Kennedy, twenty-three, quotes the Government's own document back at it — closing the hospitals without building the alternative is not the answer — then watches it do precisely that in the name of Victorian values.

November 1983, five months after the landslide that returned Thatcher with a majority of 144 and reduced the opposition to fragments. Kennedy, elected at twenty-three as the baby of the House after unseating a minister, is already trusted with an Alliance supply day — and the performance shows why: statistics marshalled without pomposity, jokes at Kenneth Clarke's flu, and a closing turn to human dignity that became his political signature. The argument was ahead of its time. 'Care in the community' was then a consultative aspiration; within a decade it would be the flagship policy whose underfunding produced exactly the gap between rhetoric and provision Kennedy describes, and the double bind he identified — statutory duties crowding out voluntary provision as demand rises — became the permanent condition of British social care. The genial debater seen here led the Liberal Democrats within sixteen years, took them to their post-war peak, and was mourned across every bench he teased.

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