tim's experiment

We all love the ICAC. Some of us hate graft, some of us have been brainwashed by their advertising, some of us just enjoy seeing millionaires arrested. But we all love ’em. Still, there is such a thing as pushing your luck.

Lurking on the back page of the Business Post this morning was a little Lai See snippet recording that the author, Howard Winn, had attended the first day of a three-day Symposium organised by the ICAC on the theme of “Fighting Corruption in a Changing World”. On his arrival Mr Winn was shunted to the press corral, which was behind a rope at the back of the room and was totally unfurnished. That’s right: no seats. It was as bare as a police press pen and I suspect almost as far from the action. Mr Winn pleaded his advanced age and was eventually allowed to sit with the delegates. The other reporters were kept standing in the press pen. I imagine they were pretty pissed off. If there is one thing worse than being expected to cover three days of speeches standing up it is seeing the SCMPost person getting favourable treatment again.

Now I suppose forcing the reporters to stand up doesn’t come up to much in the cruel and unusual punishment category. The pews which now clutter European cburches were a 19th century innovation: before that people stood for the entire proceedings and sermons sometimes lasted for three hours. When I was a sports reporter we sometimes had a press box, sometimes had a seat and a phone, and sometimes just stood on the touchline or the riverbank with the rest of the punters. This being in England it was usually raining, too. Still, what is acceptable in these matters varies from place to place and from time to time. In the early 80s lunch meetings were a favoured venue for officials to make announcements. Reporters often turned up and were given the same food as everyone else. Later the organisers of these things replaced the full lunch for reporters with a pile of sandwiches and a cup of tea on the Press Table. Later still the free refreshments for the scribes disappeared altogether, at roughly the same time as the government official speakers did. Nowadays such meetings are rarely reported. If one turned up to a meeting of this kind now refreshments would be a pleasant surprise. You would, though, and this is the point which I have been approaching rather timidly, expect a seat.

And this brings me to the big puzzle. The ICAC has a large and well-manned unit headed by a seasoned press pusher from the Information Services Department, devoted to cultivating its relationships with the local press. What were this crew, who are all employed at unimaginable expense to the public purse, thinking? Was the press invitation only meant to cover the opening ceremony? Was this a cunning wheeze to make sure that nobody would stay to cover anything else? It does not take much for well-intentioned organisations to stay on the right side of reporters. We no longer expect red packets. The ICAC being the ICAC, even such modest presents as a sandwich and an OJ may be off limits. But for crying out loud at least give people a seat!

An unlikely offering cropped up in our local bookshop the other day: a volume entirely devoted to tricky questions posed in university admission interviews.  It is by John Farndon – a prolific man according to his blurb but previously unknown to me – and is called “Do you think you’re clever?” which is apparently one of the questions used by sadistic interviewers at the Cambridge U Law Department.  This book sheds an interesting light on what happens when obscure middle-aged men suddenly find themselves in a position of power. There are some trick questions: “How many animals did Moses take on the ark?” Answer, none – the guy with the ark was Noah. There are some impossibles: “What is fate?

Some questions are actually rather specific to a particular department. “Do you think Chairman Mao would be proud of today’s China?” was posed to Oriental Studies candidates, who might have been expected to have some idea on the matter.

Most of the examples are from Oxford or Cambridge, which came as a surprise to me, because when I was interviewed for the former the questions were quite conventional, though not in all cases easy. Mr Farndon appends a little essay on each one by way of the answer you might have given if you had had time for some thought and research. I suppose he picked questions which looked usefully provocative for this purpose. So some of the most tricky ones are only mentioned in the preface. I particularly enjoyed the (suspiciously entertaining) story of the Philosophy interviewer who opened the proceedings with “Is this a question?” to which the intended victim replied “”Well if this is an answer I suppose it must have been.” Philosophy departments seem to spawn stories of this kind. When I was a student we all heard about the philosophy exam question which went “Why?” According to the legend one examinee had scored a First for the answer “Why not?”

