One of the last things Andy Burnham did before entering Downing Street was to go and see his father.

Now living in a nursing home, Roy Burnham has Alzheimer’s and isn’t really aware of his son’s new job. But perhaps the prime minister wanted, in part, to try to explain why he might not be visiting so often in future.

He wouldn’t be the first middle-aged child torn between work pulling one way and elderly parents the other, ending up desperate for a politician willing (as Burnham Jr says he is) to “expend quite a lot of political capital” on the historically vote-losing task of fixing social care. For the alternative is families expending capital – financial and emotional – they don’t have.

Generation X is now entering its caring years, and unlike previous generations, attempting it while both halves of a couple are simultaneously working full-time jobs. We’re crisscrossing the country between homes far away where we spent our childhoods, and those where our own children are still growing up; dealing with muddles over medication at one end and A-level stress at the other, shuttling from hospital waiting rooms to parents’ evenings in constant fear of dropping a ball somewhere. If working motherhood is mostly being in two places at once, middle-aged daughterhood is being in three: work, home and wherever your parents are, greeted at every turn by accusatory piles of laundry and........

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