tim's experiment

Time has alas caught up with my last passport. This is a sad moment because it means saying farewell to an interesting collection of chops and visas, some of which I am unlikely to collect again. The replacement process is reasonably painless. One goes to the British Consulate, an improvement on the arrangement in Lancaster, where the passport people shared premises with the unemployment benefit office, an arrangement which used to lead to interesting misunderstandings. Here the wait is not excessive, the charge is reasonable, the staff are friendly.

I remain resentful that the handsome dark blue hardback which used to stand out in a pile of passports on any group tour has now been replaced by a soft little red thing, with European Union on the front. Some further changes have been made since my old passport was issued. The pages of translation, which tell Immigration officers in 22 languages the meanings of such vital terms as “name” and “sex”, have been moved to the back of the book, next to the page where such matters as my name and sex (the demure use of “gender” for this purpose has apparently not yet reached the Foreign Office)  are actually recorded. The inside front page, which used to say only “European Union”. “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Passport”, but said them in 12 languages, has now been tidied up.

The same phrases are provided, but now only in three languages. One of them, mercifully, is still English. I am not sure about the other two. The language which renders European Union as “Yr Undeb Ewropeaidd” might I suppose be Welsh. Actually providing this translation seems a bit unnecessary, certainly as far as the word “Passport” is concerned. The Welsh word for Passport is Pasbort. I would have thought Welsh speakers could have worked out what Passport was. Perhaps they’re thick. The other language has a passing resemblance to some of the technical terms used in Scottish bagpiping, so I suppose it might be Gaelic. Why Her Britannic Majesty’s Sec of State for Foreign Affairs bothers with these lingistic adornments is beyond me. Most of the few people who speak Welsh or Gaelic are perfectly capable of reading English. If the Foreign Office wants to help British citizens who can’t handle the language they would probably help more people if the extra language supplied was Urdu.

The other thing which has changed is the instructions which come with your new travel document. These now tell you that your passport contains a sensitive electronic chip and should be treated like a mobile phone. It must not be bent, twisted, dunked, heated, steamed, microwaved or put near a television set. It should not be allowed to sunbathe. I have never heard of anyone microwaving their passport but I suppose after the famous case of the woman who tried to dry her cat in a microwave oven we are taking no chances. The irony in this is, of course, that if you were designing a passport from scratch and you knew it was going to contain a fragile chip, you would not produce the pathetic floppy thing which we are now offered. You would go for something solid like the traditional blue hardback which was abolished as unEuropean. While one bureaucrat was moving to snappy paperback passports, another one was planning to insert therein a sensitive chip which should not be bent or twisted.

This is the sort of thing which often happens in large organisations. Indeed it happens in Hong Kong. I notice that the MTR Corp is still planning its network so that everyone will have easy access to Hung Hom, where the old mainline station will be devoted entirely to trains to China. Meanwhile, at enormous expense, a new station for trains to China is being constructed on the other side of Kowloon. Needless to say it is too late to change any of this…

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Readers who suspect that judges live on a distant planet barely visible from the Earth will not have been surprised by the performance of Mr Justice Alan Wright in the Court of First Instance last Thursday. In His Lordship’s dock was a Ms Ng Wai-bing, whose story is rather interesting.

The court was told, according to newspaper reports, that in 2007 Ms Ng’s husband (who may or may not be Mr Ng, Hong Kong habits in this matter being unpredictable) was charged with managing a vice establishment. Ms Ng was waiting in the room outside the court where witnesses, friends of participants, people whose case has not come up yet and other hangers about sit on hard benches produced by resentful previous customers in prison workshops.  She overheard a policeman urging witnesses in the upcoming case to “nail”  the defendant. We only have Ms Ng’s word for this part of the proceedings but in view of what came later the story is plausible. Now policemen are not supposed to coach witnesses in this way, but Ms Ng thought her testimony in the matter might well be dismissed as unreliable or irrelevant. She was the defendant’s wife, after all, and also Hong Kong judicial figures tend to be impervious to complaints of police malpractices. Ms Ng was familiar with this point because she is a former police person herself.  So in order to produce evidence which would brook no dispute she started taping the conversations in the waiting room, and over four months (this seems to have been a very complicated case) collected 47 recordings.  As a result of this evidence-gathering exercise the case against her husband was dismissed, and two of the officers involved in it are now awaiting trial on charges of attempting to pervert the course of public justice. In other words, a miscarriage of justice has been prevented, and two suspected criminals have been brought to book.