As luck would have it one of my bursts of interviewing came up while I was reading the book. No doubt you will be wondering if I succumbed to the temptation to baffle a few future MA students with some variation on “Can a computer have a conscience?”  or “If God is omnipotent, can he create a stone he can’t lift?”‘ Actually I was not tempted. Different people have different interviewing styles, and mine tends to the pleasant fireside chat end of the spectrum. This is no doubt partly because Hong Kong universities do not put a lot of stress on the interview and the interviewer does not have to worry that his fugitive impressions of the candidate are going to make a great deal of difference. Partly it is because I learnt a long time ago when doing a postgraduate education course that interviewing is extremely unreliable and research has disclosed that the predictions of interviewers are hopelessly unreliable. As this was the conventional wisdom 40 years ago you might think universities would have come up with something else by now. You would be wrong. Academics make a great fuss about the research they do themselves but they take no interest at all in other people’s research into their own activities. Nobody outside departments dedicated to the subject reads education research.

Interviewers with more power or a larger applicant to place ratio no doubt feel the need to be more inquisitorial. Jimmy Carter – the former president – never forgot his unsuccessful interview with Admireal Hyman Rickover, the father of the American nuclear submarine fleet. The opening exchange went along these lines:

“You graduated from the Naval Academy in 19XX?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Were you first in your class?”

“No Sir.”

“Why not?

At the other extreme, job interviews in the journalism business are often a formality designed to preserve the fiction that the editor decides everything. In these cases the real decision has been made by the head of the relevant department and the interview is often conducted in a pub — or it was in the old days; I understand journalists do not drink so much, now.

Oddly enough there is some evidence that interviews can be useful, if you are careful. I am indebted for this observation to another highly recommendable book: “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, who is famous as the psychologist with a Nobel Prize in economics. Mr Kahneman, in his youth, was in charge of the interviews used to allocate conscripts to different parts of the Israeli Army. He had, it seems, heard the same stories I had heard about the uselessness of interviews, and also had the benefit of looking at the records of previous interviewees, which showed that the interview was not detecting anything useful. To try to make the whole procedure more effective, he standardised it. Particular topics were to be addressed in the same order, using the same questions. The results would be turned into numbers but the interviewers would not give an overall score. The adding up was done by Mr Kahneman afterwards on a very simple basis. This procedure improved the results, which now gave useful indications of who would be good at what. But it upset the interviewers a great deal, because they felt they were being turned into automatons. In the interests of good relations Mr Kahneman then invited the interviewers to give an overall score at the end of each interview. Interestingly the overall score resulting from this procedure also proved quite a useful indicator. The message is simple. If you want to get meaningful results from comparative interviews you should standardise the procedure so that every candidate gets the same interview and is scored in the same way. This is crude and boring for the interviewers but works. I fancy, though, that we shall not see universities adopting it any time soon. People’s ability to deceive themselves in matters of this kind is almost unlimited. So applicants to the older universities should continue to brace themselves for pearls like  “Is Nature natural?” or “What happens when I drop an ant?”

But they will not get that sort of thing from me. Many of my colleagues regard interviewing as a chore,  but I rather enjoy it. This may be because journalism attracts a lot of female students, so one tends to spend quite a lot of interview time contemplating a pleasant sight. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that one should try to make the experience as pleasant as possible for them also, although some of the people I interviewed for undergraduate purposes were clearly terrified. Sometimes they looked at me with such apprehension that I wondered if they had ever talked to a foreigner before. Sometimes — it seemed a harmless enough question — I did actually ask if this was the case. Usually, to my surprise, the kid concerned had never talked face-to-face with a foreigner before. This is a problem easily solved. I urge anyone approaching a university interview with this gap in his resume to wander down to Central, grab a foreigner and talk to it for a few minutes. We don’t eat people.

