It is not my intention to nitpick but I feel Dr Mavis Puthucheary has got some background details off-tangent in her attempt to give perspective to Tengku Razaleigh's decision to offer himself for the post of Umno president in the party elections come September.

She said that when Umno president and prime minister of Malaysia Abdul Razak died in January 1976, deputy president Hussein Onn moved up and chose vice-president Dr Mahathir Mohamad as deputy prime minister and acting deputy president of Umno although Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and Ghafar Baba were the more senior party vice-presidents.

The speculation then was that Hussein Onn had wanted to choose Umno supreme council member Ghazali Shafie but Razaleigh, Ghafar and Mahathir had discreetly let him know that party tradition required that Hussein choose from one of the three party VPs only.

After about four months of dithering, Hussein decided to bow to party tradition and chose Mahathir.

It was speculated that his choice from among the veeps was influenced by such factors as Razaleigh's youth (he was then 39, which placed the Kelantan prince at a disadvantage), and Ghafar's lack of tertiary education which disqualified him. At 51, Mahathir had the age plus a vaunted degree to back him.

When Hussein declined to be nominated for the Umno presidency in June 1981, it was speculated that Razaleigh (who indeed, as Dr Mavis says, was bidding his time between 1976 and 1981) wanted to contest the post of party president. But Hussein apparently told him that Mahathir should not be contested as Umno president.

It was a cinch for Razaleigh to become party deputy president and deputy prime minister. But Mahathir felt that Razaleigh would not be patient enough as party and national No 2. He threw his support behind vice-president Musa Hitam's challenge for the vacant deputy president's post.

In a stunning upset that strengthened the process of democratic choice in Umno, Musa prevailed over the popular and influential Razaleigh, then finance minister.

Mahathir did not pick Musa as deputy prime minister in July 1981 (as Dr Mavis avers); he just backed Musa, though not publicly, in the party elections weeks earlier. The speculation prior to that Umno election was that the deputy president's post was Razaleigh's for the taking, but he ran a surprisingly inept campaign where his presumptions got the better of his aristocratic self.

Humbler, and more politically savvy, Musa stole a march on him and breasted the tape an improbable 200 votes better in a riveting contest. Umno appeared set for a more liberalising course, but, alas, Mahathir turned autocratic and authoritarian. And has foisted these traits on the party's method of choosing individuals for its two top posts.

Razaleigh wanted to challenge an undemocratic method of choosing Umno and the nation's two top power brokers. But the odds were stacked against him, undemocratically.

One protagonist in a democracy-fostering exercise of 23 years ago now has lost a forlorn battle to keep the embers of that watershed contest alive.

Alas, for the what-might-have-been.