CHAPTER 269: ACROSS THE KINGDOM

After the success of the rally, Prime Ministerial candidate Baron Anthony Hayward Chapman launched his party’s Bus Tour across the Kingdom... an ambitious campaign designed to secure key seats crucial for a parliamentary majority, generate local media coverage, and, above all, demonstrate that the party was truly listening to the people.

According to the schedule, the tour would take the candidates to schools, where they would meet children and discuss future investment in education; to factories and farms, to speak with workers and farmers about business and agricultural reform; and to town halls, pubs, cafés, and museums across the land.

But the Kingdom was far too vast for one bus, one man, one message. The campaign’s strategists divided the central leadership into four teams. Baron Anthony Hayward Chapman, Baron John Constantine, Baroness Angela Dodson, and Baron Ernest Prentice would each lead their own route, carrying the party’s banner to every corner of the realm.

Four coaches, each emblazoned with the resolute image of Baron Anthony and the bold slogan KINGDOM FIRST, set out in four directions... rolling symbols of determination, each carrying a fragment of the party’s high command toward its own battles, its own constituencies, and its own interpretation of the national creed.

Anthony’s bus, the flagship, soon became a moving embodiment of the campaign’s spirit—a rolling repository of the nation’s hopes, frustrations, and identity. It wasn’t enough for him merely to visit communities; he had to absorb them.

In Newcastle upon Tyne, he stood on the wind-swept Quayside, the arched silhouette of the Tyne Bridge behind him, a monument to the Kingdom’s once-mighty industrial age.

His secretary reminded him quietly to maintain the right pace... to show a little weariness, a touch of exhaustion. Authenticity mattered.

On the road, they made deliberate stops at motorway service stations, roadside parks, and outside bustling shopping centres. Cameras captured him sharing chips with a family at a plastic table, shaking hands with a mechanic, laughing with delivery drivers. They showed the Baron as carefree among the common folk, eating what they ate, speaking as they spoke, humbly asking for their vote.

Every moment was filmed... carefully, but never too carefully. The footage appeared across news channels, the clips spun into campaign reels, and within hours, they went viral across social media.

Soon, #KingdomFirst was trending nationwide.

A day later, amidst the bustle of Manchester’s Spinningfields, Anthony stood within the glass-and-steel atrium of a thriving fintech firm. His speech there was one of unleashing potential... of a "Northern Powerhouse not as a slogan, but as a reality," of a Skills Fund that would create not just potters, but coders, innovators, and builders of the digital age. The applause that followed was thunderous, impressive even among the gathered crowd of polished professionals. The same slogan had taken on new meaning... now it spoke of global competitiveness, of a Kingdom open for business.

He visited a rain-lashed farm in the Yorkshire Dales, standing in mud-splattered wellingtons beside an elderly farmer fretting over tariffs. From there, he travelled to a university lecture hall in Oxford, debating the ethics of artificial intelligence with a room full of spirited students.

He was like a chameleon prince... his message shifting in tone, in cadence, in colour, yet always returning to that same unyielding core promise. Each night, aboard the campaign bus, he would stare at the map on his tablet, watching the little glowing pin that marked his life inch its way across the fractured landscape of the Kingdom he sought to unite.

Meanwhile, Baron Constantine’s tour was one of fortification. His bus wound its way through the shires and the leafy lanes of the true-blue heartlands. His constituency event in the Thames Valley was less a rally and more an assembly of the established order, held beneath a grand marquee on the manicured lawns of a stately home. The audience did not need convincing of the party’s virtues; they required reassurance... that the movement had not been seized by radicals.

"Stability," Constantine declared, his voice a deep, comforting rumble that barely needed amplification. "Prosperity. The quiet confidence of a nation that knows its own mind. That is what we offer. Not reckless experiments, but steady, determined progress. Putting the enduring values of our movement into action."

He was shoring up the walls... meeting with local association chairmen in wood-panelled clubs, his very presence a living emblem of continuity. In the cathedral close of Winchester, he spoke of heritage and the sacred duty of preservation. In the commuter towns of Surrey, he became a bulwark against the fear of fiscal excess. His campaign was not a march but a procession... slow, stately, deliberate... reinforcing the very spine of the party.

