He attributed his defeat to supporters backing other candidates in the mistaken belief that he had secured enough votes. Other aspirants who suffered the same fate have also blamed the “Thunder Go” plan, a strategic voting scheme advocated by Occupy Central co-founder Benny Tai Yiu-ting.

“Please don’t waste any more time on the election results and exert further pressure on Benny,” Wong told the South China Morning Post in an interview. “I have already moved forward.”

Wong reiterated that what the camp should do now was to plan ahead and grab as many seats as it could on the Election Committee on December 11. The pan-democratic camp won 205 of the 1,200 seats on the committee in 2011.

Should the anti-Leung forces, including liberal businessmen, grab 500 seats, Wong said it would create a huge headache for Leung in securing 601 votes, the minimum needed to get re-elected.

“We need to tell those who are interested in running for the top job that they have a chance of winning,” said Wong, referring to hopefuls such as outgoing Legco president Jasper Tsang Yok-sing and Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah.

“Beijing by then would have no choice but to give a green light to another aspirant to compete with Leung.”

But Wong pointed out that the pan-democrats had yet to field enough candidates to contest all the sectors, which are returned by individual instead of corporate voters. Even in the 30-strong IT sector in which Wong previously won a seat, only 25 pro-democracy candidates were fielded.

A Post count has found that the pan-democrats could have fielded 117 candidates more in six sectors that returned pro-democracy lawmakers last Sunday, including health services, medical and accountancy.

Eighteen pro-democracy professional groups ranging from medical to surveying had been set up in the wake of the Occupy movement in 2014, which Wong believed would help the camp gain more seats in the December polls.

Lawmaker-elect Yiu Chung-yim, the first pan-democrat to win the seat in the Architectural, Surveying, Planning and Landscape sector, agreed with Wong, saying he had been lobbying people to join the race. In 2011, the pan-democrats fielded just two candidates and returned only one in the 30-strong sector, a stronghold of the chief executive, who was also a surveyor.

Yiu said his victory on Sunday proved there was a strong mandate in the sector to remove Leung.

“I guess [the pan-democrats] might be able to take around 13 or 14 seats given I have won 45 per cent of votes [in the Legco elections],” Yiu told the Post.

But accountancy lawmaker Kenneth Leung, who won a second term, said things might not be as easy as Wong thought.

“Asking people to vote for you and asking people to stand for elections are two entirely different things,” Leung said. “Some 70 per cent of accountants have work relations with the mainland … it would definitely affect their business should they [contest in the polls] – as scary as it is.”

Leung admitted it would be difficult to form a 30-strong team of accountants to run in the election committee race, but added he and his allies had been working on it for months and would cooperate with Action Accountants, a post-Occupy group.

Meanwhile, media tycoon Wong described his weeks-long Legco election campaign as a “humbling experience”.

“I never knew there were so many people in wheelchairs in Hong Kong, and that’s why people are calling for more barrier-free access,” he said. “I have also heard a lot of sad stories as citizens would come to me to share their family issues and how the government has failed to help them – something that even your friends might not tell you.”

Wong also revealed he was followed for weeks while he campaigned but refused to say if he had faced intimidation, as some other candidates claimed.