A sad and serious matter: a few weeks ago a young doctor who had AIDS was “outed” by the media. He then committed suicide. I am always wary of speculations about suicide. The real motive may not be known even to the suicide himself, and he is not around to correct mistakes. Still for what it is worth the conclusion to which most people jumped was that he realised it would be impossible for him to continue to work as a doctor because of the publicity, and despaired. Well perhaps. We should all feel sorry for the guy. It was the comments which were more interesting.

A spokesman for the doctors said that reluctance to consult a doctor with AIDS was totally unjustified. “Clinical procudures” had been perfected which made it perfectly safe for a doctor with AIDS to continue to practise. The clear implication was that this medic should not only have been allowed to continue to practise, but that he should have been allowed to do so without his patients knowing that he had the disease.  The chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission took a rather different line, claiming that this case was an example of “stigma”, on whose demerits he expatiated at length.

I think in this context the idea of stigma is not terribly helpful. It is usually best reserved for occasions when someone is a victim of unreasonable prejudice or stereotyping. Refusing to employ former mental patients, or former prisoners, might be a reasonable example. I am less heppy with the idea that it should be applied to a case in which patients may have been reluctant to be treated by a doctor who had AIDS. Let us leave aside the question of how he got it, though — despite all the flapdoodle about conventional intercourse and the general population — this is a difficult disease to get unless you are into rough sex or drugs. The question is whether it is so self-evident that an AIDS sufferer should be allowed to practise medicine as to justify either not telling patients at all, or criticising those who know and avoid the sufferer for unreasonable prejudice. And I think the answer is no.

The problem is that your relationship with your doctor is not just a normal customer-supplier thing. Indeed the medical profession derives much of its prestige and mystique from this important difference. Your doctor is a man (or woman) with your life in his hands. You will tell your doctor things you might not tell your spouse. You will allow him to handle parts of you which are normally private. You need to be able to trust this person.  I would unhesitatingly condemn someone who refused to employ a HIV-positive plumber. But your doctor is not just going to have access to your drains.

Generally speaking the medical profession seems to accept this. We all know that some men prefer to be seen by a male doctor, and some women by a female one. Some of my compatriots expend substantial amounts of time and money to make sure that they see an expat doctor, though personally I believe this is a big waste. There are probably people who prefer their doctors to be young, and people who prefer them to be old. I imagine patients in search of Traditional Chinese Medicine expect the purveyor of this dubious product to be Chinese. If you, as a client, prefer to stipulate that your doctor does not have AIDS this seems to me to be something you have a right to, disappointing though some observers may feel your preference to be. And since you have a right to it, you clearly have the right to the information which you need to make an informed decision.

This may seem to the medical fraternity an unreasonable position. The question has come up before and it did then. But this is not simply a question of whether you can catch a disease from your doctor. I recall many years ago, when AIDS was still invariably fatal, a sufferer was invited by one of my colleagues to talk to our students. I was quite happy with this and indeed we would have invited him back if had survived longer. But your relationship with a doctor is not just a matter for clinical judgments and scientific determinations. It is necessary for you to be comfortable. Patients may be averse to a variety of characteristics in their doctors and that is their privilege.

This may seem a bit rough on doctors who get AIDS, but it is the penalty for working in a prestigious profession. I imagine a barrister who had AIDS might lose a lot of clients too. For doctors there are at least some branches of the profession which do not depend on a supply of live clients. Pathology is an honourable pursuit and the patients never complain…

Well well. Here we have the former Head of Surgery at Hong Kong U convicted of a variety of charges, involving altogether $3million, and you might think that the clink of the gaoler’s key was an inevitable consequence, or failing that – the poor old gent is 71 after all – at least a stiff fine. Not a bit of it. Prisoner at the bar, you will be taken from here to a place of public need, there to perform 240 hours of community service. As the convict, Dr John Wong, has passed the retirement age (and I assume Hong Kong U is unlikely to invite him back, under the circumstances) he presumably has ample free time. So this could be considered scarcely a punishment at all. I am indebted to Alex Lo’s excellent piece in Saturday’s paper for the statistic that this comes to $12,500 per hour. Mr Lo also provided details of some cases which made an interesting contrast with Mr Wong’s, in which sundsry humble souls had been less lucky in their judges.