Naive readers might suppose at this point that Ms Ng might be eligible for one of those awards occasionally dished out to law-abiding citizens who help the police. Well perhaps that is a bit optimistic. Oddly enough these awards do not seem to find their way to people who help the police to avoid infelicities in their own behaviour.  What may come as something of a surprise is that Ms Ng was not only not praised; she was charged with contempt of court. Quite how this worked in legal terms did not emerge very clearly from the newspaper reports. The Post had some quotes from Ms Ng’s lawyer which suggested that what was going on was an extension of the ban on recording in court on the grounds that the waiting room was part of the court.

Reading the quotes provided from Mr Justice Wright’s judgment, on the other hand, suggested a more general offence of conduct whereby confidence in the administration of public justice might be impaired. Certainly reading the story reduces one’s confidence in the conduct of public justice, not so much because of the possibility that someone might have bugged the waiting room, as because of the possibility that policemen are coaching prosecution witnesses with impunity and Wright J thinks this happy state of affairs should be preserved. There was a substantial risk, he said, that litigants or witnesses would be deterred from attending court if they thought that someone might be eavesdropping or recording their consultations and conversations. This is, with respect, nonsense. The waiting room is a public place. Everyone can eavesdrop on everyone else. People who want to have private consultations and conversations have other places to go to. In any case, as judges frequently observe when giving the green light for phone tapping, close circuit cameras, random breath testing and other intrusions on privacy, the law-abiding have nothing to fear.  The thought that someone may be taping your conversation is a yawn unless your conversation consists of an attempt to pervert the course of justice. Mr Wright, though, thought Ma Ng’s conduct a “singularly grave instance of contempt of court”. It was “unprecedented … throughout Common Law jurisdictions”, he had been told. Presumably by the prosecution, whose research on this point may not have been very enthusiastic.

At this point Ms Ng must have been looking forward to the chance to sew a few mailbags, read the whole of War and Peace, and sample the Correctional cuisine for a few months. And indeed she was sentenced to nine months. A friend who helped with the recording got six months. But Mr Wright seems to have had some inkling that this outcome would be seen as somewhat bizarre by many people denied the benefits of a lengthy legal education, because both sentences were suspended for 18 months. So Ms Ng walked from the court a free woman, and will stay that way unless the temptation to commit contempt of court again becomes overwhelming in the near future.

The story behind this story will be familiar to former students who have been subjected to my version of media law over the years. The law on contempt of court in the UK was reformed in 1981. In 1987 the Law Reform Commission recommended that Hong Kong should have a comprehensive Contempt of Court Ordinance which would incorporate reforms and also remove uncertainty. Like so many of the commission’s recommendations this one was ignored. So the law is still a mess. So it goes.

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Our beloved Post was in a right tizz this morning over the number of accidents involving minibuses. “Minibuses’ high crash rate fails to spur action,” complained the lead headline. The story started with the news that the accident rate for minibuses was 7.5 times that of all other Hong Kong vehicles, said that this “translated” into 21 deaths and 187 injured last year, and proceeded to accuse the Transport Department of dragging its feet despite the “alarming figures”.

Further statistics floated in further down the story. We were told that the accident rate for minibuses was 255.2 per thousand vehicles, compared with 34.1 per thousand for all vehicles. Alert readers would have spotted at this point that they had already been misled. The minibus accident rate is not 7.5 times the rate for all other vehicles, it is 7.5 times the average for all vehicles including minibuses.
Looking at it another way we were told that only 0.76 per cent of the vehicles in Hong Kong are minibuses, but they are involved in 5 per cent of all accidents. And the question which all this left in my mind is where are the alarming figures? We have all heard the rumours that, as the story put it in due course, “minibuses are notorious for speeding and violating traffic regulations”. I have heard, indeed, that the late night express to Sheung Shui is the most exciting ride in Hong Kong outside Ocean Park. But if we are going to hang a story on the statistics they had better be the right ones. And these weren’t.

