tim's experiment

Our glorious leader seems to be losing contact with reality. Here he is, dog-end of term of office measured in months, would-be successors jostling in the wings, and what does he tell us? He’s going to unveil solutions to Hong Kong’s big long-term problems.

This would have been a good plan six years ago. After all the problems which Mr Tsang belatedly recognises as problems have been around for a long time. What are Chief Executives for if not to devise solutions to long-term problems? While we were fiddling about with trivial constitutional changes, creating jobs for new layers of poliltical placemen, charging ahead with fabulously expensive infrastructure projects, and helping developers to push people out of empty buildings, and so on… We, or rather you, could have been confronting the housing problem, the growing wealth gap, the ageing population, and perhaps the air pollution and the historic buildings and the lawlessness of the New Territories as well. Some of these problems can be put down to history. Some of them, alas, can be put down to Mr Tsang. Putting the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk on Exco, for example, was a bizarre decision. Did Mr Gaddafi refuse the offer?

Mr Tsang is now, I am afraid, in no position to tackle long-term problems. Long-term problems require long-term solutions. But Mr Tsang does not have a long term left. He is a lame duck. This will be vigorously denied by the duck in question, as it always is. Unfortunately lameness is not a matter in which the duck has a choice. It’s like infidelity – everyone knows except the victim. The lameness of the duck is not a criticism of the holder of the office concerned. It is a natural consequence of the way the world works.

Consider. Mr Tsang has only a few months to go. As an ex-Chief Executive he will no longer have the power to reward supporters or to punish opponents. Avid shoe polishers will spurn his Oxfords and save their brushes for boots with some tread still on them. Acolytes who were willing to bruise their foreheads before Mr Tsang will now grovel to another emperor. Within days of Mr Tsang’s retirement people who treated him with the deference due to deity will be explaining what a duff performer he was. That is, I am afraid, the way some people are. It is not a pretty spectacle.

So let me, in my usual contrarian way, say something nice about him. Extending the $2 public transport ride for fossils to seven days a week is a decent and helpful gesture. Very welcome. Thanks a lot. I will never say that you never did anything for me.