A journalist who took a stroll around Lumphini Park in the heart of Bangkok in mid-October was confronted by an extraordinary spectacle — royalist ultra-nationalist anti-government protesters in blackface, wearing skirts made of leaves and bizarre hats, waving banners rejecting a ruling by the International Court of Justice on the status of territory around Preah Vihear temple on the Cambodian border.

The ICJ hasn’t even made its ruling yet. It is due on November 11.

The motley crew of malcontents encamped at Lumphini are mostly supporters of the so-called “People Democratic Force to Overthrow Thaksinism”, who prefer to use the acronym “Pefot”. They also include members of the related “white mask” movement who have staged multiple poorly attended rallies wearing Guy Fawkes masks popularized in Alan Moore’s graphic novel V For Vendetta, apparently oblivious to the fact that the real Guy Fawkes was executed for treason in London in 1606 for plotting to kill the king.

An equally peculiar crowd of their allies set up a camp at Sanam Luang for several months this year. In a further disorienting twist, they included dozens of elderly members of the Communist Party of Thailand who liked to strut around in fading uniforms proclaiming their undying support for the Thai monarchy.

The madness is not confined to the ultra-royalist side. Some hardcore Red Shirt commentators — most notably the ludicrous “Banpodj” — have recently been peddling a theory that claims (as far as I can make out) that King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit are already dead, and that Princess Sirindhorn has become an evil behind-the-scenes mastermind, employing a variety of special effects to give the impression her parents are still alive so that she can keep Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn off the throne. Despite his hatred of the rest of the royals, Banpodj is a huge fan of the prince, regularly lavishing effusive praise upon him.

The deeper one digs into contemporary Thailand, the more of a puzzlement it seems. Why is the establishment so infused with an extraordinary primal hatred of Thaksin Shinawatra, a fairly ordinary man little different from many other corrupt Thai political leaders before him, although admittedly more effective than most? What has turned the traditionally pragmatic and unprincipled elder statesmen of the aristocracy into rabid zealots obsessed with wild notions of impending national catastrophe and existential doom? How can conflict over the looming royal succession be so crucial for understanding 21st century Thailand — as Paul Handley and Thongchai Winichakul, among others, have correctly argued — if everybody agrees that Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn will almost inevitably become King Rama X? Most journalism and academic research on Thailand struggles to answer these questions.

In his remarkable, game-changing 1978 article Studies of the Thai State: The State of Thai Studies, Benedict Anderson coolly overturned decades of accepted wisdom on Thailand and showed that many of the most cherished assumptions of scholars were entirely wrong. He proposed four “scandalous hypotheses” that profoundly redefined our understanding of Thai history. Although lacking similar brilliance and depth of knowledge, I am at least able to draw on the work of a large number of scholars who have gone before me and led the way, and because I have already violated the lèse majesté law and elected not to return to Thailand, I am able to speak frankly. In this article, I will set out some scandalous hypotheses of my own that I believe are essential to making sense of Thailand’s era of insanity.

At the elite level, Thailand’s intractable political conflict does not revolve around Thaskin Shinawatra, although he is a central character in the drama. The conflict among Thailand’s elite is essentially a succession struggle over who will become monarch when King Bhumibol Adulyadej dies. In particular, most of Thailand’s elite are implacably opposed to the prospect of Vajiralongkorn succeeding his father, and are prepared to go to extreme lengths to sabotage the succession. Both broad factions in the elite succession struggle have failed to understand that Thai society has fundamentally changed, with the rural and urban poor becoming increasingly assertive and informed. As a result, Thailand’s unacknowledged succession struggle has become entangled with a social conflict that encompasses the whole country, leading to a crisis of legitimacy for the monarchy and the deep state. Thaksin Shinawatra is a fairly traditional Thai royalist, albeit one who — unusually — has few qualms about the crown prince. Otherwise, his views are very similar to the large number of elite Thais who — although they may appear to be fanatically ultra-royalist — in fact have limited intrinsic loyalty or love for the monarchy, beyond the extent to which they can harness royal barami to serve their own interests. Moreover, elite Thais opposed to the crown prince have a particular incentive to pretend to be staunchly ultra-royalist while the current king remains on the throne, to help shield them against accusations of treachery or anti-monarchism when the succession takes place. It’s somewhat misleading to regard the network monarchy model as demonstrating that the monarchy controls or guides the network. In modern Thai history, the network has mostly controlled the monarchy.

To support these assertions, it’s necessary to take a revisionist look at modern Thai history. This article is a first tentative draft of my attempt at doing so. The themes discussed will be analysed in more detail, and in broader historical context, in my upcoming book A Kingdom in Crisis: Royal Succession and the Struggle for Democracy in 21st Century Thailand. It will be published by Zed Books in 2014.

Once upon a time, Thailand’s royal family seemed happy. Glorified by the military dictators who ruled the country from the late 1950s until 1973, boosted by an American-funded propaganda campaign as anti-communist figureheads, and fêted abroad as a fairytale royal couple, Bhumibol and Sirikit were widely revered in Thailand. But behind the walls of Chitralada Palace, tensions were building over their troublesome son Vajiralongkorn. Taciturn, lazy and prone to violent rages, he seemed ill-suited to be a future King Rama X. Bhumibol’s relationship with his son seems to have been dysfunctional from the start and only worsened as the prince got older. But Sirikit doted on her boy. Disagreements between the king and queen, mostly over Vajiralongkorn, began to rip the royal family apart.

In 1972, when Vajiralongkorn was 20 years old, Bhumibol performed a ceremony elevating his status to crown prince, designated heir to the Chakri throne. But Vajiralongkorn was already remarkably unpopular among Thais, who mocked and scorned him in private conversations. Far more popular was his younger sister Sirindhorn, an unpretentious and apparently amiable girl who many Thais came to adore. The family tensions over royal succession were exacerbated by a mounting sense of paranoia during the mid-1970s over the threat from communism, culminating in the appalling massacre of students at Thammasat University on October 6, 1976, by extreme-right elements in Thailand that had long been fostered and encouraged by the palace. The pretext for the savagery was a mock-hanging staged by students two days earlier — rightists alleged it was intended to depict the execution of Vajiralongkorn, a claim those involved in the play have always denied. Whatever the truth, it was exploited by the far-right to unleash an orgy of murder and rape that shocked the world, tore Thai society asunder and destroyed the monarchy’s carefully crafted image as a unifying institution above partisan politics.

In the months and years that followed, an immense effort was launched by Thailand’s establishment to rehabilitate the reputation of King Bhumibol. This was the start of the absurd hyper-royalism which remains rampant in Thailand today. Although it was underpinned by ubiquitous state propaganda, it took on a life of its own. Thais — particularly among the elite — competed to be as ostentatiously royalist as they possibly could, leading to a phenomenon that political scientist Xavier Marquez (writing about ancient Rome during the rule of Emperor Caligula) has dubbed “flattery inflation“.

One of the most striking aspects of hyper-royalism is not only that Vajiralongkorn was left out of the elite’s veneration of Bhumibol and Sirikit, but that the crown prince’s unpopularity was actually exploited by the Thai establishment in order to feed the personality cult of Rama IX. From the 1970s onwards, there was an overwhelming preference among Thais at all levels of society for Sirindhorn to be their next monarch, and far from trying to crush this sentiment as heretical, the elite encouraged it. Bhumibol himself appeared to agree, and in 1977, the king elevated Sirindhorn to the status of potential heir to the throne too. Official sources usually explain this move by characterizing it as a precaution in case anything happened to Vajiralongkorn, and claim it did not cast the prince’s status as heir into doubt. But in fact, the elevation of Sirindhorn to crown princess generated significant ambiguity that remains to this day. It was interpreted by many Thais as a signal that the king was aware of their concerns and would take them into account.

Soul of a Nation, a BBC documentary filmed during 1979, made with the secretive cooperation of the British embassy and with Bhumibol and Sirikit allowed to view it before it was broadcast in 1980 to ensure they approved, devoted considerably more time to Sirindhorn than Vajiralongkorn. One very short segment discussed the prince and included brief comments from him.

Most of Thailand’s elite are royalist only to the extent that it serves their purposes and preserves a political status quo in which they are atop the hierarchical pyramid. Bhumibol was an ideal monarch for them — beloved by most ordinary Thais, seemingly immensely virtuous and saintly, but weak and pliable. By glorifying Rama IX, the Thai elite was sanctifying a social order in which they were firmly in charge.

Vajiralongkorn was another story. Deeply unpopular and totally unable to fit the image of a virtuous dhammaraja Buddhist monarch, he appalled most of the elite, who believed that if he ever became king it would spell the end of the monarchy — and by extension, the end of their hegemony in Thailand.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the elite’s hatred of Vajiralongkorn was further fuelled by his habit of preying on their daughters. In a throwback to the days of Old Siam in which kings and princes had scores of wives and concubines, Vajiralongkorn became notorious for summoning attractive high-born young women to his palace. The extent to which it happened remains unclear, but it was a source of profound anger and anxiety among the Thai elite, many of whom sent their daughters overseas to be educated specifically to escape the prince’s attentions.

The flipside of the widespread loathing for the prince was exaggerated reverence for Bhumibol, and intense fear about what would befall Thailand when he died. For the elite, this terror was largely due to their sense of self-preservation, but in wider Thai society it chimed with widely held traditional beliefs that an immoral king would cause the decline and fall of the nation, and that the world was on the verge of a dark age, or กลียุค. An alleged prophecy dating from the beginning of the Chakri era, which suggested that the monarchy would collapse after the ninth reign, also fed the anti-Vajiralongkorn hysteria.

Instead of preparing the ground for an orderly succession, the elite used popular hatred of Vajiralongkorn to foster desperate hopes among ordinary Thais that Bhumibol would reign for as long as possible. The prince himself was not unaware of what was happening — asked by Dichan magazine in 1987 about his black-sheep status, he acidly replied:

Sometimes black sheep serve a purpose, one of helping others. Black sheep help those not-too-white ones seem whiter.

