If Pak Lah wants to enshrine his administration as one of law, this gives him a good opportunity to show it. He has yet to rise up to the bait. He has kept quiet. The police flounder their way through with irrelevalent explanations why they want to interview him. But this is common police practice. Those at the scene of the crime are asked to give their statements to the police. It does not implicate him.

So, why was this RM120 million not settled in the first place? Three possible reasons: there is no money, the bills were not in order, the civil servant deliberately held payments back. We are now told the money is there. We also know that the bills are in order, since in three days payment was made. So, Pak Lah implies his civil servants do not do their jobs. It is a serious allegation. Is this why he leant on his second finance minister and not his ministry's senior civil servants to inquire into it. Not paying bills is not a political decision, but an administrative one. Yet in Malaysia it has become political.

THE FRIGHTENING SELF-DOUBT in the Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi camp is now balanced with cringing fear. First, the UMNO supreme council he controlled demanded the divisions nominate only Pak Lah and the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, for the presidency and deputy presidency. And UMNO youth and puteri nominate only whom it decrees. It was to stop the National Front (BN) MP for Gua Musang, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, from standing against Pak Lah. It failed.

Let us look at the election paraphernalia scandal. Orders were placed shortly after Pak Lah took office in November last year. It was then decided to hold general elections soon so could move away swiftly from the suffocating shadow of the former prime minsiter, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. The election paraphernalia were printed well before the general elections so that it alone among the political parties were ready for the seven-and-a-half day campaign period.

What the top UMNO pair has done is what the courts insist Dato' Seri Anwar is guilty of. Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib demanded of the supreme council to resolve that they must be returned unopposed. It did nothing of that kind. But both were present, and encouraged this canard. Indeed, Dato' Seri Najib was spokesman for this view. It did not strike him as odd that what they wanted breached the UMNO code of ethics, which prohibits co-ercion, campaigning, acting in concert, even issuing visiting cards, advertising, any move that asserts or undermines one candidate over another.

IT IS THE WORST-KEPT secret: the ill-disguised contempt and hostility between the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak; complicating it is the like "love and affection" their wives have each other. Pak Lah pulls rank, and Dato' Seri Najib cannot but rise to each snap of the older man's fingers. As one who knows both said: "If looks could kill, all four would have been dead months ago." Before the Hermit of Langgak Golf turned up to skewer the political pitch, leader and deputy and their supporters focussed their attention of bringing the other down.

They would -- could? -- not leave well enough alone. The supreme council decision is revealed ever more creatively day by day. After the first announcement, any further discussion of it is verboten. But Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib must pile the pressure on.

This is not to say Tengku Razaleigh is home and dry. He has said he is in the race to be UMNO president, taking on Pak Lah; he revealed his intentions the typically opaque way they are revealed in Malay society; and the newspapers run by non-Malays and reported by non-Malays did not understand what they meant. If they did, they deliberately ignored the significance.

TENGKU RAZALEIGH HAMZAH IS in the race to be UMNO president. He announced it yesterday in Gua Musang, his fief in Kelantan. The utter nervousness in the Malaysian mainstream media is understandable. Did not the UMNO supreme council decide, in three successive meetings in May and June, that the UMNO divisions should only nominate Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi for president and Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak for deputy president? The two men insist it did, and that view is the only accepted view in the mainstream media. What this means is that the people depend on alternate newspapers for news of UMNO politics: Harakah reports in its latest issue that Tengku Razaleigh would challenge Pak Lah. And that has now come to pass.

I had written earlier that the UMNO supreme council was not informed; wrong. It was: as the acting deputy president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, was informed after the fact. If the elections petitions had gone ahead, all three would have lost their seats. Pak Lah became tetchier by the minute as questions were asked about it, in the supreme council and by journalists later.

The sixth, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, decides that that is not enough: the supreme council must order the divisions not to nominate any one for the two positions of president and deputy president but Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak respectively. Not only that, it also ordered the UMNO youth and puteri divisions to nominate none but Pak Lah's choice. The wanita wing, not to be outdone, decided the current leaders must stay, and warned new members, those who migrated to it on reaching 40, not to upset the status quo by challenging them.

Dato' Mustapha is now beholden to Pak Lah, whose plan for survival is to have him be elected the first vice-president at the UMNO general assembly in September and, in a cabinet reshuffle after, first finance minister. Three years later, he would challenge Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak for the UMNO deputy presidency. But Dato' Mustapha does not have a political base in Kelantan. He is aloof and remote, and comes out on the hustings like a dead fish addressing a convention of second-hand car dealers. Another task in Kelantan to stop Tengku Razeleigh Hamzah, his former mentor, from even thinking of challenging Pak Lah for the UMNO presidency in September.

