Westminster, eat your heart out. While we obsess over Red Wall seats and backbench mutinies, a story is brewing in Pyongyang that makes Boris’s partygate look like a parish council row. I’ve been talking to sources in the intelligence community. They’re worried. Very worried.
The whispers have been circulating for months. Now they’ve hardened into something concrete. Kim Jong Un has a mother who was never officially acknowledged. Her name? Ko Yong-hui. She died in 2004. But the regime kept her existence hidden. Why? Because her lineage is a headache for the Kim dynasty.
Here’s the game. The Kim family has always relied on a blood-soaked myth: pure Paektu bloodline. They trace their ancestry back to Kim Il Sung, the founding leader. Anyone who threatens that purity is a threat. And Ko Yong-hui? She was born in Osaka. Japan. The enemy.
This isn’t just historical trivia. The North Korean elite is already fractious. Factional infighting is rife. The old guard remember Kim Jong Il’s dalliances with Japanese culture. They saw the ‘Arirang’ performances as kitsch. They know about the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy on the leader’s family background.
Now this secret is out. It’s like a charge of dynamite in a carefully constructed house of cards. The military hardliners, the party ideologues – they will seize on this. “Our leader is not pure,” they will whisper. And in a system built on personality cult, that’s the ultimate heresy.
Kim Jong Un is not stupid. He knows the risk. That’s why he’s been pushing a frenzy of missile tests, trying to distract with brinkmanship. But the missiles are a sideshow. The real fight is inside the room. His own relatives are circling. His sister, Kim Yo-jong, is seen as a contender. She’s sharp. Ruthless. And she doesn’t have a Japanese mother.
I’ve seen the polling from defectors and think tanks. Support for Kim is softening. The economy is a basket case. Sanctions are biting. The pandemic exposed the regime’s fragility. Now this. A blow to the legitimacy that has kept the family in power for three generations.
Whitehall is watching. The Foreign Office has a small team on Pyongyang. But they’re not the ones who will feel the first tremors. It’s the Chinese. They prop up the Kim regime. They don’t want a collapse. But they also don’t want a chaotic succession. Beijing will be reading this report with heavy hearts.
The bottom line? This could be the start of the end. Not today. Not tomorrow. But the cracks are showing. And once a personality cult starts to fray, it’s hard to stop. I’ll be staying close to my contacts. Watch this space.
