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BANGKOK: Former Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej, who was forced from office in 2008 for starring in television cooking shows, died of liver cancer on Tuesday at the age of 74, associates said.
A close ally of ousted ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, Samak led the People Power Party (PPP) to victory in elections in December 2007 – the first polls since a military coup that ousted Thaksin a year earlier.
The fiery-tongued right-winger spent nine months as prime minister, beset by mass street campaigns against his government, before a court ruling on his TV appearances brought about his downfall.
Samak had been battling liver cancer for more than a year.
"His condition worsened to critical on Monday evening and he was taken to intensive care, where he died this morning," his former secretary Teeraphon Noprampa told reporters.
Samak's body would be moved to the Bangkok's Marble Temple and on Wednesday would receive a Royal Bath – a Buddhist funeral ceremony and honour bestowed on some high-ranking Thai citizens, Teeraphon said.
A spokesman for the private Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok confirmed that Samak died at 8:48 am (0148 GMT) on Tuesday.
Thaksin, who is living in exile to avoid a jail term for corruption, offered his condolences.
"My family and I express profound sorrow for the passing away of HE (His Excellency) Samak but I will not be able to attend his funeral," Thaksin said in a posting on the micromessaging site Twitter.
The silver-haired Samak was a leading figure on Thailand's political scene for more than three decades, with earlier stints as deputy prime minister, interior minister and governor of Bangkok.
His family also had close ties to Thailand's deeply revered palace. His gruff manner and colourful way with words may not have endeared him to the urban elite who had long dominated Thai politics, but he was personally backed by the populist Thaksin for the 2007 post-coup elections.
With the support of the rural poor who had also loved Thaksin for providing universal healthcare and microcredit schemes, he and the pro-Thaksin PPP stormed to victory in the December 2007 polls.
But he faced growing protests by the so-called "Yellow Shirt" movement – which helped topple Thaksin in 2006 – on the grounds that Samak was a proxy for the billionaire tycoon.
He stared down the demonstrators, who at one point besieged his offices at Government House in the city centre.
He even found time to continue his culinary moonlighting – with a unique take on certain pressing national matters that raised eyebrows. When consumers complained about the rising price of pork, he told them: "Eat chicken."
Yet it was the cooking shows that would lead to his political demise. He was forced from office when the constitutional court said the payments from two programmes were illegal.
The PPP leadership moved quickly to restore him to power, but it proved unpopular with both coalition partners and the party rank-and-file, with nearly one-third of the PPP's own lawmakers refusing to back his re-election.
- AFP/so
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