COMMENT | Over the now fast-fading year, two narratives have marked the politics of the opposition in Malaysia.

One is on the ostensible destroyer of constitutional government metamorphosing into improbable rescuer of the country from kleptocracy.

The other narrative is the man whose eyes have so long been firmly fixed on the main chance that the more it eludes him, the shakier his judgment of the paths by which to get there.

Critics who think Dr Mahathir Mohamad's credentials as a democratic reformer are bogus, slight an important strand in the Machiavellian approach to his political craft: the salutary sense of responsibility for what he has wrought prompts the Herculean effort to set right what has gone wrong, for which he has been hugely culpable.

On the other side of the opposition's narrative equation is this: Friends of Anwar Ibrahim, aware of the ambition that seethes within him, cannot seem to help him turn an obsession into irony.

That enterprise is always useful. In life, it is the great antidote to insomnia; in politics, it is the alternative to stalemate and sterility.

All this is prologue for the point that last weekend's pow-wow held by the opposition Pakatan Harapan to establish focal points for proceeding - such as who will be prime minister and who will be deputy should the coalition win an imminent general election (GE14) - was stymied for lack of consensus.

The reason: the Harapan presidential council's choice of Mahathir as PM and Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail as deputy should the coalition win GE14 was not assented to by the weekend's conclave because the gaoled Anwar has to approve it first.

So insisted the PKR complement at the weekend's durbar.

PKR's obduracy has had this ironic effect: their de facto leader who was the principal adhesive in the improbable opposition coalitions that had seminally denied the ruling BN its two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2008 (GE12) and bested BN in the popular vote in 2013 (GE13) has now mutated to become the main impediment to the coalition's progress.

This ironic development rendered the one-and-a-half day conclave sterile rather than what it should have been – decisive moment in the shaping of the Malaysian deliverance from the precipice to which 60 years of Umno-BN rule has conduced.

When seen against the backdrop of the Registrar of Societies' foot-dragging on recognising Harapan as a political entity and approving its logo, the outcome damages the standing of Sungai Buloh's most famous resident...