Sabah speaker Salleh Said Keruak has slammed Dr Mahathir Mohamad for embarrassing Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, stating that the former premier had turned himself from a statesman to a "street brawler".

He was commenting on Mahathir's ‘takeover’ of the ‘Nothing to Hide: PM's dialogue with NGOs’ event to deliver a speech criticising Najib after the prime minister failed to turn up at a discussion on the troubled government-owned investment fund 1MDB at PWTC, Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

"Dr Mahathir has reduced himself from the level of a statesman to that of a street brawler. And this is most unfortunate.

"What is even more unfortunate is that Dr Mahathir expects the prime minister to also come down to this level.

"Had Najib turned up ... the entire event would have become undignified.

"With the shouting, booing and jeering, and the main purpose being to run down the prime minister, nothing would have been achieved," he said in a blog posting yesterday evening.

Salleh said even though some people have called Najib a "coward" and accused him of "chickening out", the dialogue would have only turned into a public brawl had the prime minister showed up.

"I was actually quite relieved when it was called off," he said, adding no winners would come out from this.

‘Crowd only interested in a fight’

"I remember when a public debate was held between PKR Youth and Umno Youth, also at PWTC, and it was reduced to a jeering match, with both sides claiming they won the debate.

"All it did was to reduce the dignity of the debaters to the level of the crowd, who were only interested in seeing a fight and were not interested in the facts that the debaters had to argue," he said.

Salleh ( photo ) also accused Mahathir of coming to the dialogue with the aim of running Najib down.

"Mahathir does not care what Najib has to say. He has already decided he will not accept Najib’s explanation," he said.

Salleh said he "dreaded" to think what would have happened had Najib turned up and tempers flared leading to the situation getting out of control.

"Under such a situation, it does not take much for words to turn to violent.”