COMMENT “May you live in interesting times” is an inscrutable Chinese saying: one can’t be sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.

Though it is Chinese in provenance, its appropriateness to Malaysian politics has made people doubt its authorship - they think something that’s so applicable to the goings-on in our public arena must make it an apothegm minted in Malaysia.

Arguments over who owns the copyright become irrelevant especially when the saying has such proverbial application to Malaysian affairs.

Like whom these days bothers about soccer being an English invention?

That country may have the best football league in the world but it is a perennial also-ran at the sport’s quadrennial summit, the World Cup.

There can be no prizes for guessing who would win if there is a champions’ league for political operators.

We would win hands down simply because the gyrations of our operatives can keep pundits, observers and the rest of the hoi polloi in thrall and intrigued.

For nearly always it’s interesting times in Malaysian politics.

The latest oscillations in the political pendulum have Prime Minister Najib Razak ( left ) in what is being bruited about as tacit cooperation with opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim that is intended to peg a nemesis of Anwar’s, Daim Zainuddin, in a corner.

Former economic czar Daim was an ‘untouchable’. Nobody, except perhaps former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad could throw a cordon around him.

In 2001, he was dropped by Mahathir from the cabinet as finance minister.

The manoeuvres that preceded his sacking were shrouded in a mist, like essential goings-on always are in the national political arena.

Speculation, then, revolved around what seemed like a series of clashes between PM Mahathir and Daim over such issues as who should be Bank Negara governor; Singapore Telecoms’ attempt at taking up a significant stake in a Malaysian company that was in control of our fibre-optic network: and over the appointment of personnel who can sit on the board of both a parent government-linked company and its subsidiaries.

No response

Daim, whose is fond of wafting in and out of political events like an apparition, has not said anything in response to what Mahathir had claimed in his memoirs, A Doctor in the House , about the reasons for Daim’s departure from cabinet.

On the grapevine after Mahathir’s book was launched, it was said that Daim was readying his version of history for publication, but four years after his sometime boss and collaborator had noted that Daim had to go because there were too many complaints about him, the former finance minister has yet to write his version into the historical record. 

Some mysteries may still a little too febrile for revelatory touches, or are Malaysians like what the poet TS Eliot’s generally observed about humankind – that “they cannot stand very much reality”, preferring sanitised versions of it.

The reality about Daim and Anwar is that if the latter were to finger what he considers as the principal plotter behind his eviction from Umno and the deputy premiership in 1998, the person would be Daim.

Going back in time in search of antecedents for the permutations now afoot, it was Anwar who had induced Najib to desert Team B in the epic contest with Team A to control Umno in the April 1987 party polls.

Analysts have come to regard that contest as the most pivotal in Umno’s post-May 1969 history.

Incumbent Anwar, a supporter like Daim of the Mahathir faction in that crucial contest, was vacating the Umno Youth leadersip to contest for a vice-presidential slot in the party election.

Anwar enticed Najib with the youth presidency in return for the latter’s backing for Team A, headed by Mahathir.

Najib, who was leaning strongly towards backing Team B headed by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah ( right ), placed expediency before principle in abandoning a faction to which he was more politically inclined.

From that occasion on, Najib came to be cast as a politician who could be relied on to place survivalist instincts before all else.

Najib has for several months been under duress from Mahathir to leave the PM’s post.

While the PM is not bold enough to direct counter fire at his main assailant, he knows he can choose softer targets if that helps back him out of a corner.

An attack on Daim is as close as Najib can get at his main tormentor, Mahathir.

And if he can get help from Anwar, it won’t be a first time when he has had recourse to Anwar for what would enable him to survive. 

If Najib can quell Daim, with Anwar’s help, it would not be unlikely he would be able to render Mahathir quiescent.

After all, almost none feel that Daim’s not replying to Mahathir’s claims about him in his memoirs is because he acquiesces in his former boss’ strictures.

More likely he has reckoned that the time for reply has not yet come.

All of which makes for interesting times in Malaysian politics because the dice is always rolling and it is never easy to predict the numbers that come up.  

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.