Look at it this way. The number of accidents per minibus is bound to be higher than the average. Most Hong Kong cars do a half-hour drive to the office in the morning, and half an hour back in the evening. Much of the “driving” actually consists of sitting in tunnel queues, where a serious accident is scarcely possible because everyone is moving so slowly. Some car drivers don’t even do that. The owner commutes by public transport and drives for fun at the weekend. Minibuses are on the road all the time. Of course the number of accidents per minibus will be higher. I expect we would find that the rate for taxis and buses is also above average, for the same reason. If we want to know whether minibuses are unreasonably dangerous then we need another figure. We could try the number of accidents per mile travelled. Or we could use that great favourite of the airlines the number of accidents per passenger mile. Or if we prefer we could try the number of accidents per trip. I am quite willing to believe that whichever figure you used the outcome would be alarming. But if you are going to beat a government department over the head with the statistics you need a figure which means what you say it means.

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The rule of law requires, or so it seems to me, not only that the law should be obeyed but also that it should know its limits.  The rule of law is sabotaged, not served, if laws are passed which cannot be enforced, or if courts presume to sit in judgement on matters over which they have no control. Traditionally one of the limits on the powers of the courts was the geographical terrain covered by their jurisdiction. There have always been some exceptions to this. Treason, for example, would still be treason if the offending action took place abroad, as it often did. Lately we seem to have seen a good deal more. Some countries feel their courts should be prepared to try people accused of serious crimes committed elsewhere, like General Pinochet. Some feel that their own citizens should face criminal charges at home for crimes against children in other jurisdictions where such matters are pursued less avidly. At least in these cases the defendant, if not the place of the crime, is in the country claiming jurisdiction and the court can inflict punishment on him or her. So the proceedings are not pointless.

Which is more than you can say for the Hong Kong government’s decision to hold an inquest into the Manila bus tragedy. The Coroner, we were told last week, had “called” or “summoned” more than 100 witnesses from the Philippines. The correct word here is “invited” because it is entirely up to such witnesses whether they wish to spend a day or two participating in a Hong Kong legal circus. Or not. Anyone who has anything to hide would be well advised to stay away and probably will. Actually it is difficult to see what this exercise can be expected to achieve. The UK government has occasionally held inquests into the deaths of Brits abroad, when there was genuine uncertainty about how they died. But this is hardly the case with the tragedy in Manila, which has been very thoroughly explored already. We know who killed the victims and how they died. That is all a Coroner is supposed to be concerned with anyway. When I reported on inquests we were frequently reminded that the purpose of the proceedings was merely to arrive at the right choice from a limited selection of verdicts: the proceedings were not intended to produce a detailed account of the death, not supposed to gratify the curiosity or resentment of surviving relatives, and not supposed to lay the foundations for civil action later by or on behalf of victims.  People may feel disappointed that the very thorough inquiry by the Manila government was not followed by more stringent punishment for officials who erred. But that is hardly an argument which can be advanced seriously by our government, whose idea of suitable punishment for an official who commits a gross error of judgement is that she should apologise. But only if she has not done so already.

Fans of our local system will wish to interject at this point that errors in considering applications for post-retirement employment from former mandarins do not lead to loss of life, unlike errors in handling hostage situations. This is true in a restricted direct sense. Nobody dies if a senior civil servant cuddles a property mogul. In a broader sense it is not. Two people died during last week’s cold snap because they were sleeping in the street. If Hong Kong’s housing policies were driven by social need instead of the wish to cosset a small circle of property developers then maybe we would not have people dying under our flyovers like the heroine of the Little Match Girl.

