Tan Cheng Bock v AG 129 [2017] SGCA 50 This in turn runs into difficulty at two levels. First, PM Lee in his speech, does not, on any reading, say President Wee’s term of office was being selected because he had been elected by the citizens of Singapore. Read in context, PM Lee was saying that President Wee’s term of office was chosen because he was the first to exercise the functions of the President, not because he was popularly elected (as we have explained at [120] above). Second, none of the other MPs could reasonably have been of the mistaken belief that President Wee was popularly elected. The Commission’s Report was published and released to the public on 7 September 2016, and the White Paper which makes extensive references to the Report was presented to Parliament on 15 September 2016. The Report was referred to repeatedly during the Parliamentary debate in question, and it stated quite clearly that President Wee was not a President elected by the citizens as the transformation of the office of the President occurred during President Wee’s last term of office (at para 7.43): The transformation of the Presidency into an elected office occurred during Mr Wee’s term as President but upon the expiration of his term, Mr Wee reportedly declined the invitation to run because he “could not reconcile himself with the need to campaign for votes”. [footnote omitted] 130 Hence, the conclusion that the Appellant advances cannot stand because it requires us to accept that a mistake took place when nothing in the text of the debates or in the material before the House supports this. 131 As for the AG’s advice, we think it is, in the final analysis, irrelevant. We put it to Mr Rajah during the course of oral argument, and he agreed, that nothing ultimately turned on this argument or on the correctness or otherwise of the AG’s advice. In our view, Mr Rajah’s third argument was really the first and second arguments put in a different way. If as a matter of law the correct interpretation of Art 19B read with Art 164 is that an election could only be reserved if five elections by the citizens of Singapore had failed to produce a 64