AS I write this week’s offering, the horse-trading and jostling for position in the Inner Sanctum, or the Council of Ministers as our politicians would have it, continues.

The Chief Minister – Beeches Old Boy Terry Le Sueur, who I still remember as a lad walking through town wearing his school shorts and that bullseye-patterned cap – now has the unenviable task of trying to bring together a bunch of people to run the Island.

There have been few surprises among the names going forward, and the new Chief Minister has mirrored the results of the Senatorial elections by sticking with the politicians he knows. That is understandable – but it’s a blow for any hope that taxpayers may have had that very much would change.

Still, as I’ve said before, we get what we vote for and if we don’t like it then we just have to wait another few years to go out and vote again. Speaking of which, it will be interesting to see whether our recently elected and re-elected representatives are brave enough then to go for the choice of a general election of all would-be politicians.

I’m not at all surprised that Terry became Chief Minister – the outcome was pretty much inevitable – but I was very pleased that Alan Breckon stood against him in the election for that post. It was right that another person should stand up as a challenger and Senator Breckon made a good go of it. I take my hat off to him.

The outcome merely reinforced the belief that I would think most people have – that experience is more important than innovation. And after all that, I strongly suspect that Alan was as happy about the result as Terry.

Another Terry – this time the boy Le Main – has made news again by announcing that he wants to reduce the time required to gain housing qualifications. He wants the waiting period for ‘quallies’ to be reduced from 12 years to ten because the housing market has slowed dramatically over the last few months.

While I can quite understand that it would be a reasonable reward – Terry’s description, not mine – for those who have chosen to make Jersey their home and are prepared to work in the Island and wait until they can buy a house, I’m not convinced that reducing the time limit is going to have too much effect on the housing market.

I am quite sure that experts on the subject may well think otherwise, but chewing the fat with some mates of mine the other evening, some pointed out that, even if would-be home owners got their quallies sooner, it was less likely that they would be able to afford a mortgage, let alone put down a deposit on a house – even if a mortgage company was willing to offer the finance, because the fact remains that, even with the financial slowdown and some small reduction in the price of houses on the market, property here is still ridiculously over-priced.

Straw polls are all very well when it’s a few mates chatting among themselves. But they really cannot be accepted as any real method of proving anything. So I was a little taken aback when, trailing along behind while enduring an enforced visit to the metropolis with Herself, I was asked, very politely, by a young man standing outside what was Noel and Porter and is now BHS (for those born in the last 30 years) if I would like to vote for Chief Minister.

I pointed out that I had no right to vote for Chief Minister, as that was to be decided by that lot in the Big House, but he explained that he was one of a number of people conducting a straw poll to see whether the person elected to that post by his or her peers would be the one that the general public would have chosen to be Prime Minister in Jersey, if they could vote. It was, he explained, all about democracy.

I declined, and told him that, to my mind, democracy had been served when the voters marked their crosses on the voting slips at their local polling station, and that now it was up to the new politicians to do the rest. Unsurprisingly, the result of the straw poll put Alan Breckon top of the list.

But to my way of thinking, we have elected our new government, for better or worse, and we cannot now go back to the popular vote. To my recollection the people who have made the difficult decisions in the Big House in the past, and who have become political legends (in their own lifetimes in some cases) – people such as Cyril le Marquand, Reg Jeune, John Le Marquand and others – were not necessarily the popular ones at the time and certainly not the poll-toppers.

And finally … Despite the rising cost of all commodities, and the worrying financial climate, the people of Jersey have once again dug deep to continue the essential tradition of ensuring that those among us who are less fortunate receive some festive cheer.

The Joint Charities Appeal is again in full swing, and the splendid total of £27,000 raised in the radio auction last weekend goes to show that we still care about our fellow human beings.