Please don’t call my husband ‘first gentleman’, Hong Kong’s chief executive-elect says
City’s next leader reveals the media-shy academic dislikes the term and proposes ‘the spouse of the chief executive’
How about “first gentleman”? Definitely not, the chief executive-elect said on Tuesday, because her mathematician husband, Professor Lam Siu-por, did not like the term.
“Perhaps he should be called ‘the spouse of the chief executive’,” Carrie Lam said on a radio show.
When Lam becomes the city’s first female leader on July 1 there will be at least one break with a tradition normally associated with the chief executive’s spouse – her husband is determined not to take up any honorary chairmanships of community groups.
“This is the wish of Mr Lam,” Lam, the former chief secretary, said. “Siu-por is a very low-profile academic ... he does not want to change [his way of life] even when I become chief executive.”
She said she would talk to the community groups in question about whether their constitutions should be amended and how to fill the vacancies.