It takes but a few disparate but unpopular decisions or events to turn divisions into factions. He is right in one sense: the autocratic running of UMNO the past decade and a half, when it descended from a mass movement to a political party, brought the divisions out into the open. Some remain divisions but several have become factions. The line is thin between them. What worries Pak Lah is this danger of the divisions and factions combining against him and his deputy, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak in the 23 September UMNO elections.

But that meeting laid the ground work for the UMNO secretary-general, Tan Sri Khalil Yaakob, to insist the June UMNO supreme council agreed on a similar plan for Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib to be elected UMNO president and deputy president without contest. It has gone further. All state liaison committees are informed by UMNO headquarters that nominations for the two must be total; no one else must be nominated. The acclaimed UMNO unity is a myth. Pak Lah struggles to keep the party together. The warlords are on the rampage. Even Puteri UMNO now insists on contest for all positions, including the top two.

He is a good example for the government to insist all is above board, and titles must be protected from rascals and scoundrels who somehow got them. If he got them because of high official status, then all the more it must be revoked swiftly. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, should order the state governments the BN controls to ensure that every one of the dato'ships Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim was awarded are revoked for his criminality. Pak Lah knows full well, as he repeats to anyone who would listen, that the man is history, he plays no role in the Malaysia of the future, and the people are happy to see the last of him. He should do it, and quick. At least the UMNO rank and file would recognise for what it is: the removal of a man who has done UMNO much wrong. It would also frighten those with titles from walking away from the straight and narrow, and forever be grateful for the crumbs the BN and UMNO throws off their table. And ensure Pak Lah would earn points for putting his money where his mouth is, and the UMNO would love him for it in September. No doubt about it.

UMNO HEADQUARTERS, ON DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's orders, recently informed UMNO state liaison officers to 'advise' the divisions that they should only nominate Pak Lah for president and Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak for deputy president. What if they did not, or could not, is left unsaid; the hint of a threat more frightening than the threat. Pak Lah wants an UMNO cast in his own image, pack it with his loyalists and 'bodeks' (apple-polishers), root out possible challengers and those who believe UMNO is not the president's plaything. A dangerous precedent, not that it has not been done before (it has) but in how he goes about it.

In this, the UMNO youth is far smarter than UMNO. Its secretary-general and acting deputy president hijacked the supreme council and decided the two top posts should not be contested. No decision was taken. But does that matter in this wonderful land of Bolehland? That Dato' Seri Najib is an interested party and he should not be a party in this is of course cheerly ignored. All it need was to land UMNO in a deep mess. Pak Lah needs the victory more than Dato' Seri Najib, is the weaker of the two in the estimation of the UMNO ground. He had laid his hopes on the March general elections, but the allegations and accusations of cheating, including by the Election Commission, made a mockery of what would have been an astonishing and astounding electoral victory. The advantage he expected, from that victory has dissipated.

The Bernama story from San Francisco reports, gushingly as only the agency knows how, on the special attention on him as the only head of government to attend the BIO-2004 conference, a 'pasar malam' for bio-tech companies. The reporter thought that significant. Would he have flown from Kuala Lumpur to attend it? No. But the point is made that that he attended is proof that Malaysia favours bio-technology, and would soon be at the fore-front of it. He went further: that he attended reflects Pak Lah's commitment to the industry in Malaysia, and that it proved Malaysia was "pro-business and not just open for business". And all because the man decided to escape from his worries to attend an exhibition of bio-tech firms!

THE UMNO YOUTH CHIEF, Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, is three years older than the two score years allowed its members. He was, he declared earlier in the year, a candidate for one of the three vice presidents. As youth chief, he is one by courtesy, and in one sense out of the pecking order. He is joined there by the wanita and puteri chiefs. If he had wanted a life in the UMNO mainstream he has to be vice-president in his own right. But the March general elections, the Pak Lah uncertainties at his huge electoral margin, the rise of the political warlords all put pressure on the UMNO leaders as never before.

He has enemies aplenty, but he takes it in his stride. He has not wavered in what he stands for. He is critical, sometimes overly so, but he believes passionately that UMNO cannot survive unless it changes drastically from within. But in the euphoria of near absolute victory, now skewered by the rise of political warlords, and the fear in the Pak Lah camp of irreparable divisions if he makes a wrong move complicates matters.

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