Annuar Musa's town hall was a stirring defence of a weak hand

In the lottery game in which a Malaysian politician can sometimes grab more than his 15-minute share of Warholian fame, Annuar Musa drew a presciently good ticket at the 1983 Umno general assembly when he clashed with Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the then party president and prime minister.

In venting some frustration about Mahathir's leadership in the days when airing such grouses was allowed at the party's annual confab, the young delegate from Kelantan quoted Brutus' rationalisation of his part in the assassination of Julius Caesar: “It's not that I loved Caesar less, but I loved Rome more.”

With his hard-nosed view of human nature, Mahathir was quick to remind delegates that it was Brutus who backstabbed Caesar, and that love of Rome was just a fig leaf for the tribune's treachery.

That unsentimental take did not spook Annuar's rise to the upper echelons of the party, which the man himself contrived to assist by staying loyal through the subsequent years of party turbulence when his sometime patron, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, led dissidents to form Semangat 46.

So that today when the Umno information chief tells the party faithful at town hall meetings like the recent one in Balik Pulau, Penang, that he has been with Umno for 40 years, 31 of which was as a divisional chief, there is the feeling that, like steel, his loyalty has been burnished by fire.

You don't think of his patriotism, as Samuel Johnson suggested, as the last refuge of the scoundrel; in Annuar's case, he can make his longevity in Umno sound like it is proof against Brutus-like flights into divisive abstraction. 

With compelling oratorical energy and not a little flair, Annuar drew parallels between his tested loyalty to Umno with the party's allegiance to what he says are the goals of BN's coalition politics.

Those goals, he said, were the development of the Malay people – their race and religion – within the overall context of the economic and social development of the whole Malaysian nation.

He said the chief threat to this never-easy-yet-nicely-crafted trajectory – made to sound like it is a work of singular achievement – was DAP, “by provoking fears among the Chinese with so many scare stories.”

He claimed DAP has ever been the surrogate of Singapore's PAP, and that, from its formation 51 years ago, has had no other agenda save that of stirring Chinese fears about their situation in Malaysia.

He also their condition has always been better than their counterparts in Indonesia, who have to use Indonesian names and language to get by.

“Little wonder I have Chinese friends in Kota Bharu who tell me they have been to many places in the world, but Malaysia is the best place for them,” said the Umno spokesperson, drawing the evening's loudest cheers from a largely Wanita and Puteri Umno crowd of about 300 in Balik Pulau – the only Umno-held parliamentary constituency on the island.

Annuar maintained his composure during the question and answer session, in which two opposition sympathisers quizzed him on the 1MDB issue – the elephant in the room that the party paladin blithely ignored during his long oration.

His composure was intact in the face of what was mildly hostile questioning on 1MDB, the bugbear of the Najib Razak government, but if anything can be said of Annuar's replies, it is that they mistook convolution for cleverness. He skirted the issue more than he delved into it.

To a crowd that was not likely to give the issue more than cursory attention, this evasion was not likely to count as a debit.

The same dearth of critical scrutiny would have followed Annuar's earlier claims that if Pakatan Harapan wins the next general election, Mahathir may reign as Harapan's point man, but it is the DAP who would rule.

By evening's end, the whole thrust of Annuar's exposition of the Umno-BN case for continuation of their rule after GE14 hinged on the argument that the Malay leaders in Harapan would be stool pigeons of the DAP.

How that trope differed from what he argued was the DAP's half-century long stirring of Chinese fears was the obvious question that could be asked of him.

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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.- Mkini