Politics is, after all, full of cloak-and-dagger skullduggery. It is little wonder, then, that I do not understand it, and prefer to wait until the Hollywood version comes out.

To illustrate, take the secrecy surrounding Mr Tung's appointment to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, possibly as a vice-chairman. Why is the booting upstairs, so to speak, of Hong Kong's leader a matter for hushed tones on fire escapes at midnight?

Surely, it is a matter for celebration. Even if it did turn out to be a way of sidelining him so that someone with slightly more flair could take over, should we not be told immediately so that we can prepare for even wilder times?

Personally, I would like to be informed of just what is happening so that I know to whom I should send my letter of complaint when I am unable to get last-minute tickets to the Rugby Sevens.

Whatever the circumstances, Mr Tung should count himself lucky to have avoided the fate of other leaders in history. Roman general Julius Caesar was publicly stabbed to death; Egyptian queen Cleopatra succumbed to a self-inflicted snake bite; England's king Charles I was beheaded; king Louis XVI suffered the same fate during the French revolution, while his countryman Napoleon Bonaparte died in solitude on a lonely island.

Russian tsar Nicholas II and his family, meanwhile, were executed en mass; Germany's Nazi leader Adolf Hitler swallowed cyanide rather than be captured; American president John F. Kennedy was assassinated; Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu died before a firing squad after a popular revolt; and the fate of Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Chile's Augusto Pinochet are in the balance.

Then there was the 'people power' revolts that toppled Indonesia's Suharto and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos; and do not forget that the father of Simba, hero of the Lion King movies, was murdered by his brother.

Lebanon's government resigned on Monday under international pressure that it, and its Syrian backers, were behind the car bomb assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. The West African nation of Togo is similarly in a political shambles after the forced resignation of its president, Faure Gnassingbe, after he was installed by the military following the death of his dictator father.

But such upheaval pales against the actions of Nepal's King Gyanendra, who on February 1 sacked the government and declared a state of emergency, claiming incompetence in the fight against Maoist rebels. For snatching away the democracy ushered in by constitutional reforms in 1990, he now faces sanctions from the US, Britain and other donor countries.

I realise that global geopolitics is a complicated business. Equally, I appreciate that the black and white of politics is not always what it first appears.

Of course, in Mr Tung's case, we will not know what really happened until he publishes his memoirs. By then, I suspect, he will be the only one interested in reading them.

Peter Kammerer is the Post's foreign editor