What puzzles me is that parts of the judge’s lengthy explanation for her sentence, or lack of it, seemed to contradict each other. Dr Wong, she said, “could have opted for a lucrative private practice, but he chose to achieve his ideal and spent his whole life working for the less fortunate and to serve the public.” This is very moving, but left me thinking that judges often over-estimate their knowledge of the world. To a young doctor the choice between private practice and a career as a teacher offers pluses and minuses on both sides. There is no guarantee that private practice will be lucrative. You may finish up making a respectable living on a public housing estate serving the public. On the other hand the university offers what is effectively an iron rice bowl, generous perks, long holidays and the chance to pursue your own interests. Generally speaking university teachers who are guilty of theft are not accorded gentle sentences because of their selfless career choices, and I am not sure doctors should be singled out in this regard.

Later on in the judgment we came to the point where Dr Wong had diverted $700,000 from two HKU accounts (a process known to the legally uneducated as theft) to pay for a driver for himself. The judge said this was not done out of greed, but because Dr Wong strongly believed that “the university should have contributed to the cost of his commuting.” I take this to mean that Dr Wong did not qualify for a personal car on the firm and the university refused to make an exception. Actually this is probably a point lost on judges (who are ferried to and from the courts at public expense) but it is the normal arrangement for people to pay to get themselves to work. The most interesting thing comes next, though. The judge said that Dr Wong could not have been motivated by greed, because the court had been told he had a personal fortune of $120 million.

Just a minute. Were we not just allowing in mitigation the fact that Dr Wong had forsworn the lucrative pastures of private practice to “serve the public”?  So where did this $120 million come from? It seems there are two possiblities. One is that Dr Wong came from such a wealthy background that he never needed to worry about money in the first place. The other is that a career serving the less fortunate in the corridors of Hong Kong U is not the exercise in Gandhian asceticism that judges may suppose it to be.

Well there we are, it’s done. No point griping. No doubt the prosecution will decide not to appeal. I cannot say there is much point in sending 70-year-old men to prison. On the other hand it doesn’t do much for 20-year-olds either, but judges do not seem to worry about this so much. I think two observations are in order. One is that judges should be more sceptical about the horrors of working in universities. Everyone who has had a real job before he became a tertiary teacher finds the lifestyle amazingly leisurely. Of course there is no shortage of academics who will tell you that they work really hard. These are the people who have never had a real job. Actually the money is pretty good and people who have marketable skills (like doctors and, ahem, journalists) can do paid work in their considerable free time.

The other point is that this mitigation thing should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course counsel for the defendant has the right to make whatever points he can in favour of his client. And the defendant is entitled to ask his rich and influential friends to write letters saying what a wonderful chap he is. On the other hand at this point in the proceedings the usual adversarial safeguards are rather lacking. The speech in mitigation does not need to include any witnesses or evidence for its assertions. The flattering letters are not balanced by cross-examination of their writers or an opportunity for the prosecution to drum up letters saying that the wretched defendant is a greedy autocrat who deserves jail. A good case could be made for the view that an educator who steals is committing a serious offence because he is setting a deplorable example to his students. Indeed I believe that in cases where the defendant was younger or less prestigious this point has been made as an explanation for a more vigorous sentence. Justice must be seen to be done. Every time a member of the local establishment gets conspicuously gentle treatment in court a million onlookers conclude that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.  This is a point which seems to escape the Hong Kong judicial mind rather often.

