'I said, he said' - it all boils down to personal integrity

The spiraling ‘I said, he said' sequel to the publication of Syed Husin Ali's memoirs is inevitable, even if one sees some merit in Zaid Ibrahim's opinion that what's said in private conversation ought not to be recycled in books meant for public consumption.

No sooner had Ezam Mohd Noor denied Syed Husin's claim in ‘Perjuangan Politik' that he left PKR for monetary gain than Kulim-Bandar Bahru MP Zulkifli Nordin (left) popped up to deny the memoirist's disclosure that he had demanded money in return for vacating his seat for Anwar Ibrahim to contest in the post-tsunami by-election of 2008.

Like Ezam, renegade Zulkifli, who was elected in the 2008 general election on a PKR ticket and then defected to the independent ranks in 2010, went on to make counter-claims that cast a pall on Syed Husin's version of the episode concerning which seat Anwar ought to contest after he had served out a five-year ineligibility because of his conviction for corruption in 1999.

The murk doesn't just thicken, it deepens. But politics, they say, is not for the faint-hearted, neither for the pristine-minded.

And the task of citizens ordering the affairs of the national estate, which is what politics is all about, is one that attracts all sorts of characters such that the need for people who can negotiate the consequent moral minefields with wisdom and integrity is more urgent than ever.

What, then, about the tweeted opinion of Zaid Ibrahim (far right) that what is secreted in private conversation should not be uploaded to the public domain?

This opinion presupposes - and justifies - a dichotomy between the public and personal personas of politicians, and if the one is quite different to the other, that difference doesn't really matter.

A corollary of this argument is that what a person does in his private affairs is his or her business; what the same person does in a public role is all that citizens ought to be concerned with.

This argument is unsustainable given what we know of human character which is the way in which a person confronts the things that happen to him or her, a number of which may come about as a consequence of his or her characteristic behaviour.

Character is important because it is consequential, and any dualism between the private and the public persona is germane to an assessment of the whole.

Which is why it is better that an appraising public gets to know the personality before it is called to make a decision on the suitability of an individual for high public office.
Fortuitously, it happened that on the global stage we have had in recent years a striking example of why it is important to know the private as well as the public personas of players on the national stage.

Zero emotional intelligence

Even cursory observers of international affairs would have known that in the 10-year premiership of Britain by Tony Blair (1997-2007), he had a deputy in Gordon Brown, the finance minister during all that time, who was chafing at Blair's heels.

Whatever the content of a tacit agreement between the two men over dinner in 1994 at a London restaurant following the death of the then Labor Party leader John Smith, Blair stepped forward to assume the mantle of leadership which Brown coveted but declined to contest because both men felt that unity in a fractious party was paramount towards the goal of defeating the Conservatives, then in power for 15 years.

New Labor under Blair proceeded to beat the Conservatives in the 1997 general election and the new premier began a Labor ascendancy in British politics that ended 18 years of Conservative - specifically - Thatcherite rule.

Constant media speculation that all was not well between Blair and Brown intensified during Blair's second term until the tension between the two men was dangerously destabilising to Labor's future prospects.

Finally, Blair was forced out in 2007 and Brown took over. Within a short while, Brown, who was considered of greater intellectual heft than his predecessor, was in hot water over matters to do with his personality, presently seen as much like what Blair was constrained to convey but could not in the circumstances.

Last year, after a Brown-led Labor Party was defeated in the general election, Blair released his memoirs ‘A Journey: My Political Life' in which said he knew that Brown would be "disastrous" as prime minister and that he variously found his Chancellor of the Exchequer "maddening", "strange" and "with zero emotional intelligence."

Blair wrote that Brown (right in photo) was impossible to work with, but the PM was not able to sack him because the man would be more dangerous outside his camp than inside.

Two months ago, Alistair Darling, Brown's finance minister in the three years he was PM (2007-2010) released his memoirs ‘Back from the Brink: 1,000 days at Number 11', in which he uses adjectives like "appalling", "volcanic" and "brutal" to describe Brown's behavior.

What Darling said in his book was what Blair had tried to secrete about Brown but was constrained from doing so by circumstances.

Brown, observed Darling, had spent a lifetime in his quest for the keys to Downing Street. When he got there, he had no idea what he wanted to do. Darling avers that Brown was not so much the leader of the government or his party but of a small faction gathered round him - the control freak that Blair had been trying to suggest all along while he was in charge.

What has all this got to do with Syed Husin vis-à-vis Ezam and Zul Nordin?

Plenty, that is germane to the constant and necessary task of leader-appraisal that the media, assisting citizens, have got to do.

And the stuff that is secreted in private conversation willy-nilly is part of the grist for appraisal. It all depends on the integrity of the person secreting the stuff; its credibility in direct proportion to the dispenser's standing on that score.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.