Meanwhile, chastened by the disasters of the late 1970s, Bhumibol gravitated towards a less obviously interventionist role for the palace in the 1980s with General Prem Tinsulanonda as prime minister heading what Duncan McCargo famously characterised as a “network monarchy“:

The main features of Thailand’s network monarchy … were as follows: the monarch was the ultimate arbiter of political decisions in times of crisis; the monarchy was the primary source of national legitimacy; the King acted as a didactic commentator on national issues, helping to set the national agenda, especially through his annual birthday speeches; the monarch intervened actively in political developments, largely by working through proxies such as privy councillors and trusted military ﬁgures; and the lead proxy, former army commander and prime minister Prem Tinsulanond, helped determine the nature of coalition governments, and monitored the process of military and other promotions. At heart, network governance of this kind relied on placing the right people (mainly, the right men) in the right jobs.

The network monarchy model assumes that Prem was Bhumibol’s proxy, and that the king was in indirect control of the Thai elite. But this has never been quite true — in fact, it has often tended to be the elite pulling the strings. Socially isolated, and often seemingly adrift from reality, the king has been a puppet for much of his reign, although until recently he appears to have been largely unaware of this fact. In his recent article ‘Working towards the Monarchy’ and its Discontents: Anti-Royal Graffiti in Downtown Bangkok in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Serhat Ünaldi proposes an alternative to McCargo’s model — a concept he calls “working towards the monarchy”:

The strength of the monarchy is not merely the result of manipulation from above but of a symbiotic relationship which, for a long time, has served the interests of many who all seek economic capital and social distinction.In contrast to McCargo’s ‘network monarchy,’ which helps to explain concrete political actions of elite groups in support of the monarchy, ‘working towards the monarchy’ brings broader structures into focus. It moves beyond clear-cut networks and the immediate royal circle as units of analysis to recognise the dominance of the monarchy in Thailand’s cultural and political life as a widespread, cross-class phenomenon serving the social, political and economic aims of people living in the monarchy’s physical proximity – from entrepreneurs to slum dwellers. Where the ‘network monarchy’ works from an active centre which manipulates politics in the interest of royalists, ‘working towards the monarchy’ reverses the perspective by putting the focus on the monarchy’s followers, its charismatic group, who are legitimising their actions with reference to that centre which, in turn, depends on the active and continued reaffirmation of its charisma by the charismatic group.

The elite needed the king’s sacred aura to legitimise their supremacy, and the leading members of the establishment had to make a constant effort to make Bhumibol believe they worshipped him, and to convince their inferiors in the network that their instructions were imbued with royal authority. But once “king’s men” like Prem (and more recently, Anand Panyarachun and Prawit Wongsuwan) managed to cloak themselves in royal barami, they have had considerable latitude to use the establishment network to advance their own interests, whether or not these corresponded with Bhumibol’s. Usually their interests were aligned, but sometimes they were not, particularly with respect to the succession. Nobody knows whether instructions genuinely come from the king. This issue was discussed in one of the most illuminating of all the secret U.S. cables obtained by WikiLeaks, 09BANGKOK2967:

Many figures in the various circles attempt to appropriate the charisma of the King and prestige of the royal institution for their own purposes without any official remit, a process known in Thai as “ang barami.” … Even Thai relatively close to royal principals treat purported wishes conveyed by other royal associates with caution, given the tradition of self-serving “ang barami.”

Prem and Vajiralongkorn have been sworn enemies since the 1980s. The precise origins of their hatred remain murky, but it probably stems from an unacknowledged family crisis in the royal household in the mid-1980s. Bhumibol and Sirikit had grown apart, and the queen’s open infatuation with her military aide Colonel Narongdej Nanda-photidej became profoundly embarrassing for the king. Narongdej was sent away from Bangkok to the United States as a military attaché, and died suddenly in New York in May 1985 after a game of tennis, at the age of just 38. The official explanation was that he suffered a heart attack but many Thais — including Sirikit herself — suspected something more sinister. Her very public grief over the colonel’s death spiralled into a breakdown, and at the end of 1985 Bhumibol ordered her to undergo hospital treatment for what was officially called a “diagnostic curettage”. Sirikit vanished from view for months, and with public disquiet growing, Princess Chulabhorn was enlisted to calm anxiety in a televised interview in 1986 in which she declared:

We all work for his majesty because of our loyalty towards him. Nobody in our family wants popularity for themselves. Everybody is sharing the work and we work as a team… But again, there are people who say that our family is divided into two sides, which is not true at all.

The opposite was true. The whole sad episode spelled the end of Bhumibol and Sirikit’s marriage, and they lived separate lives for the next two decades. A rival royal court developed around Sirikit — characterised by ultra-right wing politics and all-night dinner dances. Thailand’s establishment was never a monolithic united bloc, and the estrangement of Bhumibol and Sirikit further widened the divisions. This gave even greater scope for other leading agents in the network monarchy — above all, Prem — to pursue their own agenda.

As his marriage collapsed, Bhumibol appears to have begun seriously considering abdication. He shocked the nation on his 59th birthday in December 1986 by hinting that he would soon step aside to make way for Vajiralongkorn to rule Thailand:

The water of the Chao Phraya must flow on, and the water that flows on will be replaced. In our lifetime, we just perform our duties. When we retire, somebody else will replace us… One cannot stick to a single task forever. One day we will grow old and die.

Palace officials confirmed Bhumibol might retire to a monastery some time after national celebrations planned for July 1988 when he would become the longest reigning monarch in Thai history. Tongnoi Tongyai, a semi-official spokesman for Bhumibol, set out the likely scenario in comments to the Far Eastern Economic Review:

The king will never abdicate, if by abdication you mean leaving his duties behind and retiring… Once his majesty sees the crown prince reaching a more mature age and ready to take over all the royal functions, he may enter a monastery… It does not mean that he will remain a monk. The important thing is that he will continue to be there, behind the throne, and help his son solve any problems.

The plan made some sense, in terms of the long-term preservation of the Chakri monarchy, but there was panic among much of the Thai establishment. Given the dangers of openly questioning the king’s intentions, Sukhumband Paribatra took the lead in opposing the plan. As a royal himself, from a rival Chakri bloodline, he had some degree of protection. In an article for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Sukhumband wrote that: “everyone regards rumours about abdication with great apprehension”.

Meanwhile, a palace image management campaign was under way to rehabilitate the crown prince’s reputation — the glossy Dichan magazine owned by palace public relations guru Piya Malakul published two lengthy and sympathetic interviews with Vajiralongkorn, in August 1986 and July 1987, and the prince also spoke to international journalists representing the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand at a special audience in June 1987. He used these media appearances to present himself as a man whose youthful indiscretions were behind him but who remained misunderstood and a victim of malicious gossip. Meanwhile, Prem’s government and the Thai military and bureaucracy were busy planning more than a year of organized nationwide adulation of Rama IX. Events in honour of Bhumibol’s 60th birthday were slated to start many months in advance, and then the country would switch immediately to the build up to July 1988 when Bhumibol would overtake Chulalongkorn as Thailand’s longest reigning monarch. Prem announced that the king would be granted the title of maharaja, officially making him Bhumibol the Great. Only three previous kings in Thailand’s history had received such an honour. The stage was set for Rama IX to bow out in a blaze of glory in the second half of 1988 after a prolonged and massive national celebration of his rule.

In September 1987, Vajiralongkjorn was sent on a state visit to Japan. It was a chance to demonstrate he possessed the necessary maturity and gravitas to stride out onto the world stage with confidence. Given the stakes, things could hardly have turned out any worse. Ahead of the trip, he demanded that his mistress Yuvathida Polpraserth accompany him in an official capacity instead of his wife; the Japanese refused for reasons of protocol. Once he arrived, things went from bad to worse, as Barbara Crosette reported in the New York Times:

A diplomatic storm blew up between Tokyo and Bangkok over what Thai-language newspapers reported as “slights” to the Crown Prince, a pilot and army major general who commands his own regiment, during an official visit to Japan. A Japanese chauffeur driving the Thai Prince’s car apparently stopped at a motorway tollbooth to relieve himself — Japanese officials say the man felt ill and had to be replaced. On other occasions, the Prince was said to have been given an inappropriate chair to sit on and to have been forced to reach down to the floor to pick up a cord to unveil a memorial. The prince came home three days earlier than scheduled, leaving a diplomatic crisis in his wake.

Worsening the diplomatic damage, members of the right-wing nationalist Village Scouts militia rallied at the Japanese embassy in Bangkok demanding an apology, and Prem dutifully felt compelled to make a formal protest to Tokyo for insulting the prince and the monarchy, despite being well aware that Vajiralongkorn’s claims were totally bogus. Bhumibol finally persuaded his son to make a public statement a few days later calling on Thais to end their criticism of Japan. In the weeks that followed, diplomats and politicians in both countries quietly cleaned up the mess. If this was a taste of how things would be under King Vajiralongkorn, then the people of Thailand clearly had ample reason to be alarmed about Bhumibol’s abdication. By the end of 1987, the notion that Bhumibol could hand over the throne but still steer events from behind the scenes and keep his wayward son under some semblance of control seemed like wishful thinking, doomed to failure.

