It was, as one participant delicately put it, a "small-circle election": some 424 back-slappers, picked by Beijing, proceeded to choose from among their own.Only one deputy was chosen from outside the charmed circle.
Leung Chun-ying, beat his rival, Henry Tang Ying-yen, in the final weeks of a bizarre process that most Hong Kongers refer to as a "small-circle election".
Although Hong Kong was promised universal suffrage in the Basic Law, the city's mini-constitution, almost 14 years later the chief executive is still selected through a small-circle election of 1,200 voters, mostly made up of politicians and businesspeople with close ties to the mainland.
But a visit to Downing Street with the deputy leader, Harriet Harman, amusingly recounted in this book, ended with Straw merely telling Brown to "widen the political circle involved in election planning".
But they scoffed at the notion, discussed in Washington political and media circles since the election, that the chamber's political influence was waning and that the group might become marginalized in the debt negotiations as a result.
Bush is not the only familiar name circling the upcoming election.
President Obama's State of the Union address this week circled back to election administration issues raised last year when he announced a bipartisan commission to consider solutions to long voting lines and other Election Day mishaps with the directive: "We can fix this, and we will".
"Those in Obama's inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton.
What the party has desperately needed is what one of the election inner circle calls "a forward offer": a series of good reasons to vote Labour once more.
Several other policymakers and lobbyists Trump has brought into his circle since winning the election are climate skeptics.
Irresponsible rumours that police are defying their commanders' orders to clamp down on protesters have been spreading in opposition circles since the June election.
