tim's experiment

The news that Mr CY Leung has threatened to sue a newspaper columnist raises a number of interesting questions.

The first one is what is all the official nonsense about Mr Leung suing in his private capacity? Senior government officials do not have a private capacity. They are required to seek the permission of the government before taking action of this kind. This restriction may be among those rules which somehow do not apply to the Chief Executive, but if that is the case it would still be a good idea of he behaved as if it did.

The second is why he is making such a fuss. Apparently the burden of the column complained of was that Mr Leung was linked – presumably via the Crazy Bear – with triads. But this is hardly controversial, let alone defamatory. Many senior triads run legitimate businesses as well as their more nefarious ones. Having never been convicted of anything they are free to play the role of public spirited members of the community, including running for election. Everyone knows who they are – Tuen Mun and Wanchai are said to have good representation; Mong Kok, when it was a separate board, was said to enjoy a majority. The Heung Yee Kuk is also said to be well connected. Now psychologists have determined that normal people generally run to about 40 acquaintances whom they keep in touch with more or less continuously. But some professions – journalists, insurance salesmen – run to much larger figures. Politicians are in this category. If we conservatively put the number of contacts per politician at about 100, this means that the contacts of your contacts will number !0,000. Clearly you cannot vet them all. Equally clearly some of them will probably be less than salubrious. This is normal. It is a non-story.

This brings us to the question why Mr Leung bothered. Threatening to sue columnists has costs. Some people, of whom I am one, will see it as a shameless attempt to inhibit comment. Reporters as a group will think less favourably of him, and the general public will not be too impressed either. After all the services of a libel lawyer are like Mr Leung’s palace on the Peak – beyond the means of many of us.

The thing which puzzles me is that Mr Leung was presumably advised that to have any hope of success he must convince the judge that he is a man of unblemished reputation whose good name has been dragged in the mud. But Mr Leung is not such a person. He is routinely described, even in the most sobre newspapers, as a bare-faced liar who got his job by deceiving the electorate. Nobody has been threatened with legal action over these remarks. The defendant could mount the unusual and interesting defence that Mr Leung’s reputation was already so tatty that stories of  him taking tea with triads could make it no worse.

Actually I seem to remember that around 1997 the official line in pro-China circles about organised crime was that many of its leaders were patriots. Presumably they now qualify as persons with the interests of Hong Kong and the motherland at heart, as long as they make no trouble and vote for the Liaison Office’s preferred candidates.  Probably not much consolation when they smash your kneecaps, but politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows.