The coiffeured oligarchy

Imagine Sonia Gandhi excusing herself from a Congress (I) election rally on a hot and humid day to do a spot of shopping at M&S. Or DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi nipping away from a publicised dawn-to-dusk hunger strike he’d called to “uphold Tamil pride” — in order to get a facial done.

Political hara-kiri, right? That’s precisely what happened in Hong Kong on Sunday. Former civil servant Anson Chan, who is contesting a high-visibility by-election for a seat in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council on the pro-democracy platform, was invited to participate in a rally and a march to demand ‘one person, one vote’ by 2012.

The stately Chan, who has shown herself to be ill at ease with grassroots-level campaigning, did turn up for a photo-op, but left within minutes.

Worse, it turned out that the compelling circumstance that had required her to turn her back on over 5,000 volunteers marching on a hot and humid day was that she needed to visit a hair salon! It’s proving to be a PR disaster that even her campaign colleagues admit will be hard to live down.

Anson Chan’s principal rival in the LegCo election is Regina Ip, another former civil servant who too resents media cartoon caricatures of her hair arrangement.

As Secretary of Security in 2003, Ip (nicknamed ‘Broomhead’ for her bushy mop) had attempted infamously to push through a national security bill that targeted sedition and other treasonous acts. An avalanche of popular protests against the provision — based on legitimate civil rights concerns — led Ip to resign and take a sabbatical in the US, from where she’s returned with an image makeover.

Ip had initially tried to put a brave face on her hair-do nickname, saying, “If I can’t even defend my hairstyle, how can I defend Hong Kong?” But from all accounts, the old wounds still hurt. In a recent interview, a pained Ip noted she had “many more unpleasant nicknames than other candidates… Do you think that’s fair to me?”

On any given day, visitors to the lounge bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong may see a bespectacled, old woman sitting in a corner, with headphones tuned to the BBC World station, and an attendant reading out headlines from the international dailies.

Her keen interest in news, at her age, is easily explained, she is Clare Hollingworth, who in 1939 “scooped” news of German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. Sensational stuff for someone who was 27 then and who’d been in journalism for only a week!

Since then, Hollingworth has had quite an eventful career in some of the world’s hotspots, serving as war correspondent in North Africa, West Asia, Vietnam and China. Today, the war cannons that won her fame have fallen silent, and Hollingworth lives in retirement.

On Wednesday, she turns 96, and we’ve got a birthday party lined up for her at the FCC. Here’s to you, ‘General’ Clare, the Queen of War Reporting.