In fact, there were very few suggested solutions full stop. Everyone thinks the care of our disabled and elderly isn’t worth the scrutiny we would pay to staff and managers in far less important sectors. It is all too easy to put your faith in a system that isn’t worth it.

A man I have interviewed in the pas, who has worked in a senior role n the NHS and has become one of the most forthright commentators open it, has some suggestions.

Roy Lilley puts his finger on it when he says the inspection regimes can’t cope. There are too many place to inspect. Random checks are the only way forward but they have to be thorough.

He suggests all managers should spend a day a month in patient facing care
situations. This would motivate staff and residents and show them they cared.

As for a solution? Roy Lilley suggests we recruit and train members of the family and pay them to
look after people at home. Pay them properly and guarantee them respite.

Consolidate the care home market and make it harder to come in. Change the
corporation tax arrangements to make it really worth the investment. Make a
special minimum wage in care homes to get better staff and insist on
registration and training.

This point was one of the most crucial failings highlighted by the Panorama programme. Staff at the Winterbourne Care home were little short of feral. They did not just neglect patient, they actively mistreated them for purposes that resembled entertainment. They key issue was the calibre of staff and the senior manager in particular.

What people want is the provision of state-funded care. Sixty pensioners a day are losing their homes to pay for care; this is clearly an unsustainable situation. An option would be to provide free care and deduct the cost from the estate of the deceased resident with a guarantee of never taking more than one third of the total value.

Allow family members to contribute and syndicate the cost of care and give
them tax breaks for doing it.

Pull out all the stops and make the pharma industry work together to find
the next Aricept. Dementia is an organic illness and there will be a pill.

Roy Lilley calls for greater accountability and scrutiny………………….so let’s not complain about the dark when we can light a lantern….quite literally.

Call me old fashioned but I can’t help liking having an MP who,  I believe acts with integrity and courtesy.

Call me sentimental but I can’t help being  thankful that I have an MP, who yesterday took my daughter and her classmates to present their Send My Friend to School petition for Universal Secondary Education, to No 10, Downing Street and took the time and trouble to buy them hot chocolate at Portcullis House afterwards.

I don’t suppose the clutch of children from St Elizabeth’s School, Richmond will ever forget the day their MP, Zac Goldsmith,  bothered to introduce them to passing ministers, the ex-Home Secretary and some of the new MPs. Sky’s Polictical  Editor, Adam Boulton came over for a chat even your own Daniel Finklestein stopped to say hello in Whitehall.

Can we just let him get on with being a good constituency MP?  He must be worn out with people overlooking his achievement in winning his seat. I certainly am.

Come on Channel 4. I am used to seeing you broadcast real news - not an account of whether Mr Goldsmith spent too much on his campaign anoraks.

Mr Goldsmith’s response on Sky and BBC was an authentic and heartfelt statement of his behaviour. Such a shame Channel 4 did not give him the right to a live right to reply. He asked.

We are what we eat; so the saying goes. Like all cliches it is based on the truth. For five years I worked full-time as a current affairs reporter on Tonight With Trevor McDonald where I had the invaluable opportunity of observing and analysing our diverse and, sometimes surprising,  relationship with food. After conducting hundreds of interviews I came to realise that food is one of the most remarkable barometers of who we really are….whether it is the 31 stone woman who travelled to Duke University in the US for life-saving treatment or the father who developed real chicken nuggets for his autistic daughter.

Where once food was for sustenance it is used for entertainment, emotional nourishment or even to make a point about our standing in the social strata. Athletes are fanatical about developing the perfect nutritional equation and models are ultra disciplined about their diets.

But what is really important is that most of us  maintain a balance about all of those reasons for liking - or even loving - what we eat.

In other words junk food is fine so long as you remember it is empty calories, organic food is great but some of it is a waste of money, fair trade bananas are a good buy if you want to fund a hospital in West Africa, takeaways are fine in moderation and, as I said to Captain Birdseye,  my life has a single mother of three children has been truly enhanced by frozen peas.

What we need to understand as the money to fund a Nanny State falls away,  is that food is central to our well-being. We now live in an era where pressure on the NHS will have to be reduced. Treating obesity is a huge drain on our resources: everything from unnecessary knee replacements to diabetes can often been prevented before treatment is required.

I once sat through an operation called a total body lift. It was carried out in Kansas because we do not have the expertise to perform such invasive surgery here. It was not cosmetic - it was carried out on a woman who had lost seventeen stone in weight and had extensive problems with excess skin. It took ten hours and my breath away.

I am not a food facist but I do care passionately about what we eat…..and about a common sense approach.