In January 1988, Sukhumband wrote another article in the Far Eastern Economic Review, sounding the alarm. He used elaborately polite language, but the fact that a leading member of the Thai establisment was publicly airing doubts about the prince — in an international English-language magazine — was extraordinary:

In post-1932 Thailand, the monarch performs various functions as head of state, but his primary duties are considered apolitical — his role is above politics. But popular acceptance of the monarchy as an institution and of the king as a person, combined with the latter’s role as the catalyst of development, makes royal involvement in politics more or less inevitable. At the present juncture, the monarchy directly or indirectly, intentionally or otherwise, plays a number of roles which have become integral to the Thai political system. One is that of the symbol of national unity, essential for a society which, though relatively homogeneous, has its share of cleavages. In this connection, the monarchy also acts as the factor of continuity, when conflicts occur in other political institutions. Since 1932, the kingdom has gone through 13 constitutions, 16 coups and 46 cabinet changes. The monarchy has also become a force of national reconciliation, when extreme political polarisation takes place, as evident from the royally initiated development projects at former communist strongholds. The second major role is that of the last-resort conflict manager when the stresses and strains of the system reach a point of crisis. On several occasions since 1973, the palace has intervened to restrain military groups which would have toppled the government, caused bloodshed or precipitated unpredictable crises. In turn, this role creates a balance — precarious at times to be sure — among the power groups: military, bureaucracy, political parties and business interests… Given the monarchy’s role in Thailand’s political and economic development, as well as its place in the hearts and minds of the populace, any uncertainty regarding the future of the monarch inevitably causes a great deal of apprehension. Doubts continue to be expressed, mostly in private but now increasingly in the open, about the crown prince’s capacity to evoke the kind of intense political loyalty from the people and the major domestic political groupings that his father is able to do. Doubts also persist as to whether the crown prince can match his father’s subtle and mediatory role in politics. All men and institutions go through processes of change and transformation. Bhumibol has achieved a great deal for his country and for the institution he inherited without forewarning, but by doing so, he has set perhaps an impossibly high standard of attainment for his successors. Should the leadership provided by the monarchy become less effective for one reason or another in the future, there will be grave political consequences. The precarious balance among the major political groups and factions would certainly be destroyed… This vacuum is one which only the military would be capable of filling, given its monopoly of coercive power, organizational cohesion and control of the media and grassroots politics. For many Thais this ultimately is the root of their apprehension.

Sukhumband’s intervention was by far the most public, but behind the scenes other leading figures in the establishment, including Prem, were actively trying to sabotage the plan. Soon afterwards, palace officials spread word that Rama IX would not be stepping down. No reason was ever given to explain why the situation had suddenly changed. By first raising and then dashing his son’s hopes of soon becoming Rama X of Thailand, Bhumibol can only have worsened the conflicts and rivalries within the increasingly dysfunctional royal family.

Prem stepped down as prime minister in 1988, but retained his role as the chief consigliere of the network monarchy through his control of the privy council and the annual military reshuffle, and his status as the leading “king’s man”. Members of the establishment with a more modern outlook, in particular those close to the increasingly influential Anand Panyarachun, found Prem’s inflexible conservatism and militarism outdated and distasteful, and the key political dynamic in Thailand during the 1990s was a struggle between the conservative and liberal wings of the establishment. Among the biggest bones of contention were the appropriate role of the military in Thai politics, and what to do about Vajiralongkorn. Establishment conservatives and liberals were united in their hostility towards the crown prince, but divided over how best to handle him. In two key episodes during the decade, the conservatives were blindsided by social and economic developments they failed to understand, tipping the balance in favour of the “royal liberals“.

The increasing political assertiveness of the urban middle class, who generally adopted a highly moralistic attitude towards politics and corruption and (at least in the 1990s) took a dim view of military meddling in politics, completely wrongfooted Prem and Bhumibol. In the political crisis of 1992 that followed a coup the previous year, both men backed the authoritarian military elements of the elite, and were shocked by the strength and tenacity of middle class opposition. The events of Black May in 1992 appeared to have ended the cycle of regular coups that had blighted Thailand throughout Bhumibol’s reign, forcing the humbled and humiliated army back into the barracks and out of government.

Incredibly, Bhumibol managed to emerge from the episode with his reputation enhanced, thanks to his famous televised scolding of Suchinda Kraprayoon and Chamlong Srimuang at Chitralada Palace on the evening of May 20, 1992, which ended several days of shocking violence in Bangkok and was widely misinterpreted as a decisive royal intervention in favour of democracy. In fact, Bhumibol’s anger had been largely directed at Chamlong and the protesters demanding what the king derisively referred to as “so-called democracy”. Thailand’s middle classes chose to overlook this. As Chris Baker — an insightful analyst of Thai politics when he is not penning half-baked hagiographies of the king or extolling Bhumibol’s sophomoric “sufficiency economy” philosophy — has observed:

Since the 1976 drama, an important section of the Thai elite and middle class has needed to imagine the king as a symbol of democracy, particularly in opposition to the soldiers who wanted to suppress it with guns, and the businessmen who wanted to subvert it with money. These people want to make use of the great moral authority of the monarchy, without paying attention to the politics. They have been complicit in rewriting history to cast the king as a peace-maker in 1973 and 1992, glossing over 1976 altogether, and ignoring the 1932 revolution to make democracy seem to be a gift from the throne.

More progressive members of the elite, led by Anand Panyarachun and Prawase Wasi, recognised after 1992 that the “network monarchy” needed to be reformed to prepare for a post-Bhumibol future, an idea that conservatives like Prem regarded as heretical. Bhumibol seems to initially have been against the idea also, as McCargo notes:

Despite the general view that the violence of May 1992 signalled it was time to stop relying on the military and the monarchy, and highlighted the need for a process of thoroughgoing constitutional and political reform, all the evidence suggests that the King himself failed to understand this… The violence of May 1992 had left the King in an apparently strong position. He emerged as the supreme political referee, following a superﬁcially successful intervention to solve the crisis. Yet the intervention also marked the high watermark of his authority. His consistent support for the military reﬂected an obsolete understanding of the Thai political and social order.

This was the backdrop to the struggle over the “People’s Constitution” of 1997. The conservatives claimed the proposed constitution was an attack on the monarchy, and their opposition to the draft charter would probably have blocked it, had the elite not been sent reeling by the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the baht in 1997. In the fraught atmosphere that followed, the conservatives gave up the fight to veto the constitution, and Bhumibol gave it his assent.

Anand and Prawase were surprisingly explicit about the fact that a key motivation behind the new charter was the need to create a constitutional framework that could keep Vajiralongkorn in check if he became king. The constitution institutionalised the network monarchy: Bhumibol’s “good men” would staff agencies that acted as checks and balances on a strengthened executive government, reducing the need for informal royal intervention. If the crown prince did indeed become Rama X, he would be just a figurehead. Thailand would at last become a genuine constitutional monarchy.

But although plans were now in place for coping with a future King Vajiralongkorn, most of the Thai elite convinced themselves it would never happen. They believed the crown prince was so crazy and out-of-control that sooner or later he would so something so egregiously unacceptable and impossible to conceal that it would rule him out of the running for good.

This was a plausible assumption. The prince was connected with all sorts of shady characters, earning him the contemptuous nickname “Sia-O”. On February 28, 1996, when Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto arrived at Don Muang airport for a summit meeting, his 747 was blocked for 20 minutes as it taxied towards the red carpet by three F-5 fighter jets, one of them piloted by the prince. This was Vajiralongkorn’s public revenge for the disrespect he believed he had been shown during his infamous state visit to Japan nine years previously.

Then in May 1996, as Thailand prepared for Bhumibol’s golden jubilee celebrations, the crown prince caused a scandal that transfixed the nation — and foreign media — by publicly banishing his second wife Yuvathida from his palace and from Thailand, ostensibly because of an affair with the prince’s aide-de-camp. Besides the terrible publicity it attracted, Vajiralongkorn’s melodramatic break-up with Mom Benz dealt a severe blow to his succession prospects, because he also disowned and expelled from Thailand the four sons she had borne him. The crown prince was left with no legitimate male heir.

There was also every reason to believe that Bhumibol shared the widespread contempt for his wayward son and would make Sirindhorn his heir instead at the opportune moment. The clearest signal of this was the extraordinary book The Revolutionary King by Canadian author William Stevenson, who spent several years in Bangkok in the 1990s after being personally enlisted by Bhumibol to write a semi-official biography. Stevenson was granted unprecedented access to King Bhumibol and his inner circle, obtaining hundreds of hours of interviews. No other writer, Thai or foreign, from outside the royal family has ever matched this level of access. The book was published in 1999 to near-universal derision from academics. It was riddled with basic factual errors as well as broader and more astonishing misunderstandings throughout, and no effort seemed to have been made to remedy them for its second printing in 2001. For this reason, scholars have tended to overlook the book’s significance. It should not be read as a work of serious history – on that level it is a risible failure. But as an insight into Bhumibol’s view of himself, and how the palace inner circle perceives reality, and how they want to be seen, it is absolutely invaluable. As Roger Kershaw wrote in a review of the book in Asian Affairs in 2001:

Stevenson’s privileged position as an informal mouthpiece of the King has guaranteed, for us, the privilege of access to the royal family’s construction of its own past and present role.

One of the many astonishing aspects of the book is how it depicts Vajiralongkorn, and Bhumibol’s views on the succession. It quotes Lieutenant General Eugene Tighe, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency 1977 to 1981, as saying Sirkit’s friend Clare Luce Booth had provided him with inside information from the royal household:

Clare reported that the queen wore the pants and wanted her son to become the next king, but the king favours one of his daughters.

It shared a bizarre anecdote about Bhumibol’s attempts to teach the young Vajiralongkorn some manners:

Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, a handsome boy, showed an imperious sense of destiny. He deﬁed a reprimand from a courtier by saying, ‘Don’t talk like that to your future king!’ King Bhumibol tanned his son’s backside with the reminder: ‘You’re not the Tenth Rama yet.’ The boy pulled faces behind the backs of teachers or in solemn ceremonies, until the king begged a favour from a palace attendant who had the peculiarity that he could seem to stand still as stone during long rituals while, with his hands behind his back, he modelled clay heads in the likeness of those around him. The courtier made six sculptures of the Crown Prince. The king lined them up along the foot of his sleeping son’s bed one night and the boy woke up to see his own grotesquely ugly faces.

The prince’s notoriety as a sexual predator is hinted at:

‘Why is he giving you the Evil Eye?’ a lovely young member of the Royal Household Bureau asked me, when [Vajiralongkorn] presided over the casting of Buddha images. I suggested he was looking at her, not me. She shivered: ‘I hope not – it’s fatal for a woman.’ … ‘Perfection was too much to ask from a boy who was Heir Apparent,’ lamented an American-educated noblewoman. ‘Look at these pictures of him in court dress-up! If he had to submit to old customs, then he might as well go all the way, have all the women he wanted, and behave like the earlier kings.’