Considering the amount of assorted skullduggery which goes on in the New Territories, the Heung Yee Kuk is being strangely naive about the consequences of the CE election. This week we were told that the Kuk expected some concessions from the new CE on its hot issues — illegal structures and the Small House racket — in return for supporting CY Leung at the polls. Now let us leave aside as entirely irrelevant in this context the impropriety of election winners rewarding pressure groups or electoral college members in this way. No doubt it happens. I do not doubt that it happens all the time in elections conducted by the Kuk itself. Still, there are some further facts of life to be considered about how this works, in those places where it works.

The trade-in value of election support depends on how much the candidate needs it. In the early stages, when he is trying to establish a name and get some momentum going, expressions of approval are very valuable. Mr Leung was in the early stages a long shot, widely regarded as a mere prop to provide an election-like stage setting for the coronation of Henry Tang. When Mr Tang’s candidacy started to unravel there was still a good deal of reluctance to switch to Mr Leung, partly because people did not feel dignified changing horses too quickly and partly because Mr Leung has some problematic features in many people’s view. So support and praise at this stage were still undoubtably both welcome and valuable. I expect many people who came out for Mr Leung in this period will be tactfully rewarded is some way. So it goes.

However at this stage the Kuk was still in the Tang camp. There was no mystery about this. In the auction for the Kuk’s favours Mr Tang had offered the idea of the nine-story village house. Mr Tang is not a bad man and it may be that this offer was neither as naked or as explicit as the newspapers made it appear. Still, there was no doubt about its effect. The Kuk did not develope a liking for Mr Leung until the closing stages of the race, when Mr Tang had clearly hit an iceberg and the Liaison office was telling those lost sheep who still did not know whom to support that they should go with the public preference. Of course at this stage every sycophant, spear carrier and fellow-traveller on the election committee was with Mr Leung and he would still have been elected by a comfortable margin if the Kuk had stuck to its original choice. Gentlemen, under these circumstances the value of your support was zero. Your prospects of being rewarded for supplying it are similarly nugatory.

Of course this does not mean the prospects for illegal structures and Small House abuses are completely dim. You can try your luck in court. The government may chicken out at the end as it has often done before. But claims on Mr Leung’s gratitude are doomed to fall on deaf ears. When  he wanted it, he didn’t get it. When he got it, he didn’t need it. Thanks for nothing.

Funny how some predictions do well quietly and some come noisily to nothing. The paperless office, which has been confidently expected for some 30 years, still glimmers on the horizon like one of those legendary mirages which lure desert travellers to their doom. The cashless society, on the other hand, which was often predicted in the 80s and hardly mentioned since, has crept up on us very successfully.

I noticed this the other day because I found a two dollar coin floating around on my desk at home. “I’ll spend it,” I said. “If you can,” replied my wife. And indeed on further reflection I am having some difficulty in working out when I shall get rid of the thing. Until quite recently we made most of our minor purchases in cash. For the big things we might use plastic. Some retailers had their own cards, but they were not very popular, except with employers of domestic helpers. The Octopus was for public transport.

Nowadays at least half of us seem to use Octopus for all the minor stuff. I do not personally like the idea of an Octopus that feeds itself from my bank account, so I do occasionally have to take some money out of the bank. But this comes in big notes – my Octopus is a wrist-watch so I am quite happy to fill it with $500 at a time. I also need notes occasionally to feed the Octopus-like card issued by my favourite coffee shop. I suppose people who drink still probably pay cash in bars, though the more upmarket places will let you run up a bill and then pay with a card. The wet market still runs on a cash basis but how many of us go there often? The only other people still holding out are taxi drivers.

