Chapter 3 In which Dr Pangloss decides a second casino is urgently needed in Westphalia-on-Sea

As soon as Dr Pangloss was installed as the new mayor he quickly began pouring oil on the troubled waters of the past. He said everyone on the council needed to work together, and had his photo in the Westphalia Express everyday with a caption underneath saying 'we must all work together'. Everyone agreed with this sentiment, but an unfortunate side-effect of this new unity was that the mayor and the councillors kept falling out and were constantly saying they couldn't possibly work together. Some of the 93% of Westphalia-on-Sea who hadn't supported Dr Pangloss began to think that his appointment was a very expensive waste of time, and that everything was just the same as before. But that was with hindsight, which is a wonderful thing - even Pangloss and the councillors were agreed on that. In order to silence his critics, Dr Pangloss began writing a fortnightly column in the Westphalia Express entitled 'The Best Of All Possible Worlds', in which he explained why everything was already fairly brilliant now he was in charge of Westphalia-on-Sea, and how it would be unbelievably fantastic in the future if only people would stop being negative and focus on his brilliant ideas.

Pangloss's first brilliant idea was a second casino. Westphalia-on-Sea already had a well-established fully-functioning casino, but it wasn't attracting any upmarket visitors. Maybe it was too small and not close enough to the sea. Pangloss thought a bigger casino very close to the sea would do the trick. Apparently when upmarket rich people book a holiday one of the first things they look for is a big casino near the sea. Lots of the residents of Westphalia-on-Sea couldn't follow Dr Pangloss's logic on this one, and thought encouraging more gambling in an area with a lot of social deprivation might in fact be a bad idea, but they were simple folk who didn't earn fifty grand a year, so they couldn't be expected to grasp such a tricky concept, and really had no business writing to the Westphalia Express to air their simplistic and narrow-minded views.