Thailand’s Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, a three-times divorced playboy who made his pet poodle an air chief marshal in the Thai military, poses perhaps the biggest challenge for both the country’s monarchists and its ruling junta in coming weeks.
He was born to be king, trained at Australia’s Duntroom military college and boasts a string of military titles and a pilot’s licence, but for decades has shown little interest in the public duties that will be expected of one of the world’s most revered monarchies.
Instead Vajiralongkorn has built up a reputation for womanising, extravagance, bizarre self-indulgence and occasional cruelty, including to his own children, several of whom have been stripped of their names and titles and live in exile.
His exploits hit international headlines in 2007, when a leaked video showed his then consort, Princess Srirasm, performing near-naked at a birthday party with pet poodle Foo Foo. The canine air chief marshal, who died last year, was cremated after four days of Buddhist rites.
More recently the prince was photographed at Munich airport, accepting salutes from the pilot and other aircraft staff while dressed in jeans and a tight crop top, showing off a torso covered in temporary tattoos.
The country’s fierce lèse-majesté laws, officially designed to protect much-loved King Bhumibol Adulyadej and his family from defamation, have kept the prince’s stranger exploits out of the Thai media, but the cover-up is only cosmetic.
Stories about Vajiralongkorn are a gossip mainstay nationwide, and he is loathed by many of his future subjects, including the elite circles expected to crown him and then help him rule.
“The lèse-majesté law criminalises publication of the prince’s exploits, but despite this, or indeed because of this, Thais have voracious interest in informal royal information and gossip, which they share privately with those they trust,” said Andrew McGregor Marshall, a British journalist who has written extensively on the monarchy.
“Almost all Thais know about the exploits of the crown prince, who has been a hated figure in Thailand since the 1970s.”
Distaste for the prince was spelt out in a leaked US diplomatic cable from 2010, in which members of the Thai privy council openly discussed their concerns about Vajiralongkorn including his meddling in politics and “embarrassing financial transactions”.
“Anand [Panyarachun, the former prime minister] added that the consensus view among many Thai was that the Crown Prince could not stop either, nor would he be able, at age 57, to rectify his behaviour,” the cable reads.
In conversations with the then US ambassador summarised in the cable, Thai officials also discussed the hope shared by many in the elite – but since all-but abandoned – that the King would appoint his widely respected daughter, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, as heir. Thailand has never had a ruling queen, and the laws of succession specify a male heir.
“If the Crown Prince were to die, anything could happen, and maybe Prathep [Sirindhorn] could succeed,” the cable quotes the late air chief marshal Siddhi Savetsila saying “almost hopefully”.
At the heart of the concern about Vajiralongkorn’s ascension to power at that time was not just his erratic track record, but fears of his personal relationship with ousted former prime minister and business tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra.
Thaksin presented the crown prince with a luxury car when he was first elected in 2001. Fears that Vajiralongkorn might find a support base among the populist politician’s voters are believed to have contributed to the coups that removed first Thaksin and then his sister Yingluck Shinawatra, also a prime minister, from power in 2006 and 2014.
However, since then the generals have been courting Vajiralongkorn, apparently preferring to shore up ties with a man almost certain to become king than leave him vulnerable to overtures from an exile and political rival.
Their efforts include a public relations campaign to bolster his reputation, including mass cycle ride tributes to his mother and father. They presented the prince as the image of energetic filial devotion, a counterpoint to stories of decadence and persistent rumours of ill-health details in another leaked US diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks and dated November 2009.
The junta’s interest in the crown prince appears to have been matched by a growing taste for power from the future ruler himself, whose views on how Thailand should be governed are almost entirely opaque.
“Vajiralongkorn has over the years demonstrated little interest in political and royal affairs,” said Professor Pavin Chachavalpongpun in a recent paper. “[His] life is an elusive study because Thais know little about his views on politics, or his vision of the future of the monarchy.”
He has shown none of his father’s charisma or public commitment to serve, however, apparently preferring the use of fear and violence intimidation to bolster his position. In recent months have brought purges of members of his own and his father’s inner circle, and his former wife’s family.
Marshall warned that this ruthlessness could be far more destabilising to Thailand than the dissolute, distracted ruler anticipated by many of the elite.
“With an incompetent junta in power, providing impunity to a loathed prince who is increasingly out of control, the likelihood of some kind of uprising seems very high,” he said.
“In my view, it is probable that we will face a so-called hard landing in terms of Thailand’s transition after Bhumibol’s death. Instead of a soft landing of peaceful evolution towards a democratic constitutional monarchy, we are likely to see a violent transition.”