New Pheu Thai leader Paetongtarn Shinawatra
A famous Mr Bean episode has him grapple with a wrong exam paper the whole time. He only realises his mistake in the last minute when the supervisor’s announcement makes him aware that he should have taken another envelope containing a different set of questions.
New Pheu Thai leader Paetongtarn Shinawatra is more or less the same. She entered politics thinking that her only challenge was the military, whose “proxy” was Prayut Chan-o-cha. “Dictatorship” was assumed to be her test paper and she thought she had been prepared for all related questions. Her study and mental prep had involved nothing else.
Move Forward was never on her mind. The most that party could do was reducing the scale of an expected Pheu Thai landslide. Paetongtarn and all her handlers or trainers did not coach her to play catch-up. They only taught her what…