Stevenson says Bhumibol’s mother Sangwan supported Sirindhorn being elevated to the status of crown princess in 1977 because: “She not the Crown Prince had the makings of the next monarch.” He repeats a rumour that Vajiralongkorn once fired a gun at Bhumibol. And in a surreal and totally inaccurate re-imagining of the 1991 coup and political unrest of 1992, Stevenson depicts the crown prince as one of the main villains, in cahoots with venal generals, while Bhumibol fights for democracy:

It was three hours after midnight on 29th April, 1992 that the Ninth Rama was playing the saxophone at a private Chitralada dinner. The queen danced with General Suchinda Krapayoon. Later, Suchinda went to talk to the Crown Prince who sat at his own table. ‘It‘s strange the Crown Prince is here,’ said one of the king’s close aides. ‘He doesn’t usually come to these things. And look at the men at his table. They’re all crooks.’ Then Suchinda left the room without bothering to bow to the monarch who sat with his jacket slung over the back of his chair, as usual. He had put an old cartoon from MAD magazine on a rostrum: in the centre of the cartoon was the single word, THINK! … If [Bhumibol] said anything that a dictatorial regime decided was a criticism of the Crown Prince and his supporters, the king himself could be charged under the law of lese majesté; but this was increasingly unlikely. In this new crisis, he stayed in his study, reading a sampling of the wildly ﬂying faxes. They attacked Suchinda and the Crown Prince and supported the king. Then counterattacking faxes smeared Suchinda’s opponents, but still left the king unscathed. He bided his time…

Towards the end of the book, Stevenson evokes an atmosphere of impending doom as Bhumibol’s reign approaches its end, and suggests the king had decided Sirindhorn would succeed him. He again raises the prince’s promiscuity and suggests Sirikit was pressing for the prince to take a role in annexing Laos:

‘I cannot afford to die,’ he joked. All he had worked toward would be in jeopardy the very moment it might seem that his life was running out. The Crown Prince would never allow Crown Princess Sirindhorn to inherit the throne. She had upset her mother long ago when she decided she would never marry. The question of how much longer the king had to live was endlessly debated. Those who planned to monopolise political power could not afford to ignore the future of the Crown Princess. Even if she remained a virgin and even if there was no chance of her bearing an heir to the throne, provision had been made by the king for her to succeed him. And a majority of the people were so devoted to her that they would readily welcome her as the next monarch, however startling an innovation this might be… The Ninth Rama was now by far the world’s longest reigning monarch, but he had to undergo two major heart operations. After making a swift recovery, he appeared on television and armed with charts and a pointer, described the surgical procedure in detail, and then sounded a warning note. He fully expected, he said, to live for a long time yet.

The warning was meant for those who were already clustering around the likely Tenth Rama, the Crown Prince. [Bhumibol], like any father, was reluctant to believe the stories he heard… It was impossible to trace the authors of reports that alleged the Crown Prince took elaborate precautions before sleeping with any woman who caught his fancy because of the rapid spread of AIDS. The users of fax machines and modems claimed his selected companion had to go into quarantine long enough for doctors to be sure she was free from infection. He was now forty-four and lived in his own heavily guarded palace in Bangkok. Queen Sirikit proposed that he should use his military skills in Laos… Laos, went the argument, had always been part of Old Siam. The Crown Prince would impose order

Stevenson also shared the tale of Vajiralongjorn’s banishment of Yuvathida:

When it seemed the scandal would die down, the Crown Prince plastered the capital’s walls with photographs of his actress-wife and the air marshal together: ‘These two people have been declared persona non grata and expelled from the palace. If anyone sees them, they must be shunned . . . Anand Rotsamkhan has been expelled from his position. If he does anything else, he will be given serious punishment . . . The Thai Government does not want him to return to Thailand. Rest in Peace in Foreign Lands.’ Those backing the Crown Prince as the future king withdrew into a discreet silence. He had no authority to speak for the government but already he sounded like an absolute monarch.

This was truly sensational, incendiary material. The Revolutionary King was not simply a hagiography of Bhumibol, it was an explicit attack on Vajiralongkorn. The book was never formally banned in Thailand (partly because the king himself had commissioned it) but booksellers generally decided not to stock it. The royalist establishment, privately delighted about the book and its trashing of the crown prince, although unhappy that it referred to the king by his nickname “Lek”, never sought to repudiate Stevenson’s assertions. Many thousands of copies were bought overseas and brought into Thailand, and the Bangkok middle class loved the book. Its depiction of a saintly pro-democracy Bhumibol valiantly trying to prevent the corrupt militaristic Vajiralongkorn dragging the country to its ruin resonated with their own prejudices and assumptions. Anyone reading the book — and taking it at face value — could only conclude that Bhumibol was aware his people hated the prince, and would somehow save the day ahead of the succession.

By the start of the 21st century, the Thai elite had another reason to believe that Vajiralongkorn would never be king. They became aware that the crown prince had contracted HIV, and was also suffering from a rare acute form of leukaemia. Perhaps he would die before his father, or so they hoped. Despised, ill and without any legitimate male heirs, Vajiralongkorn appeared to have ruined his chances of ever reigning as Rama X.

Then everything changed.

Thailand’s elite never realized the ground was shifting beneath their feet. During the long economic boom that transformed the country from the late 1950s, economic inequality savagely widened, and Thailand was transformed into a mafia state. Gangsters, tycoons, police chiefs, criminal godfathers, generals and charlatans made fortunes and bought their way into the establishment, using feigned fervent reverence for the monarchy as a bogus badge of honour. The old aristocracy had always been contemptuous of ordinary Thais, and the upstart additions to the establishment were embarrassed by their lowly origins and did their best to hide them. Thailand’s wealthiest families increasingly lived in a bubble, a fairytale fantasy world. The key to getting ahead in the elite world of patronage and nepotism was knowing the right people and not asking too many questions. The rich sent their children to foreign schools and universities, but never taught them to think, and as the personality cult of Bhumibol grew stronger, critical thinking became a disability for the elite. Face was all-important in the fin-de-siècle world of the establishment: decadence was ubiquitous but hidden behind a mask of respectability. As the years passed, most of Thailand’s elite grew increasingly corrupt and incompetent. Lying and dishonesty became so routine that they lost their ability to recognize truth. Taught to revere their social superiors and the “father of the nation”, King Bhumibol, they became infantilized and ignorant.

Although the poor were mostly left behind by Thailand’s economic progress, and handicapped by the country’s notoriously atrocious education system, by the start of the 21st century they were not the submissive morons the elite assumed them to be. As longtime Thai resident James Stent wrote in his superb 2010 analysis Thoughts on Thailand’s turmoil:

The confined world of rural Thai villages… in the 1950s, where spirits and officials were to be appeased and a traditional subsistence way of life was passed on from generation to generation with little change, has radically changed. Now villagers are plugged into the rest of the world via television, mobile phones, pick-up trucks, and family members spending time working at wage earning jobs in Bangkok. As many taxi drivers, all hailing from countryside villages in the Northeast of Thailand, have told me, “We really aren’t as stupid as the city people think we are. We used to be stupid, but no longer.”

Thaksin Shinawatra set this combustible sociopolitical atmosphere ablaze. Although he was a fabulously wealthy recent addition to Thailand’s elite, and seems never to have fully understood the profound changes in Thai society, Thaksin did not talk down to ordinary people, and he made the effort to formulate policies that were of practical benefit to them. Thailand’s poor were not blind to Thaksin’s corruption but they were smart enough to know the rest of the elite were equally crooked. To quote Stent again:

When I asked the villagers if it were not true that Thaksin was very corrupt, the amused response invariably was “Of course, he is corrupt — all politicians are corrupt, but this is the first corrupt politician who has done something for us.” To this day, the corruption, abuses, and personal wealth of Thaksin are glossed over by his rural supporters—not denied, just treated as irrelevant.

Like the rest of the elite, Thaksin was a royalist in the sense that he recognized the advantages of harnessing royal barami to advance his own agenda. But unlike most of the establishment, he had no qualms about Vajiralongkorn becoming Rama X. On the contrary, he considered it almost inevitable, and in the 1990s he began preparing for it with typical pragmatism, spending considerable amounts from his large fortune to win the crown prince’s favour. As the (very pro-establishment) U.S. ambassador Ralph Boyce wrote in a confidential diplomatic cable in March 2005:

the King will not be around forever, and Thaksin long ago invested in Crown Prince futures.

Bhumibol was furious about Thaksin’s largesse to Vajiralongkorn. The king had been trying to discipline his son by restricting his financial allowance, as if the crown prince was still a schoolboy who could be brought into line by having his pocket money cut. Thaksin’s generosity to Vajiralongkorn sabotaged this strategy, and Bhumibol was livid. In his birthday speech in December 2001 he mocked the prime minister in a monologue dripping with derision.

Thailand’s traditional elite was equally appalled by Thaksin’s apparent alliance with Vajiralongkorn. Prasong Soonsiri, a right-wing former air force officer linked to Bhumibol’s circle, leaked information about the king’s disquiet to Far Eastern Economic Review journalists Shawn Crispin and Rodney Tasker. This was published in the magazine’s January 10, 2002, issue in a brief gossipy item headlined “A Right Royal Headache”:

It promises to be a messy new year for Thailand politically, if the messages from some senior officials are to be believed. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is becoming an increasing source of irritation to King Bhumibol Adulyadej because of Thaksin’s perceived arrogance and his alleged attempts to meddle in royal family affairs. Thailand’s constitutional monarch has no formal role in day-to-day politics, but in a speech in early December marking his birthday he lambasted the premier in public. Thaksin is known to have business links with the king’s son, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. According to a senior official close to the palace, all this is frowned upon by the king, prompting speculation of a possible confrontation between the Prime Minister’s Office and the palace. The same source worries that Thaksin, who gained a massive majority in last year’s January 6 general election, may use his status as Thailand’s wealthiest businessman, with solid backing in parliament, to fend off the royal palace. That would have serious and worrying implications for the future stability of Thailand.

