I refer to the Malaysiakini report Malaysia's Svengali .

Terence Netto's decision to compare the late Ghazali Shafie to Svengali would have backfired in an earlier and more literate age, and I am not at all sure that ‘King Ghaz’ would have looked on that comparison with complete dis-favour.

He might perhaps have taken to it with glee.

If the reported machinations of the past required greater decryption on the part of the reader, this was as much on account of the finesse with which the ‘Great Game’ was played as it was with the effectiveness of the more primitive forms of social control exerted by the authority.

The political class then was much smaller, but being more at ease with the ways of the world and generally more intelligent, it was great deal more difficult to manipulate: while we might now accuse people like Ghazali Shafie of having perpetrated any number of morally questionable actions, can we deny that they often did so with more than a streak of Machiavellian political genius?

And whence has that genius fled?

Today, we baulk regularly at what we are told, but this has much less to do with legislative or political deviousness than it has with the sheer idiocy of what is being said in the first place –  our politicians aren't dark masters of political double-speak; they are woefully inadequate and lack the imagination to assume that the rest of us could be anything but the same.

Also, it surprises me that no one has sought to challenge Bernama's attribution of Ghazali's nickname to the apparent sternness of his personal conduct. I always understood it to be a reference to a character in the Alley Oop comic strip.