“The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.”

- Terry Deary

COMMENT | Because Pakatan – what is it called now? – has decided to play the Umno game instead of rewriting the rules of the game, it is pointless worrying about the possible power former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad would wield in the coalition that is facing off against Umno in the next general election.

As I argued the former prime minister plays for keeps and if removing, the current Umno grand poohbah is the main goal than the former prime minister who has resuscitated the floundering opposition has to be given free rein in the possible destruction of Umno. That is the only tactical play.

My columns as some have argued, well that should be mocked, is apparently the antithesis of strategic thinking, what with all this talk about principles, egalitarianism and burrowing into the past so we do not make the same mistakes in the future.

Political prisoner Anwar Ibrahim's caution that the installation of the ringleaders of the Najib refuseniks as the main leads in Pakatan Harapan would be similar in structure of Barisan Nasional, is unintentionally humorous. Anyone with any real interest and objectivity in Malaysian politics would conclude that Pakatan Harapan, even without Mahathir, is a continuation of alliance politics in which Barisan Nasional is the most successful incarnation.

The only reason why the opposition is a viable alternative is that the charismatic Anwar Ibrahim managed to split the Malay vote and cobble together an alternative alliance which was very much an improvement of the Barisan Nasional formula but not a rejection of it.

It is pointless talking about “consensus” because what was really going on was “compromise”. There is nothing wrong with compromise but the real problem is that all those compromises were at the expense of ideology that was supposed to have cured this nation of its “ketuanan politics”. After a while, when Pakatan Rakyat spectacularly imploded, the only dogma remaining was that Umno had to replaced.

Making a pact with the former prime minister and Bersatu is merely by “any means necessary” and to argue otherwise, to make the argument that the “reform” agenda is still on the table is mendacious, considering the fact that the Najib refuseniks have been blatant in their old Umno strategies of garnering the Malay vote, which is what the opposition claims in the utilitarian value of Mahathir.

The DAP’s Lim Guan Eng claims that the DAP opposes the possible monopoly of Bersatu of the coalition’s leadership roles but declined to comment on whether his party would accept Mahathir or Muhyiddin (Yassin) as the leader of the coalition because apparently jailed political prisoner Anwar Ibrahim is still Harapan’s favourite son.

Bersatu Youth chief Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman in agreeing with Lim made a rather dubious analogy with what the Labour party’s Jeremy Corbyn went through before Labour’s big gains the UK general elections, henceforth called May’s Folly...