I read Farish Noor's "Mahathir's Dilemma" (Feb 19) with great interest. An excellently put-together piece of writing. It made me reflect on a news item from Wednesday's UK Guardian and the similarities to the Malaysian situation.

Columnist Francis Wheen launched into a deconstruction of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's increasingly disjointed perception of history and fact. Blair, as Wheen highlighted, had become increasingly prone to revising personal as well as party history since his ascension to power in 1997 (and perhaps a little before).

He claims to have sneaked onboard a plane to the Bahamas in Newcastle during his youth. But, there has never been a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas. Similarly, his declared football hero, Jackie Milburn, retired when Blair was age four, yet Blair claims to have enjoyed watching many of his games live as a teenager.

Oh dear. We often reinvent our personal histories as time glosses over, but this penchant for "reinterpreting reality...retailoring himself and his history to suit the moment" (as friend and author Robert Harris said) becomes rather alarming when applied to the political process.

The recent gerrymandering of the vote for Labour's candidate for London mayor resulted in Blair's favourite trouncing the party favourite by 25,000 votes to 80,000. This was all engineered at the eleventh hour by a Blairite intervention of an college electoral system.

His underlings have duly parroted in the media that the same block voting system was used to vote Blair and his deputy into power. Not so. It was "one member, one vote" to elect Blair, yet he and his followers conveniently forget. Or do they, as Wheen suggests, genuinely think that they are correct?

Do visionary leaders tend to fall prey to the very re-visioning they attempt to realise for their nations? Does the "hoped for" become the false reality imposed on the unwitting nation?

It was not so long ago that many thousand Malaysians, myself included, lost the chance to vote in the recent elections. We were told that there were "complications with the system". If the people of London are ill-content letting the Labour candidate for London mayor rest on the laurels of an engineered vote, how should we feel?

And I need not go into the particular revisions or re-visionings within Malaysian politics.

All this featured opposite a full-page article comparing Blair to Austria's Jorg Haider, the current political media focus of Europe. Haider, of the right-wing Freedom Party, finds much in common with Blair's policy and stances.

Indeed, they sound remarkably similar in their statements on Europe: "a positive attitude," says Haider whilst advocating tightening of immigration controls and being increasingly peery-eyed at foreigners. New Labour took the tabloid Sun's line - "chancers trying to gate crash our shores" - on the recent Afghan hijack by encouraging deportation and interviewing asylum-seekers without legal representation.

Somehow it all reminds me of home. Bangladeshi, Filipino and Indonesian workers ghettoised, beaten and treated like social offal despite their contribution to our material comforts. But I need not go on, Farish has covered this too.

I attended Mahathir's recent reception in London's Malaysia Hall which malaysiakini covered. It was there that the Prime Minister related how he was just an average citizen on his weekends, going to the shopping mall with his daughter, sipping coffee with her, talking with the people. "What other leader does that?" he asked. "Tony Blair!" piped someone in the front.

Swiftly recovering Mahathir smiled, "Well, that is very good then, but he is a Labour man and I am a conservative," which was answered with appreciative laughter (from an audience gathered largely to bask in his presence).

But what disturbs me now is not so much that Dr M is like Blair is like Haider, but that the adulation received in that Malaysia Hall room furnished the PM with a rather deceptive vision of the electorate's approval.

Added to that the fact that the Prime Minister's assistants issued a "no more political questions" gag-order halfway through (following much questioning on the Anwar Ibrahim affair), one begins to worry just how easy it is for people in power (or their underlings) to construct a perception of reality that is increasingly distanced from the grassroots.

Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" who transformed the economic and social reality of her people perhaps as radically as Mahathir has transformed ours, eventually lost her grip of reality. In the end her party removed her. The ruthless determination necessary to realise such a painful transformation often takes its toll, and not just on the individual.

As Farish Noor points out, Mahathir's critique of the Tunku Abdul Rahman's premiership was incisive and sharp, but he himself was incapable of the reform necessary to truly progress Malaysian politics.

Where is the political space, the cultural space, available for that reform within the Malaysian polity? I foresee no one amongst our present representatives capable of this in the near future, so who will create that culture of reform?

Blair's government in the UK makes its case based on modernisation and reform. But, so far the Third Way seems to be the Old Way.

It is by no means easy to realise such a sea of change, but it needs to be done and furthermore, it needs to be discussed candidly by all parties, both new and old. We are all entitled to shape Malaysia.

Maybe, the present generation of Malaysians will find it within themselves to somehow transcend the limits and depredations of the old politics, yet also include and preserve the vital essences - pluralism, multiculturalism, wisdom, etc inherent in Malaysia's shared cultures - that find themselves so impoverished in their present incarnation. To be representative without being repressive.

"Transcend and include" a Third Way? I'd rather not, please. The Third Way is too often a case of "My Way". But to paraphrase that political favourite, perhaps it's time that as a coherent Malaysia we did it " Our Way".

YIN SHAO LOONG is based in the UK and he holds a masters degree in business and the environment. His work in London is targetted at opening senior decision-makers up to the sustainability agenda.