MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra is building his way to a wondrously forgettable year, seemingly determined that if he is fated to fail, he’s going to make it a spectacular show.
A mere 10 weeks after telling critics that if they didn’t like Bangkok floods, go live in the mountains, he took new jet lag out on his citizens and voters once again after another storm filled the streets instead of draining away.
"Rubbish" was his target with two meanings: the claimed build-up of garbage that prevented a smooth run-off on Tuesday morning, and the value of the criticism of himself and his hard-working, dedicated Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) assistants and employees across 509 districts.
It was such a testy exchange with the media that no one had the gumption to ask the only obvious questions, to wit: If there's a lot of rubbish in the pumping stations, shouldn't you plan to remove it? And then remove it?
The city’s chief executive wasn’t always like this. And after all, he never got a vote on the type of critical people that now fill the city. The grandson of King Chulalongkorn the Great is actually quite genteel. We are talking rugby, Oxford, Georgetown, about as genteel as it gets.
As a full-time academic in the 1980s and early 1990s, MR Sukhumbhand was a driving force behind the Institute of Security and International Studies of Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science. The institute’s symposia, forums and papers attracted international attention and respect.
In the late 1980s, he doubled as an adviser to the committee on foreign relations of the House of Representatives. That was when he contracted one of the most debilitating and deleterious diseases yet diagnosed — political ambition.
For a while, he incubated the disease, treating the symptoms carefully. He was an adviser to then-premier Chatichai Choonhavan and the buffet cabinet, worked with the parliamentary committee on parliamentary affairs and served as international trade adviser to the Commerce Ministry. But soon the disease took hold. Political ambition grabbed MR Sukhumbhand like a slot machine grabs a gambler.
Presumably if he had beaten the politics disease, he would not be saddled with two of the most impolite nicknames in the country. To celebrate his remarkable refusal to surrender to the slavery of diet, exercise and moderation with alcohol, voters added a word to his royal-connected nickname and he became Khun Chai Moo, roughly, Piggy. And then there is the punny bilingual nick Err, in English signifying, shall we say, lack of glibness; in Thai, even more discourteously, autistic.
Not disrespectful enough, decided luk thung (folk music) star Pisit Chaisirapkorn, who saddled the governor last week with another nick in a video that got instant internet fame: nam thuam pak: in Thai, stuck for words as if your mouth is flooded. Geddit? Flooded?
Khun Chai flirted with political independence when he began, founding the Nam Thai Party, but it disappeared faster than a white envelope at a press conference. In the mid-1990s he became really serious and joined the Democrats. He found a safe seat in parliament and was deputy foreign minister for several years. In 2008, he won the party’s nomination for Bangkok governor after Apirak Kosayodhin was forced to resign because of corruption. He won his first term in January, 2009.
He almost didn’t run for a second term. The Democrats debated whether to kick him off their team as indecisive and unlikely to win. He almost didn’t win. He personally believed Pheu Thai’s Pol Gen Pongsapat Pongcharoen would beat him like a toy drum.
Then, at the last moment (the Saturday before Sunday’s vote) the Democrats went on a brilliant, dirty scare campaign of character assassination against Pol Gen Pongsapat and Pheu Thai — a perfectly legal dirty scare campaign, the Election Commission ruled. It turned the election from a devastating Democrat debacle to a resounding, seven-point victory for Khun Chai.
Nasty nicknames do not the man make, and Khun Chai has become a figure at conferences of mayors and reeves and governors around the world. Last week, while Mother Nature stormed Bangkok, he was in the Netherlands taking notes on (contrary to rumour) terrorism, cybercrime and safety in the city.
Flying home early, he found that pretty well everyone from the phuyai in charge to the common citizen was irritated at him for hours spent wet and wasted. So Khun Chai took the only action he knows, and unloaded on the ungrateful citizens, possibly unworthy of his governorship.
It was what had him in trouble in March, when he suggested that if people didn’t like inevitable Bangkok flooding, go live in the mountains. On Friday, he did it again, warning “heavy rainfall is expected on June 14 and 15”, ensuring a lie-in yesterday, June 13, when early morning storms pounded his city.
A citizens’ group implored Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha to use that magic Section 44 wand to make MR Sukhumbhand disappear. The general wasn’t up for that. But he smiled and said Bangkokians could turn him out in 2017, the first time the premier has suggested that elections are actually useful.