Prime Minister Najib Razak’s overheated rhetoric of wanting Umno members to defend Putrajaya with their lives if need be came in for wry comment by two Pakatan Rakyat politicians whose sense of irony was the more telling for being understated.

Pakatan supremo Anwar Ibrahim broached the matter from an angle that was less oblique than that of Khalid Samad, the PAS MP for Shah Alam, at a PKR fund-raising dinner in Penang yesterday.