Is the party over for Thailand’s playboy king? He made his poodle an air force chief, spent Covid in a hotel with 20 ‘sex soldiers’ and threw a ‘disloyal’ mistress in jail… but has the death of his mother changed him?

When it comes to wealth, extravagance and notoriety, few compare to Thailand’s playboy king, Maha Vajiralongkorn. 

Known formally as Rama X, the 73-year-old monarch is the wealthiest ruler in the world, with an estimated net worth of £52billion. 

He has lived an extraordinarily wild, and at times outright bizarre, life that would put even history’s most debauched monarchs to shame.  

But in recent months, the flamboyant royal has all but retreated from public life.

Rarely seen since the October death of his mother Sirikit, the once-spirited monarch appears to still be in mourning. 

In November, just a few weeks after his mother passed away, a glum-looking Vajiralongkorn became the first ever Thai monarch to visit China as part of a state visit. 

And on February 1, the king was seen performing religious rites to commemorate the 100th day since his mother’s passing. Photos of the event showed uniformed soldiers obediently bowing down to the dour-looking king and queen in a gaudy room that held a large portrait of the late Sirikit. 

Compounding his misery is the poor health of his eldest daughter, who has been in a coma for more than three years.

Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol is receiving ‘continuous’ treatment to stabilise her blood pressure because of a severe infection, the palace said in August. She has been unconscious in hospital since falling ill due to heart problems in December 2022 during a dog training session. 

Other than formal events, the monarch appears to have had little contact with the outside world.

Before his retreat from the public eye, Vajiralongkorn was involved in a string of scandals, including making his poodle the chief of his air force, spending the Covid-19 lockdown with a harem of ‘sex soldiers’ in a German hotel, and throwing his mistress into prison for upsetting him and his wife. 

Though Thailand has some of the world’s strictest lèse-majesté laws – rules that allow courts to hand prison sentences of up to 15 years to anyone who dares criticise or mock the monarch – media outlets outside Thailand have normally been able to report on his wild antics. 

And given that Vajiralongkorn spends most of his time in Germany, he has become a veritable goldmine for the country’s tabloids. 

Vajiralongkorn was regularly seen wearing crop tops and tight jeans as he swanned about the nation with his partners. 

Even in his early years, he showed signs of being wholly out of touch with common people. 

Educated at King’s Mead School in East Sussex and later at Millfield, a boarding school in Somerset, he is said to have been a spoilt bully as a child. 

At the precocious age of 12, he could not tie his own shoelaces as he had grown up having courtiers do so for him. 

Following his education in the British schooling system, he was then sent to attend two different military training courses in Australia, before attaining a law degree from a Thai university. 

After starting a career as an officer in Thailand’s standing army, he quickly rose up the ranks to become the commander of the Royal Security Command, the detail in charge of protecting the country’s royal family. He also became a qualified pilot, certified to fly, among other aircraft, F-16 fighter jets and Boeing 737-400s. 

But his time in the military, where discipline and rigour are beaten into soldiers from the moment they sign up for active service, apparently did little to wrangle his zaniness into submission. 

Perhaps the best example of this is his bizarre relationship with his pet poodle.  

For 17 years, Foo Foo was the apple of Vajiralongkorn’s eye. Picked up at a Bangkok market in 1997 as a month-old puppy, the dog lived a life of luxury few of us could even begin to imagine. 

Foo Foo was often seen sitting in Vajiralongkorn’s arms, with the royal endearingly describing him as ‘quite cute, but… very weak’.

So beloved was the poodle that the monarch gave him a major military role as head of the nation’s air force. 

Foo Foo’s appointment as Air Chief Marshall bemused many at the time, including the US ambassador to Thailand. 

In a leaked 2007 cable, diplomat Ralph Boyce spoke of the dog’s antics at a gala dinner he hosted, at which Vajiralongkorn was guest of honour. 

Boyce wrote in the now-infamous note that he had confirmed that ‘the crown prince’s miniature poodle, Foo Foo, currently holds the rank of Air Chief Marshal. 

‘Foo Foo was present at the event, dressed in formal evening attire complete with paw mitts, and at one point during the band’s second number, he jumped up onto the head table and began lapping from the guests’ water glasses, including my own. 

‘The Air Chief Marshal’s antics drew the full attention of the 600-plus audience members, and remains the talk of the town to this day.’

That was the same year a sordid video was leaked by the then-crown prince’s enemies of the 30th birthday party of his third wife, Princess Srirasmi, in 2001. 

The video showed the princess wearing nothing but a G-string in front of dozens of courtiers, lying on the floor and eating cake beside Foo Foo. 

In early 2015, the poodle passed away. Vajiralongkorn tasked officials with running four days of Buddhist funeral rites for Foo Foo. 

The dog was then cremated, with the fate of its ashes unknown to this day. 

On top of his evidently long-standing love for animals, Vajiralongkorn, to put it mildly, has a bit of a reputation as a philanderer. 

