Smash hit

Unlike, say, the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested in London while seeking medical treatment in 1998, Thaksin was welcomed to Britain in 2006 on what the Foreign Office called a “private visit”. “I’m very happy in the UK,” he told me when we met in London in October. “The people are friendly.”

Thaksin is a small and quietly spoken man. Being notoriously thin-skinned, he doesn’t stay quietly spoken for long. While a charismatic orator in Thai, he speaks English confidently but badly. Our meeting was set up by the London public-relations firm Bell Pottinger. Its corporate motto is “Better reputations”, although Thaksin is happy enough with his. He boasts about being “very aggressive” in business and politics. “When you attack me, I attack back,” he warns me.

He has no regrets about the drug war. Like many countries, Thailand had (and still has) a serious drug problem. But does this justify killing 2,656 men, women and children? Thaksin now disputes this death toll, even though it was provided by his own loyal officials. “That is part of the smear campaign against me,” he says.

I show Thaksin the Interior Ministry document that the NHRC believes indicates an official shoot-to-kill policy. Immediately he distances himself from a policy for which he had once claimed to take “full responsibility”.

“If it were to be an order from someone, they have to be responsible,” he says. But couldn’t he have at least suspended the campaign, particularly when it became clear that the blacklists were faulty? “I, as a prime minister, I have so many things to do… I just give the policies… How can you [be] responsible for everything in the country?” It’s a bizarre and cowardly defence: I was too busy to stop the slaughter.

What about the dead children? The topic flusters Thaksin. He says that “just the one” child was shot dead by police during the drug war, but “can’t remember exactly how that happened”. To jog his memory: in the first month of the campaign alone, four children aged nine or below were killed, along with 13 teenagers, according to a list compiled from press reports by Thai human- rights workers. But Thaksin prefers to focus on the “millions of addicts” he claims he has saved.

Thaksin also now denies ever urging the Thai police to “act decisively and without mercy” against drug suspects. “I never said that,” he says, adding: “It’s not because I ordered them to kill. What I said was, ‘We have to get tough.’ ” Thaksin is proud of his close relations with the police, but says he was never a beat cop who (the description is telling) “do a lot of patrol, a lot of killings”. He also admits that some police deal drugs, while others “may be doing” drug-war executions. “You think all of them are good persons?” he says. “No way.” But allegations of police brutality at the time were none of his business. “The police chief has to handle this, not the prime minister.”

A new investigation into the drug war is also under way in Thailand. The Independent Committee on the Casualties of the 2003 War on Drugs aims to confirm the death toll, compensate bereaved families and name the killers. Predictably, Thaksin’s legal team has challenged its impartiality. His chief lawyer has urged British people to “suspend their judgment” and presume his client innocent until proven guilty – a right withheld from those gunned down in Thaksin’s drug war.

Lawyers have suggested that Thaksin’s drug war might amount to a crime against humanity under article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), set up in 1992. Thaksin finds this funny. “I’ve done nothing wrong!” he laughs. “I just give the policy. The practitioners have to be responsible.” The human-rights commissioner Vasant thinks otherwise. “Those who devised the policy are primarily responsible for the deaths,” he says. Vasant believes that only the threat of an ICC trial “will ensure this kind of incident never happens again”. Thailand signed the Rome Statute in 2000 but, under Thaksin, didn’t ratify it.

Thaksin shows no remorse for the drug-war dead. Maybe he’ll never need to. The new committee can only forward its findings to the police, who are as unlikely as ever to act, or to the Department of Special Investigation, an FBI-like department under the justice ministry with an abysmal crime-solving record.

Thaksin vows he will return after a general election scheduled for December. Returning before then could spark a “confrontation” that might cause the junta to postpone the election, he says. “I want Thailand to return to democracy.” Then he will fight the corruption charges against him. Can he beat them? “Oh, easy,” he grins.

His loyalists have formed a new party and vowed to contest the December poll on his behalf. “The election is critical,” says Baker. “He’ll put a lot of money into it in the hope that he can gain enough influence to put the brakes on this judicial assault on him and his family.” How much money? Not counting an estimated $1.5 billion frozen by the Thai authorities, he still has over $4 billion, calculates Baker.

“I don’t have that much,” says Thaksin. “I’m worth two-billion-something US dollars.” With some assets frozen, his fortune is “shrinking”, he insists. But he still has an electoral war chest far bigger than any of his rivals. Thaksin denies that he is funding any political party in Thailand, a claim believed by few Thais, including his supporters.

What about his supporters in England? The master storyteller has written himself a new chapter as just another football-crazy billionaire, and for now most fans seem to believe it. But if you Google “Manchester City” and “human rights” these days, you get about 70,000 hits, a fact no amount of free noodles can obscure.

“I don’t want to spoil the party,” writes one fan in the Manchester Evening News, “but what happens… if this foreign fugitive really turns out to be an international criminal? I just hope we all don’t finish up with egg on our faces in a few months’ time. Naive is too mild a word.”