Now my views on taxi drivers are coloured by the fact that at one time long ago I was one of them. This was not a career choice – the newspapers were on strike so I needed a job for a few weeks. Fortunately I was working in Blackpool – to drive a taxi in London you have to pass an examination in local geography called “the knowledge”. It takes as long as a degree and is much more demanding. In Blackpool you were allowed to keep a map in the glove box.  I understand the local objection to Octopus is that it will hit the tips. Taxi drivers feel that most riders will simply wipe the card on the gadget without adding a bit extra, even if this is technically possible. This is a serious matter because taxi driving does not pay very well and the tips, being shared with neither the employer nor the tax man, are an important item. I understand the Octopus people, in a desperate effort to get their machinery into taxis, are proposing to pay $2 a ride themselves for the first two years in lieu of the lost tips. Observers of the local taxi scene think this will work … for two years. The drawback is that if we all know Octopus is tipping on our behalf we will, I suppose, get out of the habit entirely, and even if the drivers revert to cash they will not longer get that little bit extra. Anyway those of us who wish to be kind to taxi drivers will still have a use for a bit of change.

Another possibility is restaurants. I know a lot of people add a tip to the number on the credit card. But I understand a lot of restaurants just treat this as corporate income and do not separate it for donation to the staff. So if you want to tip it is better to give cash and I always do.

So this is what it has come to. Coins are almost only used when you need a small present. When I was a kid it was customary to hide some sixpenny pieces (which were very small and supposedly silver) in the Christmas pudding as a small present for consumers. Little did we know that this sort of use for coins was one day going to be the only one.

The 360 cable car from Tung Chung to the Big Buddha has now been out of action for a couple of months. No doubt the shopkeepers have been feeling the pain and many visitors have been disappointed. Yet, this time, nobody has been complaining about the management.

This is not what happened when the cable car endured a little spate of opening glitches. There is a habit in Hong Kong, of which locals appear completely unaware, and indeed which appears so natural and inevitable that it seems almost churlish to complain. If something goes wrong there is a tendency to find a foreigner to take the blame. This satisfies everyone except the foreigner conerned, who with luck will leave the territory and be in no position to complain. The habit surfaces in all sorts of places. Education is no bar to it: it is often the outcome of problems in universities (and institutes which would like to be universities). Sometimes, as in the Harbourfest debacle, the foreign scapegoat bites back. More often, as in the airport launch complaints, he has already left us and perhaps does not mind too much what is said about him.

When the cable care had a few initial teething troubles, as new pieces of machinery tend to, a number of people who had shown no previous signs of knowledge pertaining to cable cars opined that the management company, which was Australian, were not up to snuff. The management company was duely fired, and the MTR took over. Everyone was happy. Readers will note that the standard of management appears actually to be no better. Maybe cable cars are harder to run than appears on the surface. Maybe the MTR’s formidable engineering skills are not of the type required. Whatever the reason it appears that the cable car is still accident prone. As there is no longer a foreigner to blame I suppose we just have to put it down to bad luck.

A llttle snippet stuck in my brain from the Legco debate (as I call it for want of a better word) on the third runway. The government spokesperson gave a figure for the total cost of the new runway, and followed it with a figure for the runway’s contribution to the local economy over the ensuing 30 years.

And the question is, of course, what was this figure worth. Look at it this way. The runway will not be finished for six years. So the official figure purports to tell us the share of the Hong Kong economy contributed by the new white elephant between six years from now and 36 years from now. This prediction comes to you from a government which has consistently failed to predict its own income and expenditure over the ensing 12 months.

There are good reasons why predictions of this nature should be regarded as a joke. Over 36 years your errors proliferate. If you make an error of one percent a year in your estimate, this does not mean that at the end of 36 years your estimate is 36 per cent out. This works like compound interest: the accumulated error will be over 50 percent. Inevitably, there will also be unforseen events of a one-off kind: banking crises, epidemics, volcanic eruptions or whatever. These will blow large holes in your forcast. A serious prediction would at least come with a range. One could pretend to take seriously a figure which came with a caveat that the outcome might vary by 30 per cent either side. But I fear on topics of this kind the official figures are not intended to be honest: they are intended to be propaganda for what the government has already decided it wants to do.

