Hello Coconauts! We hardly noticed Wednesday, so we’re just as surprised as you that it’s already Friday, and we missed the week’s strangest analogy courtesy of our de facto law minister’s latest blog post, The Future for UMNO. More on that later.
Turns out, we weren’t the only one displeased with the piece, with rumors swirling that a certain nonagenarian PM wasn’t too happy with some of the comments made either.
The piece opens speculating on the days ahead of UMNO’s Supreme Council meeting, calling for the party to let their currently drowning-in-charges President Zahid Hamidi keep his position, and also congratulated former Prime Minister Najib Razak’s post-defeat road show of defending the litany of charges against him. He is giving his side of the story, and according to Zaid, “he is not running away.”
Well, yes — but is that because he and his wife have had their passports confiscated?
Zaid goes on to detail how he believes a new UMNO could form in the cinders of a collective post-election dysphoria of broken promises, and establish a new identity that moves away from the typical slogans and “raw firebrand politics” that the party is currently known for:
Well, alright a little bit of free political consultation, perhaps a teasing of pay-to-play political strategy — thank u, next!
However, one point in particular, discussing whether PH is a formidable enough foe to take on this yet to be created UMNO nouveau is said to have “visibly upset” Prime Minister Mahathir:
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ZING. In other words, the manifesto is trash, us poor plebs will never get free tolls (too good to be true), and there’s a cabal of rich, elderly Illuminati making our economic decisions. Spoiler alert: They don’t care about affordable healthcare and the like.
Harsh words, and ones that Zaid found himself clarifying earlier today:
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Right, so it’s not HIM you have a problem with, but all of his friends, and the only thing bad about this was that you had to blog about what “others are saying.”
Well, color-me-a-shade-of-non-political-blue … isn’t that sweet of you. Please sir, continue to keep digging this awkwardly shaped hole.
While Zaid has claimed that the PM was visibly upset, there were no official statements on the blog post.
Right — now that we’ve cleared that up, we can get to the part in the blog post that irked us so much, we spent a fair portion of the day fact-checking political timelines — Zaid’s analogy that Mahathir was akin to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and that UMNO would need to produce a Tony Blair to overthrow her.
Ok, look first we understand that two individuals who privatized public companies during the same Miami Vice television show era are liable to get painted with the same brush stroke, but it’s a lazy one that literally forgot another human.
Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990, and Tony Blair, along with “new Labour” as it was called, only came into power years later, in 1997.
Yes, Margaret Thatcher lost her conservative party leadership through a revolt from her own party, she resigned after being all but physically ousted by the Conservatives who feared she was so deeply disliked throughout the United Kingdom that they couldn’t possibly win a re-election with her at the helm. She didn’t need a Tony Blair, the party gave her 11-years-worth of leadership rope and she hung herself. End of story (ish).
A far less glamorous John Major was PM for seven years before Tony Blair and Gordon Brown came along promising voters a Clinton-esque centrist-left leadership. Throw in Noel Gallagher, and the Spice Girls wearing Union Jacks, Number 10 took on a far less rigid appearance, and you can probably thank Alastair Campbell for that win.
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