COMMENT As diplomacy is a branch of politics, it is part of the diplomatic arts of the genre that a practitioner has to have it in his person to grant gracefully what he no longer has the power to withhold.

Say what you like about the first and fifth prime ministers of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi respectively, both had the good grace to yield their positions when the pressure became too much for them to fight back or withhold.

Giving up power when one is at the top of the ‘greasy pole’ - in British PM Benjamin Disraeli’s felicitous phrase - has never been an easy thing to do.

Term-limits became the American way of getting occupants of the presidential office to quit.

Although President Franklin Roosevelt was popular enough to win four elections (1932, ‘36, ‘40 and ‘44), the US Congress had the good sense subsequently to limit their president to two consecutive four-year terms.

The British style exchews term-limits but their system enjoys built-in insurance against longevity for an unpopular leader.

The reigning political party has a traidtion of pressuring the incumbent PM to quit when he or she is seen as having become a liability.

This is determined as the certain expectation of defeat should the party go into approaching polls with the same head honcho.

By forcing out Margaret Thatcher ( photo ) in 1991, the ruling British Conservative Party relied on that puissant tradition of self-surgery to remove an inficted tumuor.

When the Labour Party did almost the same in 2007 to Tony Blair, like Thatcher a three-election winner, it showed that that tradition of removal of a leader who has become a liability made it unnecessary to impose constitutional term-limits.

Malaysia is a long way from arriving at this tradition, though the long dominant political party, Umno, has a custom where the president yields office, with whatever grace he can muster, when the pressure against him reaches the point where a schism threatens upon his insistence on staying or risking a destructive contest for the presidency.

Founding prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had been under intense pressure from Umno’s Young Turks, led by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to quit after the May 13, 1969 race riots.

The Young Turks, whose ranks included Musa Hitam and Abdullah Ahmad, later a proponent of the Malay dominance school of thought, pressed for the replacement of the Tunku by his deputy in both party and government, Abdul Razak Hussein.

The third PM, Hussein Onn, also left voluntarily in 1981 after a brief five years in office.

He said his leaving was because of poor health but there was speculation he was offended at the party’s appeal for a royal pardon for a popular chieftain whom he shunned, that was relayed to the Agong without Hussein’s say-so.

The fifth PM, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, decided like the Tunku, to withdraw in 2009 rather than risk a schism that loomed if he chose to put the the party through what would have been a wrecking fight for the presidential post.

The nub of the argument

This is the nub of the argument levelled at Umno president Najib Abdul Razak by critics from within his party: they say he, by reason of his mishandling of the 1MDB wealth fund, is an albatross around its neck if the party were to go into next general election with him in charge.

Najib is fighting back.

His cohorts argue that there is nothing impugnable in the the PM's handling of 1MDB funds and that the huge sums that went into his private banks accounts were donations, not state funds.

This view is now confirmed by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) probe, but both the official party line and the MACC’s finding strain credulity.       

Our system has been gutted of the checks and balances of parliamentary democracy where matters of this nature ought to be impartially resolved.

It’s no small paradox that the man who has been the loudest in calling out Najib for assorted transgressions over the 1MDB issue is Dr Mahathir, the former PM most responsible for vitiating our system of democratic trammels on executive power.      

He left office after 22 years and three months as PM, during which span he built up the country’s infrastructure and hastened the pace of its economic growth but hollowed out its democratic underpinnings.

He left office voluntarily, if that description can be said to fit the exit of someone who had stayed as long as he did.

He was not pressured to leave - he’s not the sort to buckle to such constraints - but generally people were glad to see him go.

Now they are glad that he’s around, 12 years from his retirement - here it must be said withdrawal from office, not from work - if only to see what he will do in a situation where the PM is an albatross around the necks of party and country.

He will have to acknowledge that a predecessor whom he disliked and his own successor, whom he came to see was a mistake, did have a sense of noblesse oblige to party and country, which in both retirees’ contexts was the grace to yield when it was unwise to withhold.

It’s no small virtue and is set for posthumous enlargement simply from its stark absence in the current holder of the office.

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.