Well I came across an interesting piece of research the other day. An academic had studied all the railway projects in the world over the last three decades of the 20th century. He came up with some interesting figures. The average cost over-run for these projects – not the maximum, the average, was 120 per cent. The average shortfall in the passenger numbers compared with the pre-project predictions (once again note this is an average) was 50 per cent. In other words, as a rough rule of thumb you can expect any railway project to cost twice as much as it was supposed to, and then to attract half the predicted number of passengers. Shares in the High Speed Rail Link, anyone? I have seen no comparable figure for new airports or runways but it does show you that there is a large margin of error here, and most of the errors tend to be in the same direction.

Fascinating to watch the reactions to our new CE. Anson Chan a belated fount of hostile comment. Regina, I rather suspect, would like a job. Taipan thinks only three of CY Leung’s supporters are capable of becoming policy secretaries (come on, the job’s not that difficult) while other commentators are pencilling names with enthusiasm. Some genius decided that China (a usefully vague word people use when guessing what passes through the collective mind of the Liaison  Office) wanted 80 per cent of existing secretaries to stay on in the interests of continuity. Heaven forbid that there should be any blips in the supply of mediocrity.

Clearly Mr Leung is not going to go short of advice. I am not sure that urging him to keep the tired old team more or less intact is very helpful, and putting forward Arthur Li as a potential appointee is barely short of sabotage. But I shall not add to the discord.

Some advice, though, for everyone else. Do not expect too much. I found a wonderful comment on politics from Michael Oakeshott lurking in a current (highly recommended) bestseller called the Social Animal. The quote goes like this: “In political activity, then, men ssail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” Success, in short, is keeping things afloat, not finding Paradise.

The other thing to remember is that politics is very much a matter of luck. Some politicians manage to hold power in unchallenging times, some meet challenges for which they are well equipped, and some are overwhelmed by events. Which you get is down to luck.  If Mr Tung had been Hong Kong’s last Governor the territory would still have enjoyed prosperity, and if Mr Patten had been the first CE there would still have been a financial crisis and a SARS epidemic. Mr Leung’s success will depend on many matters beyond his, and our, control.  That of course will not stop us blaming him if things go pearshaped, but that goes with the job too. He wanted it. He’s got it. Fruit will now fly.

Quite the most depressing feature of the exercise which masquerades as a Chief Executive election has been the growing chorus of complaints from electors that they do not know whom to vote for. This would perhaps be understandable if it was a complaint about the attractiveness of the three candidates. But it is not. The thing which is bothering a surprising number of electors is that they have not received a clear signal from Beijing, and consequently do not know who is the candidate favoured by our imperial masters.

This complaint reached a pathetic crescendo last week with two “electors” complaining on the front page of the usual newspaper that they had not had clear instructions. One of them apparently spoke for the Chinese Medicine group of voters, betraying a degree of sycophancy which perhaps explains why this group was chosen as the source of a surprising number of electors in the first place. The witch doctors are “which?” doctors, willing puppets who will complain if their strings are not pulled vigorously enough.

I can understand voters thinking that Beijing’s preferences are a relevant matter for consideration. After all we all understand that if the winner is Albert Ho then the whole “one country two systems” concept may come under a strain which it is unable to bear. Clearly it is useful if the successful candidate is somebody who is acceptable in Beijing, and will be trusted by our colonial masters not to do a Dalai Lama.

Having said that one would also expect that electors could take on board the idea that if Beijing does not have a clear preference between two of the candidates then this is an opportunity for voters to use their own skill and judgment in the public service. If Hong Kong is ever to make full use of its “high degree of autonomy” we must surely recognise that Beijing’s preferences in matters of this kind may be more sophisticated than a simple preference for one candidate under all circumstances.

Actually my understanding, for what it is worth, of Beijing’s position is that they would prefer Henry Tang but not if he has to be enthroned in the teeth of widespread public disapproval. I would have thought anyone who was bright enough to practice medicine of any kind ought to be able to get his head round that. Sorry boys, Beijing actually expects you to use your own brains and make your own choice. Stop whinging and get on with it.