Thaksin’s government reacted furiously, threatening to expel Crispin and Tasker, which gave further credence to the report. But the incident did little to damage Thaksin’s soaring popularity. It is widely assumed that the elite was concerned that popular support for Thaksin was undermining reverence for Bhumibol, but this is not quite correct. Their real worry was that Thaksin’s popularity made it less implausible that Vajiralongkorn could become king. The prime minister’s unprecedented approval ratings and electoral legitimacy could compensate for the crown prince’s unpopularity. Together, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and King Maha Vajiralongkorn could make a formidable team, perhaps able to dominate Thailand for decades to come. Heightening these concerns, the crown prince appeared to be maturing and settling down, after a secret ceremony at Nonthaburi Palace in February 2001 in which he married one of his ladies-in-waiting, Srirasmi Akharapongpreecha.

The man with most to lose from these developments was the elderly Prem Tinsulanonda. With no descendants to take care of, Prem had little interest in amassing wealth, but his life revolved around preserving the barami he had accumulated and he was addicted to power. He had been a mortal enemy of Vajiralongkorn for two decades, and knew that if the crown prince became Rama X he would be flung out of the privy council and his personal safety could be at risk. Thaksin showed little deference to Prem and saw no reason why the old general should still be such a powerful figure. After becoming prime minister, he began systematically circumventing Prem’s network and putting his own allies in influential positions.

In 2005, two bombshells detonated in the comfortable world of Thailand’s elite. In February, Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party won a landslide general election victory that was unprecedented in several respects: Thaksin was the first prime minister ever re-elected for a second consecutive term, and the first to win an overall parliamentary majority at the polls. It was a stunning riposte to his critics and it demonstrated that he would be a dominant force in Thai politics for the foreseeable future. Then on April 29, Srirasmi gave birth to a son, Prince Dipangkorn Rasmijoti. He was HIV free — Thai newspapers had reported the previous year that doctors had perfected a technique known as “sperm washing” to allow men with HIV to father children who were not infected. Vajiralongkorn had a legitimate male heir once again.

There was panic among the elite, and a coalition of forces assembled to oppose Thaksin Shinawatra. It included almost the entire Thai establishment, the military top brass (loyal to Sirikit and/or Prem), the Democrat Party, the bureaucracy and judiciary, and much of the Bangkok middle class who were rallied by Sondhi Limthongkul and Chamlong Srimuang under the banner of the “Yellow Shirt” movement. It was a curious alliance that encompassed groups that had been at odds during the 1990s — the inner circles of Bhumibol and Sirikit, the establishment conservatives linked to Prem Tinsulanonda and the “royal liberals” in Anand Panyarachun’s network, right-wing business tycoons and leftist NGO and labour leaders. What united them was not simply dislike of Thaksin Shinawatra, it was fear of Vajiralongkorn and the possible consequences of his alliance with Thaksin. From the start, the royal succession was central to the motivations of the Yellow bloc.

Because of the dangers of openly challenging Vajiralongkorn, which include but go well beyond the risk of violating the draconian lèse majesté law, the Yellow coalition never made explicit its opposition to the crown prince becoming Rama X. But the clues were everywhere. In apocalyptic speeches, Yellow Shirt leaders and Thai elder statesmen invoked fears of a looming กลียุค in which corruption and immorality would destroy Thailand. The demonization of Thaksin Shinawatra as a uniquely dangerous supervillain — when in fact he was just an unusually effective and typically corrupt political godfather — channelled decades of fear and loathing for Vajiralongkorn. The elite recognized that an alliance of Thaksin and the crown prince posed an existential threat to their political dominance, and this was the reason for their bloodurdling millenarian rhetoric warning that the world was coming to an end. Their world was coming to an end, and this terrified them. When a mentally ill 27-year-old Thai man destroyed the statue of Brahma at the Erawan shrine at Ratchaprasong in the early hours of March 21, 2006, hysterical ultraroyalists like eccentric Nation Group journalist Thanong Khanthong compared the situation to the last days of Ayutthaya before it was sacked and burned by a Burmese army in 1767, and invoked an ancient prophecy attributed to King Narai. Sondhi’s speeches at Yellow Shirt rallies routinely suggested an existential battle was under way in Thailand to prevent an age of darkness engulfing the country. Anand Panyarachun warned that Thailand was becoming a failed state:

Thai society is now polarized by strong hatred. If this condition is allowed to continue, we will be living in horrifying times.

Despite his support for the Yellow movement, U.S. ambassador Ralph Boyce accurately analyzed this end-of-the-world angst in a confidential cable at the start of September 2006:

So why all the angst? Part of it is just that people tend to forget how bad the bad times were. But part of it may stem from the way politics and Thai society have changed in just a few years. Politics tended to be a game mostly for the elite to play. In the wake of the 1992 demonstrations that toppled the dictatorship, the “People’s Constitution” of 1997, the broader access to media brought by rising prosperity, and the populist policies of PM Thaksin — who staked his electoral success on maintaining the support of the long-disregarded rural population — politics has been, well, democratized. Within Thai society, being “krengjai” (modest, self-effacing) is no longer such a highly prized virtue; citizens more often see the importance of demanding their rights. A much broader segment of the population feels that they have a real stake in the outcome of the political battles in Bangkok, and they are prepared to assert themselves. This does raise the overall political temperature and make spontaneous violence between the rival camps more possible. This may be an unavoidable by-product of a shift from a political system marked by back-room deal-making among the elites to one more genuinely democratic. Old style pols and patricians may be spooked, but we believe that the Thai can, in the end, manage the transition.

Despite all the efforts of the Yellow coalition to create an atmosphere of looming catastrophe and to demonize Thaksin, most Thais continued to support Thai Rak Thai. But the elite and middle class in Bangkok didn’t give a damn about what the rest of the country thought. Helped by an increasingly anti-Thaksin media, they conjured up the illusion that the whole nation was rising up against a dictatorial prime minister. Thaksin himself made some terrible tactical mistakes, most notably with his failure to pay tax on the sale of Shin Corp to Singapore’s Temasek in early 2006, fuelling moralistic middle class rage just when the Yellow movement appeared to be running out of steam.

In an interview by Shawn Crispin the following year, Sondhi Limthongkul confirmed that leading members of the old royalist elite, including Prem, his close ally Surayud Chulanont, and senior generals, had supported the aims of the Yellow Shirts and pressured him to seek confrontation. In the lethal pantomime of Thai street politics, popular support and objective truth are irrelevant, the important thing for anti-government protest leaders is to get some of their own people killed or maimed in circumstances that can plausibly be blamed on the authorities. Sondhi told Crispin:

The request for military intervention or for the king to come out has always had one prerequisite: there must be bloodshed. That old political theory, that there must be bloodshed for the king to intervene, did not work when its purpose was to get rid of Thaksin. So that more or less upset their planned solution. I remember vividly that when there was [street protest] against Thaksin, I always had people calling me: “Khun Sondhi, could you move things a little bit forward, have a little confrontation, let us see a little blood?” … I fought Thaksin and I was able to pull up the mass, and they were excited because [the elites] never thought in their minds — and later on they admitted it — that so many people would come out. So they were both shocked and ecstatic. So, all the elites were pulling all their forces behind me.

Sondhi’s Yellow Shirt rallies never came close to bringing down Thaksin by themselves, but they helped create a political climate that enabled a military coup. On September 19, 2006, after months of planning by the Yellow bloc, with Prem Tinsulanonda at the centre of the web, royalist generals deposed Thaksin. Bhumibol immediately gave the new regime his blessing. It was Prem’s coup, but Bhumibol assented to it.

The 2006 coup was a terrible strategic miscalculation by the Thai establishment. They assumed ordinary Thais would passively accept the removal of the most popular prime minister in the country’s history, failing to understand how much society had changed. Millions of Thais who supported Thaksin were initially bewildered that the king, who they had believed to be their protector and guardian, had allowed their democratically expressed wishes to be overturned. As time went by, their shock and confusion began to turn to disgust and anger. Widespread popular reverence for Bhumibol, the sacred glue that held Thailand’s unequal hierarchical society together, began to corrode and decay. The establishment also assumed that Thaksin would follow the unwritten gentleman’s rules of the Thai elite, and meekly accept being turfed out of power. But that was not Thaksin’s style. He fought, and the elderly royalists installed by the coup were utterly befuddled about how to respond. Worse, it quickly became clear that they were incompetent at running a 21st century government.

The establishment had assumed that Prem’s coup was just the first stage of a plan he had worked out with Bhumibol for preventing Vajiralongkorn becoming king. With Thaksin’s political influence neutralized, they thought, the royal succession could be managed to keep the crown prince off the throne. Not only did the coup fail to crush Thaksin’s political power, however, but it quickly became clear that Prem had not made any arrangements with Bhumibol to handle the succession. Although he had never been enthusiastic about his son becoming Rama X, by early 2007 the king appeared to regard it as inevitable, and sent several signals that he had no intention of changing his designated heir. Meanwhile, Bhumibol’s health was worsening and it was clear the succession could come suddenly at any time.

Panic in the royalist ranks reached feverish levels. They had just overthrown a hugely popular prime minister in an exceptionally provocative gambit to sabotage the succession prospects of the heir to the throne. Belatedly it dawned on them that Vajiralongkorn was still highly likely to become king when Bhumibol died. And when this happened, it seemed probable that he would bring Thaksin back from exile and allow him to be prime minister once again. An era of political dominance by Thaksin and Vajiralongkorn seemed inevitable, during which the royalists would face vengeance for what they had done. Both Thaksin and the crown prince are noted for their hot tempers and their appetite for revenge.

In a confidential U.S. cable in January 2007 entitled “Coupmakers’ Haunted Dreams“, Ralph Boyce reported that the royalist generals who toppled Thaksin were so fraught with worry that they were unable to sleep at night. The atmosphere of late-reign panic in 2007 was also insightfully evoked in Duncan McCargo’s article Thailand: State of Anxiety. The Thai establishment had backed a coup they thought would save them from an existential threat. Instead, it seemed, they had only succeeded in making their demise more inevitable.