At the end of the debate we were asked, who influences us now? Then; who will influence us in ten years time?  I think the real question is who is influencing our children now? Then; who will influence our children in ten years time.

Before leaving the house my teenage son asked where I was going. I told him about the debate. He asked me if I had ever heard of Phillip DeFranca. I had not.

I had enough to to get online and find out about him. He he is young man who web-cats for three minutes a day on gobal current affairs. He gets between 500,000 and four million views and his influence amongst the 14 to 19-year-old age group is huge.

Few of those at the debate will have heard of him and, although he reaches people through YouTube, I do not believe it is Google who has the influence it is Phil DeFranca. As we move forward the power of individual will increase. If you want to know who is going to be the biggest influence in our lives, try looking over the shoulder of your teenagers as they scour the internet. That is where the answer is.

Is it any wonder that so many of them choose to inhabit the risk-free world of computer games. I am not talking about those violent, savage games such as Grand Theft Auto but of the mythical, charming world of Final Fantasy.

Yes, they are fascinating, compelling and a haven for so many stressed-out teenagers. But are the safe. In the direct sense; yes. But they have an insidious quality which makes them a very real danger for our kids. In the end, many of our youngster prefer the virtual world to the real one….and that has very many dangerous implications.

At 8.OOpm on  ITV’s Tonight  I revisit three boys I interviewed three years ago about their computer game addiction. I wanted to see if they were off their drug of choice and working their way back to the real world. Two have made good progress but a third is still deeply immersed in his struggle.

This report has particular relevance to me since my own son developed a compulsion for computer gaming while I was making the original film. He has turned a corner…..but it has been a long and tiring three years…for him and for the rest of our family.

We under-estimate the lure of these games at our peril. The challenge now is to connect with our teenagers and make every effort to make real life a safe place to be.

It appeals to me on another level. It is an activity that makes me feel more connected with my community and with the powers that be in Brussels. Through my political activities I have met my Euro MP and several candidates. My point is this: it does not take much time or effort to get involved, and the rewards are considerable. Think about how much better you feel when you view your bank balance regularly. You know how much i there is in your account and you can then manage it properly. It is the same in politics - pay attention to what is going on around you - even in a small way - and you will start to feel a lot better about life

Over the last few weeks we have spent hours debating the moral corruption and selfishness of MPs. In many cases we have every right to do this. Haven’t we fallen a sleep at the wheel, though. Voter apathy is a big problem but to carry on the analogy indifference can be a two-way street. We looked away for long enough and we were taken advantage of.

The best way to stop any kind of horror is to expose it to public scrutiny. That doesn’t mean just reading an online account of your MPs expenses, it means paying attention to the political process. Like our newspapers sometimes we get the politicians we deserve. As Peter Gabriel said of the South African apartheid regime after the death of Steve Biko……”the eyes of the world are watching now.” Steve Biko needed to be politically aware and active. We can’t all be active…but we can be aware.

When I thought about it, I realized that there would be many more at the top if the number of women entering politics increased at the bottom. The City and big corporations have all been able to entice more women into their ranks and then successfully plug the leaky pipeline…..that is all that has to happen in politics.

What women need is practical help coping with their responsibilities. We are the sandwich generation and often have to cope with young children and aging parents. What about making childcare tax deductable? Shirley Conran once said that the biggest boost to the feminist movement was the washing machine…..how right she was.

And what about making politics appealing - at least to the point where women can understand its relevance to our lives.

I am not in favour of positive discrimination because I don’t think it is necessary if enough women participate. It really is a numbers game.

In a feature I wrote for the Mail on Sunday recently I wrote of what it was like to be an ordinary woman trying to become an MP. Some readers suggested I was far from ordinary because of my job as a journalist and my contacts in the media world. This misses the point entirely.

In a sense we are all ordinary people who can behave in extraordinary ways depending on whether we are dealt a blow or bestowed a boon.

I once interviewed Pam Warren the survivor of the Paddington Rail crash, who famously wore a plastic mask to help her scars heal. Her hands will never recover and her tendency to suffer flashbacks will always remain. She has become a motivational speaker: courageous and inspiring. But she would agree with me that she is just an ordinary person.

In my job as a journalist I have met many extraordinary people, from the lorry driver from Rochdale who raised half a million pounds to fund his daughter’s cancer treatment to the widows of the New York fireman, but at heart they were all ordinary. My extraordinary good fortune was to meet them.

We need people who can rise to the challenge by behaving well. It doesn’t matter what their job is. Plenty of current MPs were ordinary people behaving badly what we need is ordinary people behaving well. What we need most of all is leaders behaving well. The best way to spot a leader is to look at who is following. On June 4 we will know.