Mick Hartley

There seems to be something about Korean women and power. Kim Jong-un's sister Kim Yo Jong is notoriously offensive – her brother's "verbal attack dog". South Korea's first and only female president Park Geun-Hye was impeached for corruption and abuse of power, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. And now:

The first lady of South Korea told her bodyguards that they should have shot police arresting her husband, President Yoon, media have reported in Seoul as tensions rise before a court ruling that could force him from office.

The country’s constitutional court is expected to deliver a judgment next week on the parliamentary impeachment of Yoon over his sudden and abortive attempt to impose martial law in December. Now his wife, Kim Keon-hee, faces potential criminal proceedings of her own for her reported words following Yoon’s arrest at his presidential residence in January.

According to court documents, quoted by the Hankook Ilbo newspaper, Kim angrily reproached members of the Presidential Security Service (PSS), who had blocked a previous effort to arrest the president for insurrection.

“I am disappointed in the PSS,” she said, according to documents related to the prosecution of two former bodyguards. “Guns are meant to be used in situations like this — what were you doing if you weren’t going to shoot?”

She is said to have spoken of her own desire to murder the leader of the opposition Democratic Party, her husband’s chief antagonist. “Honestly, I just want to shoot Lee Jae-myung and then take my own life,” she is alleged to have said….

Ever since his emergence on the political stage five years ago, Kim, 52, has lent much-needed glamour to Yoon, a solemn and austere former prosecutor. But from the beginning, she has been a figure whose strong opinions have sometimes eclipsed the conservative political agenda pursued by her husband.

During the presidential election campaign in 2021, she apologised publicly for “exaggerating” her academic achievements. In conversations covertly recorded by a journalist, she implied that she was the power behind the throne and would remain so if Yoon was elected president.

“Have you heard of ‘the second VIP’?” she asked, referring to the role of first lady. “I don’t think Yoon Suk Yeol is really the president. That fool is just a puppet.”

With personal assets of close to 50 billion won (£28 million) in 2018, her wealth as a businesswoman far exceeds that of Yoon.

She spoke of her interest in “dosas” or spiritual gurus. Her doctoral dissertation was about fortune-tellers and all of this played into claims, always denied, that Yoon was employing supernatural techniques on the campaign trail, such as writing a mystically charged Chinese character on his hand.

Strange. Very strange.