Just hours after the light-bulb scandal broke 10 days ago I was up at Government House with the chief executive, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen. We were recording a TV show. He seemed unusually quiet, almost distant. Normally, every time he greeted me he would ask about my family, something that dates back years when he visited Washington as a senior official while I was a correspondent there. But this time he didn't. I could tell his mind was elsewhere.
He had just returned from a lunch with legislators where a street protester threw yet another banana at him. 'I'm not feeling well,' he volunteered softly. It wasn't the banana. He's now used to being a missile target. 'Too much talking,' he explained.
It turned out he was losing his voice from two days of having to defend virtually non-stop his poorly-received policy speech. But a hoarse voice was not what kept him so uncharacteristically quiet that afternoon.
It seemed to me more a case of a perplexed man lost for words. Who would have guessed a well-intentioned plan to encourage the community to switch to energy-saving light bulbs would backfire into a scandal of such unwarranted proportions?
What makes this scandal so much more damaging than the many others that have dogged Tsang is the suggestion of wrongdoing.
Any reasonable person who reads past the headlines to the facts would conclude he actually did nothing morally or ethically improper. Yet the stench of corruption hangs in the air. He is accused of having put forward the light-bulb plan solely to benefit his son's father-in-law who is in the business.