emily Thornberry, had inquired whether Mr Cameron thought that Mr Osborne should apologise to Ed Balls for suggesting, apparently without foundation in fact, that he had been up to his neck in manipulating the Libor rate. The view in Mr Cameron's and Mr Osborne's circle is that there is nothing in the annals of infamy that should not in some way be pinned upon Mr Balls. He may have been responsible for the Black Death and the loss of the American colonies. So, no, the Prime Minister did not think that the Chancellor need apologise.
By this time though the Prime Minister's ears would still have been ringing from a sustained scream from one of his own backbenchers, Anne Marie Morris of Newton Abbott. Rarely in Parliamentary history could anyone have been so violently and unintelligibly in favour of government policy. Whatever she was actually saying, Ms Morris appeared to be in need of the sort of sedation routinely applied to the beneficiaries of residential care and which in future has been secured by letting them pass off onto their descendants the onus of flogging off their homes.