Baron Ernest Prentice’s tour was a pilgrimage to the source. His bus... the least ostentatious of the four... rolled through the places others merely flew over. His constituency gatherings were held in village halls, Legion clubs, and sometimes no more than a small huddle of activists on a windswept street corner in a Northern marginal. He was there for the foot soldiers, the loyal volunteers who delivered leaflets, knocked on doors, and manned phone banks long after the speeches had faded from the headlines.

In a social club in a former mining town in South Wales, where the air was thick with beer and nostalgia, he stood before a handful of steadfast loyalists. There were no cameras, no journalists... no gloss, only grit.

"They talk about the air war," he growled, his voice rough with age and conviction. "But I’m here for the ground war. It’s you... on the doors, in the rain... that wins this. Not the telly. Not the headlines. You."

He lifted his pint of bitter high. "To the Kingdom. And to getting the job done."

From there, he travelled north to the Borders, meeting farmers in draughty barns, his message one of gritty resilience and enduring pride. In a coastal town in Norfolk, he walked the salt-stung esplanade with local campaigners, listening as they spoke of coastal erosion, lost industries, and forgotten services.

His speeches carried no grand rhetoric, no soaring promise. Instead, they offered something older, steadier... a pledge that loyalty would not be forgotten, that the party’s heart still beat in the calloused hands of its workers.

Ernest Prentice was tending to the roots, ensuring the great machine of the movement remained oiled, grounded, and ready for the long haul.

Baroness Angela Dodson did not campaign in anonymous business parks or conference centres. Her battle was fought in the places where life was lived and felt. Her constituency... a tapestry woven from affluent suburbs and post-industrial towns... did not receive a surgical strike of slogans and sound bites, but rather a heartfelt listening tour.

In a sunlit community hall in one of the greener corners of her patch, she sat with a circle of mothers. The topic was the invisible labour of care.

"We talk about the economy," she said, her voice warm, steady, and enveloping, "but what is an economy for, if not to support the love and sacrifice that happens in every home? It’s the mothers, the grandmothers, the daughters who hold the fabric of this country together. Our government will put that fabric first. We will respect the work of the home, support the carers, and ensure that family is never treated as a secondary concern."

Later that same day, in a women’s resource centre in a struggling former mill town, the atmosphere was different... harsher, more grounded... but her connection was unchanged. Here she stood before a small group of women who had built a cooperative from nothing, their faces marked with both fatigue and fierce pride. She spoke not of unemployment rates or GDP growth, but of the quiet resilience of the Kingdom’s under-recognised women.

Her power lay in her listening. At a village fête in the Chilterns, she heard the trembling concerns of retirees fearing their families would scatter and drift apart. In a youth club in a diverse urban quarter, she absorbed the bright, defiant ambitions of girls who dreamed not of following, but of leading.

Baroness Dodson became the heartbeat of the campaign... translating the Kingdom’s most intimate hopes and fears into a political language of compassion and respect. She embodied the truth that the strongest bonds in the realm were not those of commerce or politics, but of care.

The final event of this phase was not held in some wavering marginal, but in Anthony’s own constituency of Bethnal Green. He stood in the shadow of the old market, surrounded by the scents of his childhood... spices, fried dough, and damp brick mingling in the cool evening air. He was home.

He didn’t need a microphone. His voice, stripped of all the polish and theatre of the campaign, carried easily down the familiar street.

"This is where I learned what a kingdom truly is," he said, his gaze sweeping across the faces of neighbours, shopkeepers, and old friends. "It’s not a palace. It’s a pavement. It’s a market stall. It’s the person next to you. We put our kingdom first by putting each other first. It starts here. It starts with us."

It was the simplest restatement of the slogan... and the most powerful. As the cheers of his people washed over him, Baron Anthony Hayward Chapman felt, perhaps for the first time, the true weight of the crown he sought.

It was not a single piece of gold and jewels, but a thousand fragments... forged in the factories of the North, the shires of the South, the new glass towers of the cities and the quiet, forgotten valleys. To unite them, to hold them as one, would demand every fibre of his being.

The buses would keep rolling, the campaign would march on... but now, Anthony carried the Kingdom within him... fractured, beautiful, and entirely his to mend.