It does not help that Vajiralongkorn is deeply unpopular. He has lived the high life, largely abroad, churning through a succession of wives, siring multiple children outside his various marriages and shirking the more mundane sort of flesh-pressing expected of the heir apparent. A widely circulated video of his third wife, naked apart from a G-string, singing happy birthday to their pet poodle, gives a sense of the loucheness of his image. It is hard to imagine him acting as any sort of curb on Thailand’s excesses, political or otherwise.