NO ONE could have failed to be moved by the tributes paid to the late Charles Kennedy. ‘We have been touched beyond measure...by the affection expressed by politicians across the spectrum,’ said his family.

The papers were filled with tributes to someone who was universally admired, genial, witty, extremely bright and principled beyond measure. His outspoken and very public opposition to the Gulf War flew in the face of the political cadre, but proved much more in tune with public opinion and much more closely aligned with facts and evidence as they emerged.

Astute, courageous and successful.

Small wonder that with the political spotlight shining on the devastation of his party and the landslide election results in his native Scotland, the shock of an early and untimely death brought tributes pouring in…but like many a political hero, Charles had feet of clay.

He was an alcoholic, engaged in a personal battle with an illness that eventually cost him his life and deprived the nation of a gifted leader. I read the tributes with sadness but also a sense of increasing incredulity at the commentators’ collective silence about the wider tragedy that Charles’ death highlighted, the cost we pay personally and as a nation through the misuse of alcohol.

I had the privilege of working for a while for a national charity for a while, based just down the road in Ringwood, which had the unenviable task of casting a spotlight on a national timebomb that is about to explode: liver disease.

Its biggest causes are alcohol misuse and poor diet are its biggest causes and it will overtake heart disease as the nation’s biggest killer within a generation.

It already claims the lives of a jumbo jet full of people a fortnight – a headline that never gets written. It is a silent killer. By the time your body tells you that you have liver disease, it is almost certainly too late to do anything about it. And it is eminently preventable.

Simple things that have worked in other countries, such as minimum unit pricing for alcohol for example, have fallen prey to industry lobbying and fallen by the political wayside.

Supermarkets continue to advertise and pile high vast quantities of discounted alcohol in a way that will appear as obscene in a few years’ time as our previous acceptance of smoking.

I cannot forget the look on the face of a 40-year-old woman lady that came to our Love your Liver roadshow on receiving test results that showed her liver was on the edge of coping. ‘But I only have one glass of wine a night,’ she protested. No one had ever told her that alcohol was effectively an addictive poison and that her liver, like everyone else’s, needed at least two consecutive alcohol free days a week to recover.

Charles Kennedy was unique. But his story of family devastation and life needlessly lost through the way that alcohol is misused in our society is one that is will become more all too common place in the years to come.