Stuart Wolfendale

A friend’s uncle was once a British Cabinet minister. This meant he was also a member of Her Majesty’s Most Excellent Privy Council, a throwback to monarchs who waged wars and beheaded daily but it still meets. On one occasion, according to the uncle, Queen Elizabeth summoned it because the prime minister of the day, Harold Wilson, was out of the country and his deputy. George Brown, could not be found. George was in pubs that told no tales on a drinking bender in his native county of Derbyshire.

The councilors gathered, all standing, for such is the tradition to keep things short. The Queen asked a simple but direct question. ‘Is my kingdom being governed?’ Of course, those present assured her it was then raced off to get the county police  to flush out George and pour flasks of hot coffee down his throat.

Just following the media and chatting to my fellow uninformed, I have this uneasy feeling that the same question should be asked about Hong Kong. I am not altogether sure that a government with a clear idea of what it should do when stuff happens  is actually in place. You will note that the original question was not “Is the civil service at its desks?” or “Are things ticking over?”, or “Have we got enough in the reserves?” or even “Is the dazzling supply of  infrastructure projects uninterrupted?” The question was simply about firm daily government.

A symptom of the problem is vagueness over who could ask the question in the first place. Not the British queen anymore, obviously. Logically, it should be the President of the People’s Republic and he does hold a school report day with the Chief Executive twice a year. In Tung Chee hwa’s case one of those meetings led to expulsion but it did not do much to answer the supplementary questions , “If its not being governed, why not?”

It would be a lot more realistic, in the short term, if the system stated quite clearly that Donald Tsang was Beijing’s viceroy and from there came his direct authority to govern. This nonsense of several hundred widely disliked placemen shamming a vote really whacks the chocks from under legitimacy and tarting up the way they are selected will improve the situation not a jot. The CE is seriously short on sovereignty. British governors were swimming in it. Nobody threw vegetables at Murray McLehose or stuck placards on their Legco desks in front of  Edward Youde or screamed and shouted at Patten. The CE needs a bit more of ‘tremble and obey” rumbling within his briefcase and the first six bars of the national anthem played every time he appears in public.

It is not fair to be denied the mandate of heaven, albeit once removed, on the one hand and not be allowed to seek popular sovereignty from the population on the other. This leaves you in a huge dip of doubt. Who are these governors, the people ask. They are a bunch of local civil servants left behind by the British with little to wear and chattering teeth, comes the answer.

Then silly things start to happen on top of the serious like a conspiracy theory over light bulb profiteering popping up out of the yawning gap between the very well off and the seriously strapped. The government reacts more viscerally over the bulbs than the gap.

The civil servants take cover in the one thing  they can do and once did best. They binge on physical infrastructure programmes. Now, only the self serving or giddy ones get taken up. A government Machu Picchu is being built in Wanchai. A railway line has been commanded, the beginning of which will be somewhere underground, the end of which was only recently discovered, the need for which is questionable and the cost of which is really unknown. Yet at the vast old Kai Tak site, twenty years on, strange conifers grow in the concrete cracks . On the West Kowloon reclamation, the only structure visible is a zippily covered subway ventilator.

So if Hu Jin Tao was to ask “Is my SAR being governed” the answer could be “No Sir and not because Tsang is in the pub. It’s because the job has no clout. Give it to Tang, give it to Leung and it will make no difference. Now, you are a war making beheading ruler so it’s up to you to work out why”.