Desperate times breed desperate measures. In mid-2007, conservative royalists linked to Prem leaked a notorious video showing Srirasmi’s birthday party in Nonthaburi Palace in 2001, at which she had been virtually naked in the presence of numerous courtiers as the crown prince looked on, contentedly puffing on his pipe. A confidential U.S. cable noted that “the Crown Prince’s reputation continues to suffer and may have declined further, in part due to the dissemination online and by DVD of material harmful to the image of the Crown Prince and his Royal Consort”, and added: “some in palace circles are working actively to undercut whatever support exists for the Royal Consort, and we assume that this undercurrent also has implications for the Crown Prince”. In July, while Vajiralongkorn and Srirasmi were in Europe, very high-level sources spread misinformation that Vajiralongkorn had died of AIDS. This sinister episode was recounted on the Wikipedia page for Vajiralongkorn before being removed by royalist sympathizers:

It was an extraordinarily risky strategy for the royalist establishment to adopt — they were actively damaging the image of the monarchy, even though they needed to maintain popular reverence for the palace to ensure the continued survival of the existing social order. To make sense of it, one needs to understand their desperation. The prince already knew they had been actively seeking to undermine him and sabotage his succession prospects. It had become an all-or-nothing struggle — if the coup leaders and elite backers of the Yellow movement failed to prevent Vajiralongkorn becoming Rama X, they were doomed. They were prepared to do anything to prevent this, whatever the cost.

Remarkably, their kamikaze tactics had some success. Vajiralongkorn appears to have realized that his HIV could be used against him to prevent him becoming king. The reason had nothing to do with health or longevity — the crown prince has not developed full-blown AIDS, and HIV can now be managed effectively using anti-retroviral drugs for those with the means to afford them. But the theology of Thai kingship derives from two intertwined religious ideologies, Buddhist and Hindu. In the Buddhist tradition the king is a dhammaraja whose legitimacy derives from his great spiritual merit. On these terms, Vajiralongkorn’s claim to the throne was exceptionally weak. In the Hindu tradition, the legitimacy of a devaraja king derives directly from the purity of his bloodline. Previously, Vajiralongkorn’s dynastic claim was impeccable — he was a celestial prince, the only son of the king and queen. The fact his blood was diseased — with leukaemia, and more importanly with HIV due to the moral stigma that tends to be attached to it — made him vulnerable.

During 2007 an experimental project was initiated in Thailand on behalf of the prince in which doctors investigated using plasma filtration and magnetic activated cell sorting (MACS) technology to remove infected cells from the bloodstream. The equipment was assembled but in the end it was never used — Vajiralongkorn instead began spending long spells at a clinic in Munich. Intriguingly, this came at a time when German doctors successfully managed to cure a man of HIV — Timothy Brown, the so-called “Berlin patient”. He was cured with a bone marrow transplant that gave him HIV-resistant bone marrow treated with stem cells, a highly complex procedure that only made medical sense because Brown suffered from acute myeloid leukaemia as well as HIV. His leukaemia necessitated the bone marrow transplant, and his German doctors used the transplant to also cure his HIV. Vajiralongkorn also has both HIV and leukaemia, but while he may have explored the possibility of a bone marrow transplant, it never happened, for unknown reasons. In the end, he began an alternative unorthodox treatment regime in Germany that involved regular transfusions of HIV-free blood. A curious aspect of both the experimental treatment explored in Thailand and the transfusions in Germany is that they could never cure HIV, only greatly reduce the prevalence of HIV infected cells in a patient’s blood. Yet Vajiralongkorn appears to believe it is important for him to purify his blood as much as possible.

Another extraordinary development followed the smear campaign by leading royalists. After decades of being Vajiralongkorn’s staunchest supporter and insisting he remain first in line for the throne despite Bhumibol’s doubts, Sirikit began to waver. She believed she was destined to save Thailand from calamity, and that in a former life she had been the 16th century Ayutthayan queen Sri Suriyothai, who supposedly disguised herself as a man and rode into battle on an elephant to defend her husband King Maha Chakkraphat during the Burmese-Siamese War of 1548. Suriyothai was killed in the battle but her husband was saved and the Burmese were vanquished, or so the story goes. Egged on by her cabal of ambitious ladies-in-waiting, who hated Vajiralongkorn, Sirikit began to think she would be the best person to lead Thailand, as regent for Vajiralongkorn’s young son Dipangkorn. She also grew close to Sondhi Limthongkul, whom she met at the residence of her sister Busba. Sirikit liked to go secretly to Busba’s place to relax, drink and play cards away from the constantly watchful eyes of palace courtiers. Sondhi was often there too because he was having an affair with Busba’s daughter Suthawan Ladawan, the wife of Suriakart Sathirathai. Sirikit became increasingly influenced by her discussions with Sondhi.

As the elite obsessively and secretively plotted over the royal succession behind the high walls of their mansions and palaces, outside in the real world Thai faith in the monarchy was collapsing. On August 19, 2007, the coup-installed government held a referendum on a new draft constitution to replace the 1997 charter which had failed to function as the elite had hoped it would. There were many things wrong with the latest version, but voting against it was futile as this would allow the government to pick any past constitution it wanted from Thailand’s history, according to the rules the elite had written to ensure an outcome that suited them. A huge military-backed propaganda campaign told Thais that voting to reject the charter was tantamount to voting against King Bhumibol, using the slogan “Love the King. Care about the King. Vote in the referendum. Accept the 2007 draft charter.” Copies of the draft constitution were distributed with a yellow cover — the king’s colour. In spite of all this, more than 42 percent of those who cast their ballots voted “No”.

This was a remarkable result. Given the fact that an opinion poll would be unthinkable, it is very difficult to estimate what percentage of Thais genuinely revere the monarchy. The 2007 constitutional referendum is probably the best gauge, and it suggests that the number of Thai royalists is far lower than the establishment likes to claim.

Another major propaganda campaign preceded the general election held on December 23, and the military and royalist establishment used several underhand (and illegal) tactics to stack the odds against Thaksin’s new proxy party, the PPP. Nevertheless, the PPP easily won the elections, with the perennially useless Democrat Party far behind in second place. On February 28, Thaksin Shinawatra returned from exile abroad, prostrating himself on the ground outside Suvarnabhumi Airport as thousands of supporters cheered and wept.

These were crushing blows to the royalist establishment. Despite suspending democracy for more than a year and attempting all kinds of dirty tricks, they had been totally unable to deflate Thaksin’s popularity in Thailand. And yet, within a few months, the gloom and anxiety that had pervaded the Yellow bloc the previous year evaporated, replaced by a giddy mood of exuberant combativeness. The reason was Sirikit. By April 2008 she had pledged her full support to Sondhi’s PAD and made up her mind to freeze her wayward son out of the royal succession and reign as regent when Bhumibol died — provoking a furious row with Vajiralongkorn in Chulalongkorn Hospital in March 2008 that was mentioned in a secret U.S. cable. It was a crazy plan, not least because Sirikit was approaching the age of 76 and her health was not much better than her husband’s. But the desperate royalist establishment and Yellow movement rejoiced at this remarkable development. Just when it seemed that everything was lost, and that the looming ascendancy of Thaksin and Vajiralongkorn was unstoppable, Sirikit had switched sides and given them hope. They began to dare to believe they might prevail after all.

Besides all its more obvious flaws, there was another huge problem with the establishment’s plan to bypass Vajiralongkorn and instal Sirikit as regent — Bhumibol was implacably against the idea. He had been estranged from his wife for two decades, and although he had grave misgivings about his son, he was even more appalled by the idea of Sirikit effectively succeeding him. Had royalist veneration of Bhumibol been genuine, his opposition to their succession machinations would have put an end to the plan. But for the Thai elite, self-preservation was far more important than principle, and whatever affection they may have felt for their dear old monarch, it was trumped by their existential fear of the crown prince. And so Bhumibol’s objections were blithely ignored. The elite could afford to do so because they had Sirikit on their side. At the age of 80, only two years after his diamond jubilee had been celebrated with an outpouring of adulation across Thailand and around the world, King Rama IX discovered just how little real power he really had. To add insult to injury, the Yellow Shirt leaders who were knowingly flouting Bhumibol’s wishes ceaselessly proclaimed their bogus love for the king and insisted they were motivated by their determination to protect him from the evil schemes of Thaksin. Making things even worse for the hapless monarch, Sirikit moved in with him in Hua Hin’s Klai Kangwon (“Far From Worries”) palace in mid-2008, ostensibly to look after the increasingly infirm Bhumibol but actually to keep an eye on him and prevent him circumventing her schemes.

To have any hope of success, the plan to prevent Vajiralongkorn becoming Rama X required three institutions in particular to be on board. First of all, the privy council was crucial: if Bhumibol died without removing the crown prince’s status as designated heir, the privy council could still propose an alternative candidate as monarch by invoking Article 10 of the 1924 Palace Law on Succession, which states:

The Heir who is to succeed to the Throne should be fully respected by the people and the people should be able to rely on him happily. If he is considered by the majority of the people as objectionable, he should be out of the line to the Throne.

Secondly, the army leadership had to agree with the plan. If the military disagreed with efforts to meddle with the royal succession they would swiftly crack down and crush the plot. Given the possibility the crown prince might attempt to launch an armed challenge to the privy council’s decision, the army would also have to be on standby to lock down the capital and enforce the alternative succession plan. Thirdly, under Thailand’s constitution, parliament had to formally ratify the privy council’s decision and proclaim the new monarch. There would be no time to circumvent this requirement by staging a military or judicial coup and appointing a new parliament because another crucial element of the plan was that it would have to be executed with decisive speed. As soon news of Bhumibol’s death became public, Vajiralongkorn would begin acquiring the status of monarch by default unless an alternative candidate was proposed and ratified immediately. Every hour that passed without an alternative monarch formally in place would gravely lessen the plan’s likelihood of success and increase the probability of serious civil conflict. Moreover, for those in charge of carrying out the plan, the consequences of openly trying and failing to sabotage Vajiralongkorn’s succession were too grim to contemplate. Once the plan was set in motion, failure to achieve success would be suicidal.

