Sunday 8 May 2022 11:17 PM President Bongbong! This former British public schoolboy looks set to win ... trends now

When Bongbong Marcos first arrived in Britain, he faced not just educational and cultural challenges but physical ones, too. 

For not only was he the youngest boy at the fee-paying Worth School in West Sussex, he was also among the smallest on the rugby pitch.

But what he lacked in strength he more than made up for in guile — he took a flick knife to games which he is said to have brandished in scrums.

It was the only time in the school day that Bongbong could not be protected by his bodyguards, some of whom were disguised as kitchen staff, reputedly to taste his school meals in case they had been poisoned.

Sometime later today, this Ferrari-driving former British public schoolboy, will — barring an electoral result that flies in the face of recent opinion polls that put him 30 points ahead of his nearest rival — be unveiled as the 17th president of the Philippines.

It will be a victory that completes one of the most extraordinary political comebacks of all time.

What makes Bongbong’s success so unlikely is that his father was the ruthless dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who plundered billions from his country while brutally suppressing dissent, and his mother Imelda, a former beauty queen, who was infamous for her vanity, materialism and her 3,000 pairs of shoes, half of which were left behind after the family fled a popular uprising in 1986.

Yet in a country of startling inequality, the Marcos legacy has been anything but a hindrance to the chances of Ferdinand junior — Bongbong’s real name — at the polls.

And while his triumph owes much to a web of dynastic politics, loyalties reaching back generations and exploiting social media, it was also forged on the playing fields of £36,000-a year Worth, a Benedictine boarding school near Crawley, where fellow pupils included comedian Harry Enfield and Cold Feet star Robert Bathurst.

At the time of his overthrow 36 years ago, Marcos senior was an international pariah. 

He and his wife, dubbed the ‘conjugal dictators’, had amassed a staggering amount of wealth and Imelda’s shoe collection remains the most notorious symbol of the couple’s outrageous ostentation.

She loved luxury European brands such as Christian Dior and Gucci, but also had a standing order for ten locally made pairs of shoes to be delivered every week to the presidential palace.

Her footwear collection, however, pales into insignificance compared with the billions of dollars that were stashed in secret bank accounts around the world or spent on real estate, jewellery, artwork and stocks.

Only after the regime’s downfall did Filipinos comprehend the magnitude of their plunder.

The couple had carried off one of the greatest government thefts ever seen, stripping up to $10 billion from the country’s coffers to fund their lavish lifestyle.

The dictator and his cronies were found to have pillaged everything from foreign aid to World Bank loans, forcing outright takeovers of major companies and soliciting bribes for lucrative government contracts.

More than three decades after they were harried into exile in Hawaii — where Marcos died in 1989 — most of this hidden wealth is still missing or the subject of court proceedings that have dragged on for years.

With 64-year-old Bongbong as president, any lingering hopes of the Philippines recovering the family’s ill-gotten gains look slim.

Political opponents say Marcos Jr is running not only to redeem the family name but also to ensure that their immunity from prosecution remains in place.

When questioned about this toxic heritage, Bongbong has shown anything but repentance. ‘What have I to be sorry about?’ he demands.

Instead, he cites the thousands of miles of roads and power plants built by his father, while boasting that the Philippines has the highest levels of literacy in south-east Asia.

If, as the pundits predict, he secures victory today, Bongbong will not only be the first head of state to have played himself in a film, but also the first to claim he has been promised a ticket to ride on the first commercial flight to the moon.

The promise, he says, was made by disgraced former U.S. President Richard Nixon. When Nixon was in the White House, Bongbong was at Worth, where he had arrived in 1970.