God's Loving Embrace

Part Twenty-Six

The People Decide

May 2025

'Debate thy cause with thy neighbour himself; and discover not a secret to another.'

Proverbs 25:9

"Come on Ben, be serious." Charles Buckingham smiled his most winning smile, keeping himself calm, but digging his fingernails into his palm to help him focus. "Having promised not to change any of our policies in your first year in office, how can you criticise our record on anything? What are you going to do? Take a gap year? Go backpacking around Australia or lay on a beach in the Bahamas? Just as it was when Blair promised the same thing...it is a confidence trick...an attempt to reassure the electorate that you can be trusted not to undo all the good work we have done."

"One of my first priorities will be assessing all the damage you have done...I certainly do not want to blunder in and make things even worse." Cartwright snapped back, less calm but still in control of himself, performing much better than he had in the first leadership debate in truth. Buckingham was treating him rather like an annoying younger brother in an attempt to patronise and belittle him, and he was doing a good job of keeping his temper thus far. He was approaching his moment of truth and he could not afford to ruin things with tantrums like Brian Strickland had once done. "Our whole point is that all the structural changes you have forced through will take time to dismantle without risking throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We will need to plan and assess and agree the most sensible way forwards. I do not deny your achievements Charles, but it is the price we will all pay for them in the long term that concerns me and my party. We need that year to get our strategy in place and agree a sensible change of tack...a compromise between your extremes and commonsense."

"There will be no price to pay as long as we are given the time to finish the job we have started...the structural changes you allude to have transformed this country from a close to bankrupt basket case into a financial giant again...full employment, falling crime, much lower interest rates, better health, better education...good luck with dismantling all that my friend and not sending us back to the dark ages. I do not deny that we still have a lot of work to do in this country. There is always a danger with dramatic change that it all takes time to hang together, to bed in, for the tail to catch up with the head, as it were. But I would ask each voter to concentrate on one thing and one thing only. Ask yourselves just one simple question before you place your vote...is this a better, nicer place to live than it was five years ago? If it is, vote Christian Democrat, but if it isn't and you don't trust me to put it right, vote for Ben Cartwright and then see where you are in a few years time."

"Charles, your problem is that you don't like being challenged on the details. You are fine on the big plan, but when anyone asks you something fundamental, like how you can provide six hundred thousand nuns to replace all of our nurses and even more to replace our women teachers, you don't have a clue. It was a pipe dream...yes, some of our hospitals are cleaner and in those the patients get a lovely bed bath every day and their meals on time, but is the healthcare any better than it was before?"

"Precisely Ben, you hit the nail on the head. All we have achieved are the things you and your better half failed to do over countless successive administrations. The medical care was always first class, but the service around those highly motivated professionals was appalling and we solved it, radically...and yes we have more work to do. We have changed the political landscape, but no one really cares about that anymore, because ordinary people don't inhabit the political landscape. The really important thing is that we have changed the crucial social landscape. This is the difficult phase. This is where everyone who voted for us five years ago just has to hold their nerve. Imagine the progress we have made in that time. Now imagine what we can do in another five years...and remember that your alternative is a man who intends to waste twenty percent of that time examining his navel and hoping for inspiration to strike!"