To return to our bus tragedy, what is going to happen after the inquest? Normally the Coroner might make recommendations. Even our government frequently ignores them. It is difficult to imagine any great new insights emerging from the Hong Kong proceedings. In fact as there will be a general absence of such useful formalities as a visit to the scene of the tragedy it is rather easier to imagine the proceedings producing some thoroughly unhelpful observations which will give grievous offence without helping anybody. The inquest may publicise some things in Hong Kong which are not widely known here, but it will hardly have anything to say which is news in Manila. The government there can afford to greet any suggestions made with one of those phrases which our government uses when contemplating an unhelpful public opinion poll – something along the lines of all views will be considered with the attention which they deserve. Basically the Philippines may have problems but it is not a sort of diplomatic domestic helper at the beck and call of the Hong Kong government.

Well the inquest will produce a lot of media fodder, enrich some lawyers and perhaps gratify some Hong Kongers who want to watch a Manila official squirm in the witness box. No doubt it can be defended along roughly the same lines as the Asian Games – it will encourage local legal culture, boost interest in judicial matters and give our aspiring competitors a chance to perform before a large sympathetic audience. Students now still in Form Three will later attribute their choice of a legal career to the inspiring and educational effect of a long inquest on an overseas gunman’s victims. It will be worth the expense, about which we have so far been told very little. Meanwhile our Travel Advisory people continue to pretend that the Philippines are more dangerous to travellers than Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or Colombia, which suggests that either ignorance or political vindictiveness is polluting what should be a source of objective information.

I wonder. The official inquiry in Manila concluded that the affair had held up a mirror to a society and showed distressing levels of corruption and incompetence. That was a brave conclusion. Hong Kong’s official reaction suggests distressing levels of arrogance, ignorance, and racism. But I fear introspection of this kind is not our leaders’ forte.

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Never let it be said that our Mainland brothers have no sense of humour. The morning before Liu Xiaobo’s chair was awarded the real Peace Prize in Oslo, readers of the local newspapers were treated to the news of a rival award, called the Confucius Peace Prize, bestowed in Beijing. Clearly no trouble had been spared to make this an occasion beyond satire. The recipient, a Taiwanese politician, was not present, so the bauble was bestowed on a sweet but puzzled 6-year-old girl. Her connection with the prize-winner, or peace, was not explained. The winner was supposed to be selected by an internet poll, but it eventually emerged that this had been cancelled because of “technical problems”.  So quite how the winner was picked remains a mystery. The shortlist, however, was compiled by four professors at Beijing universities. The eight people on it comprised, reportedly, the winner, one poet who works at the Ministry of Culture, the Panchen Lama and six foreigners. The prize money came from – ah, another mystery, – someone who “loves peace and wishes to remain anonymous”.

The idea, apparently, is that peace (like democracy?) has a Chinese version visible only from Beijing, and those who pursue it should be honoured in their turn. Although I noticed that on the same day the Foreign Ministry was being less modest. The Nobel committee, said a spokesman, “are in the minority. The Chinese people and the overwhelming majority of people in the world are opposed to what they do”. Let us all hail another symptom of China’s peaceful rise; the Beijing Foreign Ministry now speaks not only for the Chinese people, but for the overwhelming majority of people in the world.

Well we must not be unkind to something which is still in its infancy. But I do wonder whether giving a peace prize is the most promising option, if the Chinese government wishes to give international prizes. Norway may be a small country, but it is demonstrably peaceful. It has never invaded anyone. Admittedly this is partly because it only became an independant country in 1905, but some countries manage lots of invasions in a mere 50 years. Like the PRC. Frankly the idea of “peace with Chinese characteristics” is not very convincing. Giving the prize to a Taiwanese KMT politico suggests that the Chinese idea of peace follows that of Carl von Clausewitz. The great military theorist pointed out in one of his more sardonic moments that the person who invades your country is always a pacifist: he wants nothing better than that you should submit to him without fighting. Anyway, in view of the PLA’s rich military history – not to mention its huge size – it may be a bit early for China to be regarded as an international authority on the pursuit of peace. Distributors of international prizes should stick to matters on which they have demonstrable expertise.

So I suggest that the Chinese government should institute a Confucius Prize for the world’s top despot. This is a matter on which China, with its eclectic collection of international friends — and its own venomous internal habits — can speak with authority. Indeed they can skip the shortlist phase of  the selection and go straight on to vote. All the likely candidates will be found on the list of countries which boycotted the Nobel ceremony this year. I dare say that any of this fine selection of nasties and ne’erdowells would be very happy to get a prize. And for people like this, such chances do not come up very often.  At least we could trust them to turn up to receive it.