The privy council was fully on board — Prem was a prime mover in the plan to sabotage the succession, and his elderly cronies all passionately loathed Vajiralongkorn. The army leadership also supported the plan — all of the top brass were acolytes of Sirikit and most were fanatically loyal to her. The problem was parliament. Ever since the start of the 21st century, Thaksin Shinawatra had won control of parliament every time an election was held, even when the odds were heavily stacked against him. Given the fecklessness of the Democrat Party, there was no prospect of this changing any time soon. Some way had to be found to prise parliament from Thaksin’s grip — and more importantly, prevent him winning it back at the first opportunity he got.

And so, apparently oblivious to the damage this would do to the reputation of the monarchy and the stability of a country still roiled by the royalist coup of September 2006, the establishment and the Yellow Shirts launched an aggressive campaign to topple the newly elected government, with the explicit backing of the queen. For Thaksin, the royalist assault on the PPP presented both a serious threat and a beguiling opportunity. If he could successfully resist, and ensure Vajiralongkorn became Rama X, he could expect to be richly rewarded for his role as kingmaker.

The new U.S. ambassador Eric John, a far shrewder observer of Thai politics than his bumptious and biased predecessor Ralph Boyce, analyzed the conflict in a confidential cable during 2008:

The battle lines in Thailand’s political environment are clearly drawn, even if there are multiple actors in play. However, reductionist arguments that the crisis is about “the King vs. Thaksin” are overly simplified; neither camp controls all who claim allegiance to each, and key secondary figures in both camps have differing agendas. While all countries have their unique dynamics — Thailand’s revolves around the institution of monarchy — Thailand nevertheless is experiencing a version of a scenario that has played out in other East Asian countries: economic growth outstripping the pace of democratic institutional maturation, and new groups challenging the prerogatives of old elites. Although both sides in this polarized society have independent-minded and middle-class participants, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra provides direction and, we assume with confidence, financing for his allies, relying on a loyal electorate in the northeast and north of Thailand which benefited from his populist policies from 2001-06. The Thaksin machine faces off against a mix of royalists, Bangkok middle class, and southerners, with Queen Sirikit having emerged as their champion, as King Bhumibol largely fades from an active role. The two sides are competing for influence and appear to believe, or fear, that the other will use the political power it has to marginalize (if not eliminate) the opposing side. They are positioning themselves for what key actors on both sides freely admit to us in private will be Thailand’s moment of truth — royal succession after the King passes away.

On March 28, Sondhi Limthongkul resumed regular Yellow Shirt rallies. On May 19, Visakha Bucha day, the most important Buddhist holiday, Sirikit visited Wat Channa Songkram, Bangkok’s “War Victory Temple”, with army commander Anupong Paochinda. As a leaked cable from U.S. chargé d’affaires James Entwistle noted:

That temple is not the traditional venue for the royal family on this holiday, but is normally a place where people pray before going into a battle of one sort or another.

It was a declaration of war. The events that followed in 2008 were truly extraordinary — a guerrilla insurgency openly fought by Thailand’s establishment against the country’s elected government. There was a remarkable degree of coordination among different elements of the Yellow alliance — the PAD, elite elder statesmen, the biased judiciary, the Democrat Party, newspapers and the military leadership. This was the “network monarchy” flexing its muscles, but it was Sirikit and her cronies pulling the strings, not Bhumibol.

The shrill and paranoid climate of rabid hyper-royalism was ratcheted up ever higher, with the lèse majesté law used to undermine the government and intimidate the foreign media. Jakrapob Penkhair, a minister attached to the prime minister’s office who was the main government spokesman, and Jonathan Head, a highly respected BBC journalist, were accused of violating Article 112 during an August 2007 panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand at which Jakrapob had criticized Thailand’s culture of patronage and directed some snide remarks at Prem. Abandoning any pretence of being a progressive party that believed in freedom of speech, the Democrat Party began preparations to impeach Jakrapob, who eventually resigned on May 30. Meanwhile, Anand Panyarachun, who had long cultivated a cosy relationship with prominent foreign journalists and remains the only significant elite source most of them have, privately assured Head he would not be charged, but on May 27 police showed up at the FCCT and questioned club president Nirmal Ghosh for three hours, also threatening to confiscate the club’s computers. The intimidation worked. Foreign journalists in Bangkok remain terrified of writing anything that could be construed as lèse majesté, and have done an atrocious job of explaining to the world what is really going in Thailand.

On May 25, the Yellow Shirts held a rally at Democracy Monument attended by around 10,000 people. The PAD supporters attempted to march on parliament and Government House, and after being stopped at the nearby Makkawan Bridge, they set up a permanent protest site there. It was the beginning of 193 days of continuous and increasingly disruptive protest by the Yellow Shirts, explicitly intended to sabotage the government’s ability to govern.

On June 18, Thailand and Cambodia signed a Joint Communiqué in Paris endorsing the registration of the 9th century Khmer temple of Preah Vihear as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The clifftop temple was on disputed territory, claimed by Thailand, and although the International Court of Justice had ruled in 1962 that it belonged to Cambodia, Thailand continued to contest 4.6 square kilometres of territory around Preah Vihear. The UNESCO agreement followed years of diplomacy, during the Thaksin and Surayud administrations, to agree a position on the UNESCO listing that was acceptable to both countries and did not impact Thailand’s territorial claim. The Joint Communiqué explicitly stated that Thailand’s support of UNESCO status for Preah Vihear would not prejudice ongoing border negotiations with Cambodia. But the Yellow movement saw an opportunity to attack the government by claiming — entirely inaccurately — that the PPP administration was “selling Thai territory” to Cambodia. They stoked dangerous tensions at the border to try to inflame nationalist anger and rally opposition to the government.

On June 20, thousands of PAD supporters broke through police barricades and marched on Government House. The Democrat Party demanded a no-confidence debate in parliament on June 24-25, also joining the attack over Preah Vihear. The government easily defeated the no-confidence motions, but most Thai media coverage favoured the opposition. Meanwhile, the courts once again began delivering judgments damaging to the Thaksin camp. On July 8 the Supreme Court upheld electoral fraud charges against Yongyuth Tiyapairat, a senior ally of Thaksin’s. The decision meant that the PPP could face dissolution according to the rules of the 2007 constitution. The Constitutional Court also ruled that Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama should have received formal parliamentary approval before signing the Joint Communiqué with Cambodia. As a result, Noppadon resigned on July 10. The U.S. embassy commented “we find the Court’s analysis questionable”, adding:

This ruling will likely reinforce the impression of Thaksin supporters that the Court is ill-disposed toward Thaksin and his allies.

Thaksin’s opponents also stepped up their efforts to convict him and his wife Pojaman on corruption charges over a 2003 deal. Pojaman also faced separate tax evasion charges. U.S. ambassador Eric John warned in a confidential cable that the politicization of the judiciary would have highly damaging long-term consequences for Thailand:

The courts may prove capable of marginalizing Thaksin, either by incarcerating him or by tarnishing his reputation beyond repair. It is possible that Thaksin’s conviction in one or more cases would represent a straightforward dispensation of justice, as we believe he likely used his authority as Prime Minister to benefit himself and his cronies. However, we also note that there is an increasing perception among Thais that the judiciary has become politicized; this perception has grown ever since a watershed speech in April 2006, in which King Bhumibol called on the judiciary to take action to resolve the ongoing political crisis. While the courts currently have the requisite level of prestige and credibility to marginalize Thaksin — a goal that the Army proved incapable of achieving in the 2006-07 period — the judiciary may also suffer in the long term, as it moves beyond its traditional role and increasingly serves as a decisive instrument for shaping political life.

On July 22, activist Darunee Charnchoensilpakul, known as “Da Torpedo”, was arrested on charges of lèse majesté over speeches she had made at anti-PAD rallies on July 18 and 19. As the U.S. embassy noted, some of her comments breached the most sensitive taboos:

She implied that King Bhumibol was involved in the unusual death of his brother, King Ananda Mahidol; urged Thailand to follow the example of Nepal in abolishing the monarchy; and suggested that the aging King relied on Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanonda to make his decisions.

Inevitably, the antics of the royalist establishment, the Yellow Shirts and the judiciary further damaged the reputation of the palace. A U.S. cable at the start of August quoted Thaksin ally Jaran Ditapichai and PAD leader Somkiat Pongpaiboon as saying anti-monarchism was surging:

UDD activist Charan, a former communist who has expressed his distaste for monarchies in a controversial book on the French revolution, told us he was surprised by what he perceived as an increasingly open expression of anti-monarchy sentiment, such as Daranee’s. He said “many Thais are like her now… online, in coffee shops, and on community radio.” The King, he said, is being heavily criticized in public, by the public, for the first time in modern history. He claimed to have heard many community radio programs in which people phoned in to complain that the monarchy had supported past coups, and many callers viewed the monarchy as an obstacle to democracy in Thailand. PAD co-leader Somkiat also told us he had noticed a proliferation of anti-monarchy websites, starting in 2005, and he also referred to the widespread availability of video discs that show the Crown Prince’s Royal Consort, Srirasmi, semi-nude.

During August, Thaksin and Pojaman travelled to China for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Instead of returning to Thailand at the end of their visit, they flew to London and on August 11 Thaksin faxed a handwritten statement to the Thai media declaring he would not return to face legal proceedings he denounced as unfair. The Yellows scented blood. Thaksin Shinawatra was officially on the run.

On August 31, a 41-year-old Australian working as a university lecturer, English teacher and freelance writer in Chiang Mai became the latest Westerner to fall foul of the lèse majesté law. Harry Nicolaides had self-published a novel in 2005, entitled Verisimilitude: Is the truth, the truth? He printed just 50 copies, of which only seven were ever sold. In one passage, the novel related the sexual shenanigans of a Thai prince, unnamed but clearly based on Vajiralongjorn:

From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives major and minor with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.

Nicolaides was arrested at Bangkok airport while trying to leave the country to return to his native Australia. He was denied bail, and held in Bangkok Remand Centre awaiting trial.

