Still stuck for good gift idea?

Cornered by reporters after a meeting at Pheu Thai Party headquarters, Varathep pre-empted questions by showing off his new iPhone case. “See, someone made it for me!” The case had a portrait of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra taken when she was campaigning for election.

“Did someone in your fan club make it?” a crack reporter demanded to know. Nope, not someone in his fan club, Varathep replied, but someone in the party’s fan club. “I got it first because the fan is rather close to me,” he explained. 

The reporters conferred on how best to handle such a complex story. Eventually they realised it wasn’t actually a “story” at all, at least not in any commonly accepted sense of journalism. (Which is why you’re reading it here.)

The consensus that emerged among the parliamentary press was that Varathep had nothing to be thrilled about, particularly when every Cabinet minister, MP and red-shirted granny in Thailand will soon be toting around the same iPhone case. The upside was Yingluck’s picture. She is rather fetching, they conceded. “Imagine if it was her brother’s face!” someone pointed out.

 

Who’s smarter?

One person who’s more or less close to Pheu Thai but will not get a Yingluck phone case is Suwat Liptapanlop, a “key figure” in the Ruam Chart Pattana Party. It’s not that he can’t afford one – he could afford billions of them – but because he doesn’t have a smartphone. 

That’s right. He has two mobile phones, but they’re both of the old-fashioned dumb variety. “To me, a phone is only for making and receiving calls,” Suwat says. He runs his empire with just those two, and suspects that many politicians with smartphones do nothing smart with them. 

“Maybe they have them for the sake of having them – or because they think they’re good for their image.”