On KJ, Pak Lah trips on a banana peel

So far so good.

Former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's retrospectives were going nicely for him until the subject of his son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin came up.

Abdullah's reflections on the personalities that factored on his watch as prime minister (October 2003 - April 2009) were making good headway towards renovation of his standing as a failed PM until the matter of his son-in-law's presumed influence on him came up for comment.

Here Abdullah missed out on a good opportunity to shed necessary perspective on a matter that dogs almost all serving politicians: how to counter the inevitable public perception of bias when the powerful are blood relations to underlings seen as wielding undue influence?

Abdullah's response - conveyed in reflections that appear in a compilation of assessments of his premiership titled “Awakening: the Abdullah Badawi Years in Malaysia” - is flat denial that Khairy wielded "undue influence" on him in the five years and five months he was premier.

Until that denial issued from Abdullah, the former premier's reflections - on predecessor Dr Mahathir Mohamed, on MIC strongman S Samy Vellu, on tackling the inflammatory journalism of Utusan Malaysia, etc. - engendered its own dynamic of credibility.

But when Abdullah opted for implausible denial rather than elucidating comment on the subject of his son-in-law, credibility oozed out of his reflections the way a garden hose goes limp from having suddenly sprung a leak.

This is a pity, because a sufficient period of time has passed since his administration ended for our memory of its impact to collect around a summary of its strengths and its weaknesses.

Those strengths - he initiated glasnost (opening space for criticism) and attempted to restore independence to a hitherto compliant judiciary - are enhanced when seen against the disabling legacies he inherited from his predecessor, Mahathir.

About Abdullah's weaknesses, an absolving perspective has come to be shed on them, especially when viewed against the obstacles he had to contend with as, say, when he tried to reform the police force and came up smack against entrenched interests within it.

Those reactionary forces grew bold during 12 years of Mahathir's sleepwalking tenure as home minister, he having taken over from Musa Hitam who resigned in February 1986 before relinquishing the post to Abdullah in January 1999 when the latter was also appointed the deputy prime minister.

Abdullah enjoyed an early, if evanescent, popularity when he took over the premiership from Mahathir in late October 2003. A new-broom PM can always count on a receptive welcome but Abdullah did not sit on his haunches and expected the good vibes to continue.  

Reform of the police force was the first item on his agenda. This reform move resonated with the public.  

A royal commission was set up to recommend reforms which it duly did but Abdullah, even after the propulsion of a thumping victory in the general election of 2004, could not leverage on the mandate to compel the police into acceptance of the royal commission's cardinal reform - the setting up of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC).

Reactionary elements in the force signaled brazen opposition before which Abdullah backpedaled, a mistake that boded disaster for his tenure as PM.

It was against this background of Abdullah's vacillation on police reform that Khairy Jamaluddin's transition from political novice to powerful presence behind the scenes took place.

The grapevine began to buzz with stories of Khairy's influence on major decisions and even of his interference with the civil service.

Some ministers in Abdullah's cabinet, holdovers from Mahathir's era, began to relay to the former PM stories about the extent of Khairy's influence.

This served as grist for Mahathir's sniping at Abdullah, attacks which grew in intensity from 2006.

A once famous blogger, now long gone to seed, made his reputation during this period largely on the stories he dredged up and collated as the "Khairy Chronicles", an intriguing amalgam of half-truths, rumor and fanciful twists.              

Exasperatingly, Abdullah mixed vacillation over police reform with deafness to the need to decisively demonstrate that Khairy was not a power behind the scenes.

Khairy increasingly became a target of criticism even as public disappointment mounted against Abdullah over the latter's dithering on reform.

It is disingenuous on Abdullah's part to now say that Khairy had no "undue influence" on him. As well believe Wanita Umno leader Shahrizat Jalil when she contended that she had nothing to do with the scandalous way in which a national cattle breeding project was managed by a company run by her husband and children.