COMMENT There are two facets to PKR deputy president and MP for Gombak Azmin Ali’s disclosures yesterday about the no-confidence motion that opposition leader Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail is to propose during the current sitting of Parliament. Both were equally heartening though not equally credible.

The one about PAS agreeing to back the no-confidence motion is not as plausible as that which disclosed that some Umno and BN backbenchers have approached opposition legislators to indicate interest to support the move.

If the PAS contingent of MPs were unitedly for the measure, it would have more likely been that party secretary-general Takiyuddin Hassan, MP for Kota Baru, would have spoken to the press rather than leave it to Azmin to do the talking.

It’s not that one of the PAS MPs, in the fashion of PKR’s Hee Loy Sian ( photo ) vis-a-vis Lim Guan Eng, would jump up, after Azmin had done the speaking, to rebuke the PKR No 2 for his presumption.

It's just that it is more believable that if the whole contingent of PAS MPs are for a measure as weighty as the no confidence move against Prime Najib Razak, their point man would have elected to do so and not depend on relaying it through the leader of another - albeit - allied party.

PAS is known to be divided on this issue, with the top two in the party not in favour of a move to end NajibAbdul Razak’s premiership, while lower down the hierarchy there is no love lost for the PM.

Similarly, PKR is not very united on a no-confidence motion, which was probably why a MP pretty junior in the party’s pecking order had to go out on a limb to file notice of the motion, presumably to jolt the party out of its lassitude on the issue, even if that risked inviting some disparaging remarks from fellow oppositionists like DAP secretary-general Guan Eng who made the valid point that for weighty propositions to carry the floor, proponents of comparable heft should make all the running.

The last thing a necessitous, if arithmetically challenged, measure needs at this point in its saga is that of it being mired in petty squabbles such as Hee’s tart “You are not my boss” riposte to Guan Eng.

From that standpoint, Azmin's brace of disclosures yesterday that PAS would back the no-confidence motion - even if' not quite credible - and that some Umno and BN backbenchers have signalled support for the move gets the backwagon moving towards a denouement.

The point of whether speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia would allow the motion to be tabled is at present not as critical as the fact that the move has gunned to a start.

Reliant on a momentum all its own

Matters of this kind are reliant on a momentum all its own: once the wheels start moving, there’s no saying how things would end and neither can a parliamentary arbiter of tacit reformist, if still staunchly pro-BN credentials like Pandikar stand athwart it.

The 1MDB issue is the biggest national crisis since Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965; to treat of it like it is some foetid air that can stay in the room without opening the windows to let out the stench is akin to expecting birds of prey to circle around rather than feast on an ample carrion.

The disclosure by Azmin that some Umno and BN MPs have indicated support for the no-confidence move come as the least of surprises.

They must be certain of what is by now a common surmise in opposition quarters, that if the 1MDB issue is not resolved soon it will put the skids under Umno-BN going into the next general election (GE14).

This is despite the disarray in the opposition ranks caused mainly by the obdurate unilateralism of PAS and factionalism in PKR.

But these obstacles are not intractable. They are pliable to the flows of public opinion which is currently running in favour of full disclosure by the PM on the 1MDB issue.

Full disclosure is just what is not now available. One suspects it will never arrive at that stage which is why the no-confidence motion against Najib is off to a start that is inevitable - if parliamentary democracy is still alive in Malaysia.

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.