AFP, BANGKOK: Dozens of ex-MPs from Thailand’s toppled government met in public for the first time Thursday to hear a Skype address from the self-exiled former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who sits at the crux of the country’s political rupture. Applause erupted among the Puea Thai Party faithful as the 67-year-old cop-turned-telecoms magnate appeared on a sketchy Skype link from an undisclosed country. Thaksin and his affiliated parties have won every election since 2001, even though he has lived overseas for eight years to avoid jail on a graft conviction. He is accused of toxifying the country with corruption by the Bangkok-centric royalist elite who have skewered his governments with coups and legal cases, plunging the kingdom into a decade-long political crisis. The rare gathering of party grandees was ostensibly non-political—in keeping with a junta ban on political expression.