Until a few weeks ago months ago, when I wrote stories about Thaksin Shinawatra, I identified him with the simple formula "deposed prime minister of Thailand" and filed them to the Foreign Editor. Since then he has risen to become something much more important than a foreign head of government - the owner of a Premiership football team. These days in The Times, he is "Man City boss", first and foremost; my story in today's paper ran in the Sports pages.
Since Thaksin's footie acquisition, there's been a lot written about him in the British papers, a lot more than when he was merely one of the richest and most powerful men in south-east Asia. But no consensus has really emerged on what to make of him. Reduced to its essentials the question seems to be: is this man evil? or, put with a little more sophistication, is he fit for the honour of running one of our venerable Association Football clubs? Is he a classic Asian despot who has fled to our shores after being driven out by his brave people, and who is now sinking his blood-soaked talons into one a prized sporting institution? Or a brilliant businessman and visionary leader who has been shamefully tumbled from power by a clique of unelected generals?
It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. But here is my stab at Thaksin-in-a-nutshell.
For decades, Thailand, a country of relatively poor farmers, was run by a cosy band of middle and upper class politicans in Bangkok, many of them foreign educated. For a foreigner, such people are a pleasure to deal with. Half of them seem to have gone to Eton and Oxford. They have beautiful manners, PhDs from the finest European and American universities, and they speak better English than you or I. But they are hardly representative of the average Thai-in-the-paddy-field.
During the 1990s, Thai politics got bogged down in a series of weak coalition governments and ineffectual leaders. Everyone became sick of this (it was one of the factors blamed for the Asian financial crisis in 1997) and so the constitution was rewritten to give more power to the prime minister. The smart crowd in Bangkok were expecting that he would be one of them, as usual. Instead they got Thaksin.
Thaksin was an ambitious ex-policeman who got very, very, very rich in mobile phones. Mega-super-breathtakingly rich. After several false starts in politics, he set up a party called Thais Love Thais. In 2001, he won a record majority; in 2005, he was re-elected (the first time a Thai prime minister had ever achieved this) with 61 per cent of the vote.
Yes, Thaksin may have used his immense wealth to buy votes and support, directly or indirectly - as all Thai governments have done to some extent. But this in itself does not explain his success. Thaksin's genius was to go over the heads of the Bangkok yuppies and appeal directly to the rural population.
He established cheap health care, and made small loans available to farmers. The country people loved him. He did some very nasty things too, although not all of these played against him at home. His crude and violent crack down on the Muslim insurgency in the South made a bad situation worse - although many Thais in the Buddhist north of the country don't seem to mind too much. His "war on drugs" amounted to a carte blanche for the police to kill people they didn't like - and kill they did. Many of the 2000 corpses no doubt did belong to drug dealers. But they never had the chance to prove otherwise. And plenty of the victims were innocent bystanders.But plenty of the rural poor, who had seen the effects of drug addiction on their own children, cheered Thaksin on.
Then there were the accusations of corruption - that Thaksin was using his position further to enrich himself and his family, that he was giving key jobs in the government, judiciary and army to his cronies. No doubt there's truth in this too - although it has taken a surprisingly long time to bring the first case to court (yesterday).
When Thaksin came to power, the Old Etonians and their crowd didn't know what had hit them. They hated him, in part, because of his brutality and greed. But they also feared him because he had changed the rules of the political game, the game which they thought was theirs to win - and now he was trouncing them at every turn.
They held noisy anti-Thaksin demonstrations. He called their bluff by calling a snap election and winning a majority again. The demos continued until finally, with a nod from Thailand's King Bhumibhol, the army stepped in and tossed Thaksin out.
This was the crowning irony: the liberal, democratic western educated opposition holding the door open for the generals, and then holding their coats as they trampled on the law, the constitution and the elections.
So Thaksin ended up in London, no longer prime minister, but still exceedingly wealthy. So he bought a footie club (he'd tried unsuccessfully to buy Liverpool FC when he was still PM). That's one of the things billionaires do. Certainly Thaksin is . . . dodgy, to say the least. I wouldn't want him running my country. (I don't have any great team loyalty myself so I can't really say whether I'd want him to own my football club.) But he is also one of the most brilliant and successful Asian politicians of the past ten years. He was elected democratically. He was ousted, illegally. And perhaps the whole story says less about him than it does about the right minded chumps who sat by and watched it all happen.