All Around Town: How media-savvy Starry Lee puts names to faces

Starry Lee Wai-king is one to know what makes a good chairwoman of the city's biggest pro-establishment party. Fresh from her April 17 victory at the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong's leadership vote, Lee, 41, has her press relations strategy all planned out: taking pictures with journalists so she can recognise them one by one. Yesterday, at the end of a South China Morning Post interview, Lee asked her assistant to snap photographs of her with the journalists. "I can recognise journalists' faces, but I am not very good at remembering which media outlet each of you work for," she said. "These pictures will [at least] help me know who's calling when I pick up my phone." But as party leader, keeping her word to spend weekends with her daughter, 12, would still be a challenge, Lee said. "She would ask, 'Mama, are you having another business trip? Why are you not spending time with me?' But this is getting less frequent because she is growing up and can understand [my job better]."

The latest quibble between Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and Leung Kwok-hung is no laughing matter, as lawmaker Leung would have it. The League of Social Democrats chairman barely hid his disdain after the chief executive - with his typical smile - explained why he smiled as guards removed lawmaker Leung for protesting at a reception on Monday. The chief executive had said: "Sometimes I cannot help laughing." Lawmaker Leung fumed: "I was protesting about a serious issue of labour rights and standard working hours. What was so funny about that?" He added that "if CY's selling point is his smile, is he now 'selling smiles'?", using a Chinese term that meant prostituting oneself. The chief executive had also said he was not the only one smiling. Lawmaker Leung countered: "Those on the floor were worse; they were putting on smiling faces to placate someone."