COMMENT These days Prime Minister Najib Razak must be looking back to April 2011 when he hesitated to go simultaneously to the polls with Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud the same way former International Monetary Fund chief Dominic Strauss-Kahn must look at his visit to the Sofitel Hotel in New York last year.

Najib's hesitation tripped him into a concatenation in which every divination of when it would be a good time for him to seek a national mandate was subverted by unfavourable circumstances...