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Well the good news is that a Hong Kong restaurant has been awarded three Michelin stars. The bad news is that if you ask for it, this restaurant is quite willing to serve you sharksfin soup. That was enough to get local tree-huggers, or fish-huggers, up in arms. Michelin should take sustainability into consideration, said a WWF spokesperson. “Excessive consumption is driving sharks to extinction,” she said, “and the award will indirectly encourage further consumption.”

I have several quarrels with this approach. One is that sharks are nasty carnivorous creatures which do not reciprocate the warm and cherishing feelings which they evoke from some human beings.  Species are going extinct all the time. This is nature’s way. If it is the shark’s turn, well it coundn’t happen to a more deserving fish.

Leaving the lovability of sharks aside, though, the WWF seems to be taking the oppportunity for a good whinge on a slender foundation here. I suppose they were put up to it by the newspapers and the opportunity was irresistible. But the restaurant concerned is not going to ram shark fins down the throats of reluctant diners. The consumption of fins will be entirely at the discretion of the customer. If the customer has any sense he will spurn an over-priced and under-flavoured dish. Sharks’ fins don’t actually taste of very much at all.  The WWF has every right to urge diners to consider sustainability in their menu choices. Asking restaurants to participate in the latest conservation PR stunt is another matter. Fins are expensive because they are hard to get hold of. If they are banned by some restaurants, or some restaurant guides, they will become more, not less attractive. And that “indirectly encourage further consumption” phrase looks dangerously vague. How much further consumption? Presumably there is a threshold below which the WWF would admit it was wasting people’s time. Have we passed it?

Also I think the Michelin people have the right to say that politics, the environment, and other worthy causes are important and interesting, but not what their guide is about. The guide is about the food. All that a Michelin star says is that the food in a restaurant is good. It says nothing of the sustainability or other worthy qualities of the restaurant’s menu policy. This is a sensible arrangement because it would be very difficult to run such a guide any other way. Lots of food is the result of processes open to one objection or another. The things done to geese to produce foie gras, for example, are painful and disgusting.  As for veal … These are matters which a sensitive diner should consider carefully.  WWF has every right to persuade people to stop ordering shark’s fin. If that is not producing the desired results, try harder. Restaurants give their customers what the customers want. This is the way to stay in business.

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There is something endearingly antiquated about the row over a Catholic priest, Father Thomas Law, who was rather misleadingly reported as “likening Li Ka-shing to the devil”.  Generally the modern habit is to keep the religious rhetoric for religious contexts and condemn the exploiters of the poor or gullible in terms borrowed from sociology or economics.  Perhaps this is a shame. Anyway I thought Father Law was subjected to a certain amount of poetic licence by local reporters. Actually he did not compare anyone to THE devil. In a clearly jovial speech at a party he compared property developers generally to devils,  an obvious metaphor because he was speaking at a Halloween party. Devils in the plural are a different matter from Beelzebub in  the singular. Plural devils used to flourish in mediaeval paintings, where they could be found pitchforking sinners into the furnace, but they don’t really feature in modern mythology, at least outside the wilder fringes where exorcism in still practised, and in the resulting movies.  This was not a devastating figure of speech in its context. It seems this point was not lost on the property developers, because none of the others has complained.  Mr Li featured by name in the next sentence, which contained the observation that he should be worried about what would happen to him when he died. This was perhaps a bit personal. As I understand it in the Catholic view we are all sinners so most of us should share the same concern.

On the other hand I seem to recall that Father Law’s boss — the real boss, not the one in charge of fund-raising for Caritas — did say something to the effect that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. If the difficulty is proportionate to the wealth it seems a legitimate theological observation that Mr Li will have a lot of talking to do when he reaches the Pearly Gates.  Father Law then went on to say something critical about Cafe de Coral, but so many people have done that lately that this was not considered newsworthy.

