Giles Ji Ungpakorn does some great work on Thailand but he doesn't understand the succession conflict. He is wrong to say: "The hypothesis that the present long-running unrest in Thailand is primarily caused by a 'crisis of succession', assumes that the Thai monarch has real power and that he has been constantly intervening in politics." As I make clear in my forthcoming book, the current king has very limited power and has not tried to intervene in Thai politics since late 2008. The key point is that the monarch controls the royal fortune, officially estimated at $37 billion, and likely to be at least $70 billion. This is at the core of the Thai conflict