As I See It | Comedy of errors at reform vote leaves pro-Beijing camp red-faced ... but is the joke also on us?

In politics, sometimes a mistake is just a mistake. Then there are blunders so shocking that they draw gasps and deer-in-headlights stares from even the opponents. The latter happened at Legco yesterday.

After nearly two years of bitter political wrangling, 79 days of street occupation, months of government-funded media blitzes, and a last-minute appeal to the opposition by senior Beijing officials, the biggest constitutional showdown in the post-handover era finally came to an end – a dramatic one at that.

It came as little surprise that the Beijing-backed proposal for the 2017 chief executive election was voted down by the Hong Kong legislature.

What’s astonishing was the 28-to-8 defeat. There are 70 seats in Legco and 42 of them are taken by pro-Beijing lawmakers. That means the government was only about five votes shy of the super-majority it needed to pass the electoral reform bill.

There were unconfirmed rumours that pro-democracy lawmakers were offered hundreds of millions of dollars to change their minds, although none of them took the bait. In the end, however, the bill that Hong Kong’s No. 2 official Carrie Lam has been peddling for months received only eight out of the 70 Legco votes. Even a Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t have come up with a better twist.

Exactly what happened is the subject of much contention and confusion.