As the world hunkered down in their homes for the Covid-19 pandemic, baking banana bread and following Joe Wicks’ exercise videos, Vajiralongkorn used his enormous wealth to live quite a different life to the rest of us. 

Accompanied by a harem of 20 concubines with military ranks, the Thai king booked out the whole fourth floor of the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in southern Germany. 

The floor was full of ‘treasures and antiques’ from Thailand, with amenities including a ‘pleasure room.’

His ‘sex soldiers’ are said to have been assembled as a military unit called the SAS. Like Britain’s special forces, the unit stood by the motto: ‘Who dares wins’.  

At the hotel, his concubines were apparently given military-style designations with numbers such as S01 or S020, along with ranks including major or colonel. 

The sex soldiers were also given honorary titles such as Sirivajirabhakdi or ‘The beautiful one who will be faithful to the king,’ it was claimed. 

One hotel worker said at the time that staff were forbidden from the fourth floor where the king and his entourage set up camp.  

Thailand expert Andrew MacGregor Marshall told Bild in 2020: ‘The whole floor [was] full of Thai antiques and treasures from Bangkok. 

‘The concubines make a big gamble – with the hope of winning big. Some are happy to join and are hoping for riches and success for themselves and their families. 

‘Others give in to the king’s pressure to join over fear of the consequences if they refuse.’

The king’s stay in Germany meant he missed Coronation Day in Thailand, marking the first anniversary of his accession to the throne. 

And since then, he has stayed in the nation, choosing to rule there instead of from his home. 

This ticked off both the German government and the people of Thailand. 

In 2020, then-foreign minister Heiko Maas said the government had made clear that ‘politics concerning Thailand is not to be done from German soil’.

He added Germany ‘would always oppose having guests in our country who run their state affairs from here’.

A spokesperson from the Foreign Ministry said at the time that this position had been made clear to the Thai government on several occasions, with representatives of the Asian nation assuring Germany that while government business is conducted by the Thai prime minister, the King is in Germany for private reasons. 

The king isn’t just someone who loves collecting the most beautiful members of his military for casual flings.  

At the age of 73, has so far had five marriages. He has long had a reputation of being a womaniser, with even his own mother comparing him to Don Juan.

She said during a trip to the US in 1982: ‘My son, the Crown Prince, is a little bit of a Don Juan. He is a good student, a good boy, but women find him interesting and he finds women even more interesting.’ 

Shockingly, he is currently married to two different women at the same time. 

In May 2019, three days before he took the mantle of king, he married Suthida Tidjai, former acting commander of Royal Thai Aide-de-Camp Department. 

As a result, upon his coronation, the former Thai Airways flight attendant became Queen Consort – and his fourth wife. 

Official photos from the wedding ceremony showed Suthida laying on the floor and looking longingly at the king as he gave her a gift. 

But it was not long before Vajiralongkorn’s eyes began to wander. 

Just two months after he married Suthida, he made his mistress Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi a royal noble consort, as well as a Major General in his nation’s army. 

Sineenat, born in 1985, worked as a nurse before she got involved with the king. 

She eventually became a bodyguard, pilot and parachutist, before joining the royal guards.  

Footage of the hideously awkward ceremony showed Sineenat lying on the floor as she demurely accepted a gift from the king, as Suthida stonily looked on. 

He used ceremonial water to anoint his partner while she lay at his feet.

It was the first time in a century that a ruling monarch has openly had multiple formal romantic partners. 

But just three months later, Vajiralongkorn issued a command to rescind the appointment to consort, as well as her military rank, and sent her to prison. 

She was accused of being ‘dishonourable, lacking gratitude [and of] disobedience against the king and the queen’, though circumstances around this are still unclear. 

The palace claimed at the time that she was being punished for trying to elevate herself to ‘the same state at the queen’.

Sent to the Bang Kwang maximum-security prison in Bangkok, she was released just a few months later and joined the king in his harem in Germany in September 2020. 

It was written in the Thailand’s Royal Gazette, where all laws and royal decrees are announced, that the king’s decision meant that her name was ‘not tarnished’.

It added: ‘Henceforth, it will be as if she had never been stripped of her military ranks or royal decorations.’

Along with his Don Juan-esque antics, the king also has bold sense of fashion that he does not like being mocked. 

In 2017, Thailand’s government placed significant pressure on Facebook to remove hundreds of posts that depicted the then-newly-crowned monarch walking through a shopping mall wearing a skimpy yellow crop top. 

A 44-second video showed the king walking with a woman through a Munich shopping mall. 

The video also exposed a large tattoo of his back, as well as what appeared to be a fake tattoo sleeve. 

This is far from the first time the king has been spotted out in public in a surprisingly sultry outfit for an elderly monarch. 

In 2016, he was seen arriving with Foo Foo at Munich airport in a tiny white top and sagging blue jeans. 

He was also seen sporting a fake tattoo sleeve as he got into an awaiting Mercedes convoy.

Given the tragedy that has struck the king in recent months, it’s unclear how long Vajiralongkorn will be in his low mood for. 

As the old saying goes, money can’t buy happiness; only military harems and crop tops.