Not a shadow of the shadow cabinet

A year ago, on 04 Oct 2010, I posted Shadow Cabinet where I wrote:

Pakatan Rakyat presents itself to the Malaysian voters as the alternative government in waiting, yet it has been decidedly evasive about its alternative leadership in government, namely the shadow cabinet, giving mealy-mouthed excuses why it hasn’t ... or more correctly, won’t, can't, dare not!

The real answer why it hasn’t done so is the coalition fears the component parties won’t be able to agree to a distribution of ministerial portfolios.

My question to them is, if you can’t now, how would you be able to when you win the next general election?

And if you fear an inability to negotiate and compromise, then aren’t you just delaying the inevitable, the disintegration of the coalition on its very moment of victory?

… which could bring about what I dread and posted in Sex and a potential future for Malaysia.

I continued in that (last year’s) post:

Shouldn’t it be far safer to sort this unavoidable issue NOW rather than delay its inevitability? Quite frankly, I don’t consider you fit to take over the business of the government of the day if you cannot even resolve this power sharing now!

Then today RPK posted The point we are making where he also lamented on the missing Pakatan shadow cabinet.

Coincidentally, today as well, my matey Dean Johns, articulate columnist at Malaysiakini, explains why he has steadfastly hammered UMNO-BN regularly but not Pakatan, but grudgingly admits there’s one point about PR that has bemused him. He wrote:

But as I've written in my admittedly rare columns criticising Pakatan Rakyat, the fact that it still refuses, or at least fails to specify a shadow cabinet or concrete set of policies, leaves us lamentably short of reliable insight into both its intentions and its ability to achieve them.

In its continuing and obdurate refusal to establish a shadow cabinet, kaytee believes that PR is behaving like the proverbial ostrich, burying its head in the sand to pretend there is no obvious void in their credentials to take over Putrajaya.

But then, with PAS suddenly going feral in abandoning its so-called ‘welfare state’ policy and reverting to its previous desire to establish an Islamic State, a volte-face in fact catalyzed by Anwar Ibrahim’s support for PAS' proposal to implement hudud in Kelantan.

Anwar was of course worried he might not be PM in a PR victory because of a new and growing synergy between PAS and DAP which renders him and PKR more and more irrelevant, thus I believe he dropped the bombshell to deliberately split PAS and DAP, a schism he believes will restore his bridging role between the other two component parties and hopefully his primus inter pares status in PR.

Thus I wonder, in the midst of such coalition turbulence, just how PR would ever see the formation of such a shadow cabinet, let alone assume rule in Putrajaya.