The really interesting bit comes next. There was a telephone conversation. On one side we have a senior member of the Li empire. We were assured that this was not Mr Li in person but that is not surprising. Being rich means never having to do anything for yourself. Even procreation can be outsourced these days. On the other end of the conversation we have a senior spokesman for the Church who, we are also assured, did not apologise. It seems he offered some carefully worded assurance that Father Law’s views were not necessarily shared by the Pope, and in return received an assurance that Mr Li would continue to donate to Caritas.

It seemed to me rather unfortunate that these two topics had come up at the same time. Many years ago it was considered acceptable for the Church to sell what were called “indulgences”. The way this worked was that you supported the Pope of the day in his purchases of hand-painted chapel ceilings and other artistic extravagances, and in return were promised a reduction in your stay in purgatory, a sort of half-way house between Heaven and Hell where moderate sinners could pay for their errors before joining the Choir Invisible. But that was many years ago. While I cannot say the Beatitudes are my daily reading I think I have visited them often enough to say that in the traditional version there is nothing along the lines of “Blessed are the property developers, because they shall be cossetted by the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong”, and nor was there one saying “Blessed are donors to Caritas, because all their sins shall be forgiven them.”

Well, Mr Li’s charitable impulses do him credit. Quite how much credit I leave to Saint Peter. Where a church which is supposed to “hunger and thirst after righteousness” should draw the line in its fund-raising is a tricky matter. I realise that the church sincerely wishes to help the poor and the money to do this has to come from somewhere. Also, local standards in these matters are low. Few charities refuse the assistance of the Jockey Club, whose money comes from the industrial exploitation of a notorious vice.  Still a church is a church, not the Heung Yee Kuk. Like most Hong Kong people I am not a Catholic. Quite a lot of non-Catholics, I imagine, found Father Law’s original observations refreshing and apposite, if expressed in what seemed to us rather picturesque language.  The subsequent non-apology was … shall we say less inspiring?

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I am not often moved to comment on American politics but I see the new Speaker is a gentleman who spells his name Boehner … which, The Economist observed for readers who might be confused on this point, rhymes with “trainer”. This will have come as a profound disappointment for many readers who will have supposed that it rhymed with “loner”.  This is, after all, in conformity with the usual practice. The “oe” combination usually comes out as a long “o”, as in Boeing or Goebbels. Putting an “h” on the end of it shouldn’t make any difference. If it was meant to rhyme with trainer it would be spelled Behner, you would think.

Now of course there is a reason why Mr Boehner might prefer to rhyme with “trainer”. Boner, in the slang of many English-speaking countries, is not only the word for a butchery implement; it is also the word for – um – an erect male sexual organ. Indeed before Mr Boehner’s pronunciation preferences had been pronounced in Hong Kong, the internet was already alive with some rather indecent plays on words. Mr Obama was to face “stiff opposition”. His opponent would give him a “hard time”.  Other authors speculated on the headlines which might accompany Clintonesque indiscretions on the part of Mr Boehner, supposing he perpetrates any. Clearly for a politician who wishes to be taken seriously the Bayner pronunciation is rather important.

Still it is, I fear, wrong. We must salute Mr Boehner’s exemplary persistence and success in persuading people to adopt a thoroughly implausible version of his name for public purposes. Even TVB is rhyming with “trainer”, which considering the problems they used to have with Leicester City is a remarkable achievement. But there is a cost to Mr Boehner’s success. Many of us have suspected for a long time that Americans are a puritanical lot who also cannot be bothered to pronounce foreign names properly. A plausible theory, it seems.

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The whole town is talking, as journalists say in their usual exaggerated way, about the goings-on in the Lee clan. The story was that the elder Lee (otherwise known as Henderson Land) was keen to have grandsons to inherit the family firm. His second son had married and done his best, but produced only daughters. Eldest son is not married, but did his duty by getting a surrogate mother in the US to give birth to triplets on his behalf. The three babies have now arrived in Hong Kong.  The Standard reported this entirely as a feel-good happy story, which seemed a bit odd to me, but I must in fairness report that it was a better effort than that of the Post, which missed the item completely.  It did not seem to occur to anyone, at this stage, that some people might find the whole idea a bit controversial.

