Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong did not write in a condolence letter to the Jeyaretnums following their father’s passing that the late Mr Joshua Benjamin Jeraretnum ‘had to be destroyed’.
JBJ’s eldest son, Kenneth has apolgised at a press conference held on Monday 2 May for suggesting that he did.
Speaking to reporters after a Reform Party rally, he said: ‘It was an honest mistake and I apologise if I misquoted him.’
Meanwhile, the question I would like to hear answered is how much damage did the PM inflict upon his own reputation by writing that particular letter of condolence in the first place?
I mean: Did he need to mention in the context of JBJ’s track record as a politician that, ‘Unfortunately, this helped neither to build up a constructive opposition nor our Parliamentary tradition’? I thought the general rule with letters of condolence was to either write something very obviously respectful or to restrict oneself to writing as little as possible. At least, one might ask oneself, ‘Am I helping the bereaved to feel better?’ If the answer is ‘Probably not,’ then it seems to me one can’t have sat down with the intention of writing a letter of condolence but some other sort of letter.
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