Shades of NKF Saga Deja Vu?

The temperature of local politics has ratcheted up by quite a few notches in the past few days. First we had news of Foreign Minister Shanmugam's lawyers sending a letter to local blogger Mr Alex Au to remove a comment on his blog about alleged improprieties in Mr Shanmugam's personal life. In the NKF saga of a few years ago, lawyers were similarly involved in squashing rumours of financial indiscretions. As it turned out, those rumours were not without basis in fact. In this case, Mr Alex Au may yet be similarly vindicated in future.

Until that report in the local papers, not many Singaporeans likely knew that Mr Shanmugam had divorced and then re-married again recently. Just yesterday, the opposition Worker's Party sacked Mr Yaw Shin Leong from the party and hence parliament for just such alleged improprieties. Given the recent events in Mr Shanmugam's marital status, I think it would not be unreasonable for the public to be given irrefutable evidence by Mr Shanmugam (or through his lawyers) on the timeline of events that led to his divorce and re-marriage to exclude the possibility that the alleged improprieties could have been the cause.

In todays highly interconnected world, flooded with camera phones, it is increasingly difficult to conduct affairs outside of public view. Sooner rather than later, some service staff be it a waiter or receptionist somewhere will catch on to it. Denial backed up by lawyers is good only if truly innocent. If not, it will merely expose oneself to greater potential for blackmail from the publicity. It would be an untenable situation for someone in public office to operate under the constant condition of potential exposure or blackmail. Affairs after all always have to involve some other party. If the alleged affairs were carried out overseas and hence potential blackmail originating from foreign sources, the implications are doubly dire.

In all this, the PM, with all the instruments of state available to him (CID, ISD, FSB etc...) must be aware of the true state of these allegations. If not he is not doing his job and those that are supposed to apprise him of such matters would CERTAINLY not be doing their jobs. Perhaps PM Lee could come out and make the definitive statement on the matter knowing full well that he is staking not only his reputation on the line, but also the potential survival of his government as well. The question is does he have enough confidence in his ministers (and his sources of information) to do it?

Conspiracy theorists might suggest that Mr Yaw might have been the victim of a possible sting operation like that carried out on Julian Assange of Wikileaks or Dominique Strauss Khan formerly of the IMF. If indeed it is a sting operation to 'fix' the opposition, the blowback from it could well be the mother of all unintended consequences. By the time this saga of Mr Yaw's sacking ends, it may well be necessary to hold more than one by-election. It would be the only reason I think, that would justify postponing it.