In the Standard’s follow-up story the next day some misgivings had appeared. One radio caller apparently thought the whole deal was morally wrong and unfair to the kids. A millionaire was quoted as saying that “it’s more reasonable to have children after marriage”, which could be considered a bit of an understatement. Another caller said that “they are not harming anyone and everyone has gotten what they needed,” which seemed to be rather missing the point.

Which is, I think, that using medical technology to help people with medical problems is one thing. Using it to allow very rich people to, in effect, buy babies, is another. This is not a question of the acceptability of surrogacy. In fact, strictly speaking, the woman who bore the babies is not a surrogate. A surrogate is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “a substitute, especially a person deputizing for another in a specific role or office”.  In this case there is no wife for whom the surrogate is a substitute so she is not a surrogate. She is, I suppose, a sort of rented incubator. We were not told where the eggs came from – from the incubator or someone else – but it seems that the “father” was able to stipulate the sex and that a multiple birth was not unexpected, so I suppose the actual meeting of sperm and egg was done in a laboratory dish. The father’s part of the proceedings was limited to 20 minutes with a test tube and a copy of Playboy, and paying a very large bill.  

The new father of three now says he is studying fatherhood and intends to be a hands-on Dad, changing diapers like any other single parent. On the other hand I suppose being a vice chairman of Henderson Land takes up quite a lot of his time and he has left an awful lot of the proceedings so far to the hired help, so there may be some doubts about this. He also says he hopes to get married eventually, though I would have thought that finding a Miss Right who is romantically inclined to a pre-existing family of four may be a bit challenging, even for a millionaire.

I believe there is some reason to worry about the babies. Firstly, being a twin (as I am) has some serious disadvantages. I suppose being a triplet is even worse. The appearance of Mum, when Dad gets round to it, is going to raise some tricky questions. Are further offspring on the cards, and if so will they be treated differently? Or are they not on the cards, and will the future Mrs Lee have to live with the fact that some nameless American lady had done her job for her before she even reached the altar?

Clearly the Lee clans’ activities are legal. Whether they are moral is not a question on which I feel qualified to have an opinion. I just think the whole thing is in very poor taste. If you  are rich enough you can buy almost anything. “Can”, not “should”.

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The government web page has now sprouted a little logo which invites you to go straight to what officials call the Outbound Travel Alert system. This would he a kind thought if the alert system was trustworthy. It is not. The list supplied has three categories. There are countries in which travellers should exercise caution and monitor the situation:  India, Indonesia, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. This is a reasonable observation given the recent history of the countries concerned, though the inclusion of Indonesia may be a bit unkind. Then there is a category of countries which should be avoided unless your travel is essential. There are currently no countries at all in this category. Then there is a category to which all travel should be avoided. There is one country in this category: the Philippines. And this is of course preposterous. There are some hazards to travelling in the Philippines, no doubt, but to suggest that the country is in a class of its own, two degrees more perilous than the scenes of recent civil wars, is too outlandish to be taken seriously.

Now of course we know how this happened. After the bus tragedy in Manila the Hong Kong government in essence put the Philippines on its no-go list as a sign of displeasure. There may have been some justification for caution in the immediate aftermath of the killings, when there was at least a theoretical possibility that the victims had been chosen because they were from Hong Kong, rather than just being an unlucky pick by the hostage-taker. This possibility has now wholly receded. None of the millions of words devoted to the tragic event has suggested that it was in any way connected with the nationality of the hostages. Having put the advisory on, though, officials are now faced with a difficulty: having had no good reason for putting it on they now have no good excuse for taking it off. So it sits there, a shameless lie, commemorating our officials’ contempt for the people they serve.

Because the travel advisory system is an important safety measure. But it only works if people trust it. If it is used as – say – a way of imposing economic sanctions on governments we are having a tiff with, then it loses its informational value entirely. If the alert on the Philippines is ostentatiously unwarranted, why should people feel worried by those for India, Indonesia and other unhappy spots?  Actually there are probably parts of the mainland where one would be well advised to exercise caution and monitor the situation. But I somehow do not think we shall ever see a travel advisory for them. If the government is not going to offer honest advice it would be better if it offered no advice at all.

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