Border hostilities with Cambodia continued to simmer, with efforts to defuse the confrontation over Preah Vihear damaged by some aggressive Thai troop movements. The pro-Sirikit military leadership was doing its part to keep tensions on the boil.

At the end of August, Eric John sent a cable to Washington entitled “THAILAND PROTESTS: A PAD PRIMER”. He billed it as “a guide to PAD, its leaders, and motives”. The cable discussed the alarming extremism of the Yellow Shirts, and their intimate links with Queen Sirikit:

The People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) behind the ongoing street protests against PM Samak’s government first surfaced in 2005 in reaction to growing discontent over the alleged corruption of then-PM Thaksin. It largely disappeared following the September 2006 coup that ended the Thaksin administration, only to reemerge in Thai politics on March 28 with the same leadership but fewer supporters and a more radical agenda. Since then, it has been an active, occasionally aggressive, daily force on the Thai political stage. The last 90 days of protests have halted Bangkok’s infamous traffic on numerous occasions, temporarily seized a media outlet, and even displaced the Prime Minister on several occasions from his office… Before the aggressive actions launched August 26 which led to arrest warrants for its leadership and left its future uncertain, PAD appeared to be transforming itself from a movement whose purpose was to combat Thaksin and his allies whenever they were perceived to be untouchable, to a political party with a simultaneous populist and royalist-nationalist bent, with megalomaniac Sondhi Limthongkul using it as his personal vehicle, much as Thaksin did with Thai Rak Thai. PAD’s 2008 reincarnation largely abandoned its origins as a wide, loose coalition of the working class, royalists, and middle class Bangkokians seeking justice and increased transparency in government in a shift to anti-democratic principles and increasing association with the Queen’s circle rather than the King alone… In the latest round of protests, PAD supporters have also started wearing armbands and other items in light blue, a color associated with the Queen, seen by many in Thailand to support a more nationalistic approach on issues like the south and a more aggressive opposition to the Thaksin camp, including if necessary with military involvement.

Sondhi Limthongkul’s anti-democratic beliefs were made clear when he began openly proposing a philosophy of “New Politics” in which 70 percent of parliament would be appointed by the network monarchy and only 30 percent directly elected. The bizarre scheme was motivated by a determination to put parliament forever beyond Thaksin’s control and ensure Vajiralongkorn could be prevented from becoming king.

On August 26, the PAD escalated the political crisis once again, storming and occupying Government House during a day of coordinated provocations aimed at forcing Samak’s administration into a violent response. As the U.S. embassy reported:

In the latest twist in Thailand’s on-going political drama, the Peoples Alliance for Democracy (PAD) staged a mass demonstration in Bangkok and strategic points around the country in a what some press sources are reporting as a last bid show-down with the Peoples Power Party (PPP) led government of Samak Sundaravej. Kraisak Choonhaven, Democrat party MP and deputy party leader, told us that the PAD leaders had laid out their intentions to him late August 25; the PAD hoped to provoke clashes with the police, leading to enough violence and government overreaction to spark military intervention/another coup… The day’s activities got off to an unexpected start early on August 26 when some 80 to 100 PAD supporters attempted to take control of the government-run NTB television station between 0430 and 0530. Although Royal Thai Police units responded and arrested a large number of the demonstrators (press reports indicate between 60 and 80), control of the NTB compound and the quality of the transmission varied throughout the day. In the end, it appeared the NTB showdown was only the first incident in a series of determined PAD attempts to provoke PM Samak and security forces into a direct confrontation. With surprising efficiency, the PAD executed simultaneous marches on the Ministries of Education, Finance, Agriculture and Transportation, as well as the Government House compound which is the formal seat of the PM and the government. By 1500 they had occupied these ministries and the Government House compound.

On August 29 the Yellow Shirts raised the stakes once more, forcing the shutdown of several provincial airports including Phuket, Krabi and Hat Yai, and blocking key railway services. Thousands of Thais and foreign tourists were left stranded.

Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej did not take the bait, although this was partly because he knew he could not count on the support of army chief Anupong Paochinda. Anupong was a man with split loyalties: he was part of the Queen’s Guard army clique and had joined the 2006 coup plotters, but he was also in Thaksin’s Class 10 military network. During 2008, he insisted he was remaining neutral in the worsening political conflict, but this meant that he failed to offer Samak the military support that the prime minister would have needed for a robust response against the Yellow Shirts. Aware of this, Samak refrained from pushing for a serious crackdown, although the police did issue arrest warrants for the PAD leadership. As the U.S embassy commented:

While there is little doubt that PAD had hoped to provoke conflict, the Thai government and police have so far pursued a passive posture with the apparent intent to avoid confrontation.

In their excellent 2009 book Thaksin, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker note that the military’s refusal to back the government was far from being a “neutral” position:

General Anupong Paochinda, who had succeeded as army chief in October 2007, persistently claimed that he and the army would not make another coup but would remain “neutral”. He said the dispute was “political” and thus had to be solved by political means. But in a situation in which PAD had begun to break laws as a deliberate strategy to undermine the authority of the government, “neutrality” took on a special meaning… Anupong’s “neutrality” was effectively a withdrawal of services from the PPP government — the horse bucking off its jockey. This move both symbolized the army’s growing independence of action and undermined the PPP’s legitimacy to govern.

Meanwhile, leading network monarchists were plotting Samak’s downfall. Privy councillor Siddhi Savetsila told Eric John on September 3 about a secret scheme he was planning to present to King Bhumibol to remove Samak (and Thaksin) from politics:

Privy Councilor ACM Siddhi Savetsila made clear to Ambassador Sept. 3 that he viewed Thaksin and, by extension, PM Samak as an existential threat to the Thailand he supported, centered on the monarchy… Stressing that Ambassador was the only foreigner he would share the information with, Siddhi laid out a scenario which he said he would present to King Bhumiphol later in the day in an audience for the Privy Councilors in Hua Hin. The solution was not by using force but to rehabilitate Thai democracy. The same Constitution would remain, amended to allow outsiders (non-MPs) to serve in the Cabinet. The House and Senate would stay. Universally respected former PM Anand should serve as the leader of the “project,” which would involve respected, “honest” ex-military and Ministry of Interior officials, academics, one or two PAD members, and perhaps some Democrat Party figures. The mandate would be to initiate a wide array of reforms in the economic, social, and political sphere. That in turn would “weed out” the bane effects of Thaksinism from the system. Army Commander Anuphong would have to deliver the message to Samak; no one else could. Siddhi said that a group of prominent figures had approached him with the plan, more than could fit in his modest living room. The only one he named was Pramote Nakorntab, a retired respected professor and political scientist from Chulalongkorn University; others included a high ranking Air Force officer and a Constitutional Court Judge. Since, as a Privy Councilor, he was not supposed to be involved in politics, only in advising the King, Siddhi agreed to meet “as a former military leader” ready to do his best for the country. He was willing to push forward and present the project to the King in part to shield Privy Council Chair Prem Titsulanonda, who had been heavily and unjustly criticized for backing the PAD and trying to promote a Democrat Party-led government. The stakes were high; it was essential to rehabilitate the democratic system in Thailand. “If we lose, Thaksin will come back, and if Thaksin comes back, the monarchy will be lost,” Siddhi explained.

It was a remarkable insight into the working of the network monarchy, with elite figures scheming and conspiring in private and then seeking a signal of support from the king. The plan was yet another variant of “Thai-style democracy” — suspending genuine democracy and replacing it with the rule of appointed royalist “good men”. Siddhi was an 89-year-old political dinosaur who had been close to Phao Sriyanond’s clique in the 1940s and 1950s and served as a foreign minister under Prem. The very fact he believed he had a right to meddle in politics and advocate the overthrow of an elected government demonstrated how out of touch and deluded senior royalists had become.

Anand Panyarachun told U.S. diplomats that Samak was likely to be forced from power: “I cannot rule out regime change, but it would not be a traditional coup d’etat.” He confirmed he had been in contact with the plotters:

Anand acknowledged he had been listening to the group for the past week, but refused to get involved directly in anything before the plan was put into action. If the plan went forward, he was prepared to meet with them at that point. It was imperative to ensure the least impact on the contents of Thai democracy; even in the case of non-elected persons of supposed quality, care needed to be taken. Anand claimed that “I’m always my own man,” and that he had turned down many positions offered when he thought others sought to control him. Ambassador underscored the critical importance of developments in Thailand staying within the framework of the constitution and rule of law; if that did not occur, the U.S. would respond accordingly. Anand replied that he had disagreed with the U.S. reaction to the 2006 coup and frequently disagreed with western views of what constituted democracy in various countries.

The bureaucracy and judiciary were playing their part to help. On September 2 the Election Commission voted to seek the dissolution of the PPP due to vote buying by Yongyuth Tiyapairat. On September 3, Tej Bunnag resigned as foreign minister. Samak hung on, though he was increasingly isolated. Meanwhile, at Government House, the number of PAD protesters began dwindling, as the U.S. embassy reported:

The PAD siege of Government House continued despite deteriorating living conditions at the site; the weekend rains turned the trampled grounds of Government House compound into a sea of mud. In an effort to ward off the increasingly unsanitary conditions, and diminish what the Thai press called the prevailing stench of urine, protest organizers began sprinkling white “disinfectant” powder over the stinking muddy ground. Protesters jokingly said they could bear the stench better than they could stand the government.

Fearing that they were losing momentum, the Yellow bloc struck back on September 9. The Constitutional Court ruled that the prime minister had violated conflict-of-interest rules by continuing to appear on a TV cookery programme, Tasting and Grumbling, even though he received at most only nominal payments. It was a bizarre and clearly partisan decision (expertly dissected by Verapat Pariyawong in his Harvard thesis Three Course Recipe for the Court’s Cookery) that made it clearer than ever that the judiciary had become a tool of the royalist elite to thwart the democratic will of the majority.

Samak had to resign as a result of the decision, but parliament could have opted to renominate him as prime minister. Instead, however, Thaksin and his allies decided it was time to dro