COMMENT The arithmetic and tribal psychology are against the success of a no-confidence move that’s initiated by the opposition.

PKR is said to be planning such a move early in Parliament's Budget session due to begin on Oct 19.

The opposition does not have the numbers to make a success of the move; if initiated by PKR the motion may well have the effect of a circling of the wagons by the BN, with Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak in the role of whip-wielding master.

Witness how the MCA higher-ups have closed ranks round the BN chairperson after a former president of the party unleashed over the weekend a broadside against Najib.

Dr Ling Liong Sik ( photo ) may well be sued by Najib for defamation for having said that the PM has had state funds channeled into his personal bank accounts, a piece of impugnable misconduct, Ling said, that warrants his ouster.

Ling is the first non-Umno BN luminary to call for Najib's resignation; the signs are he will not be the last.

It’s not hard to see that the attacks on Najib’s handling of the 1MDB imbroglio will escalate and ratchet up the pressure on the PM to quit office.

His most most trenchant critic, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, has opened up another front in his attacking sorties against Najib forays: yesterday he was in Sabah, a supposed bastion of support for the PM, where he uncorked another salvo in what is now a relentless verbal assault on Najib’s hold on office.

If Dr M’s latest petard does not elicit the threat, at least, of a restraining order from the Umno secretary-general Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor - not that one if issued will be respected by Umno’s elder statesman - the fact remains there is no stopping Mahathir.

Dr M may be the irresistible force but Najib remains the immovable object.

To shift the latter, it’s best for its success that the move comes from within the Umno quarter.

There are dissidents within that camp in party deputy president Muhyiddin Yassin and vice-president Shafie Apdal.

A plan to remove Muhyiddin from the position as chief war strategist for Umno was retracted shortly before it was to be effected; its proponents must have balked at the incentive removal would have given the party deputy president to go for broke and sponsor a no-confidence move against Najib.

Suffice to say, Muhyiddin and Mahathir were in Sarajevo in the last week of September for a conference on Bosnia.

On his return, Muhyiddin felt obliged to deny he had met up with Mahathir in Bosnia; if they did, it couldn’t be that the subject of a tete-a-tete would have been the weather.

Fearing what powerlessness will bring?

Give what we know of Mahathir’s character - how once he has set his mind on a goal, he won’t let up - and knowing that Najib will not relinquish office - Mahathir may well be correct in surmising that Najib fears what powerlessness will bring - it’s conceivable that Dr M’s game plan will be a removal of the PM from within.

The main factor against its possibility is the subservience of Umno’s divisional leaders and MPs, in particular, to the party supremo.

But when so many of the gauges of national well-being are at negative, especially the steep fall in the ringgit, even those most thickly swaddled in complacency within the Umno fold can be expected to feel that they are caught in a sinking boat.

It’s just under two weeks to the opening of Parliament’s end-of-year sitting, too short a time, some might say, for plans of mutiny to succeed.

But as one time prime minister of Britain Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics; there's enough time for a revolt within Umno’s parliamentary ranks to occur.

For its success, the insurrection would need opposition support. That’s when PKR, DAP and Parti Amanah Negara (PAN) will have to unitedly say they are for it provided some cast-iron conditions be ceded the opposition.

It’s best for the medium-term prospects of the opposition that conditions be a new, credible and impartial leadership for the Election Commission, and all new appointments to the judiciary be vetted by the Bar Council.

These two conditions, if granted, should see the opposition well-placed for their electoral future.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.