“DELUSIONAL and drunk on our own Kool-Aid.”

Khairy Jamaluddin made that harsh assessment when explaining why Umno didn’t see the “Malaysian tsunami” that blew the party out of office on May 9.

The Umno Youth chief admitted the party leadership was complicit and had failed to read the signs that Najib Razak was unpopular with the masses.

“We became delusional; we got drunk on our own Kool-Aid and got carried away.

“We didn’t want to bell the cat. Nobody – after Muhyiddin was purged, after Shafie was purged – wanted to acknowledge we have a problem.

“That was a terrible mistake on our part,” he said in an exclusive interview with Channel News Asia.

Former deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin and former Umno vice-president Shafie Apdal were dropped from Najib Razak’s cabinet after publicly criticising him over the 1Malaysia Development Bhd scandal.  

Pakatan Harapan, led by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, won 122 out of the 222 parliamentary seats, defeating Barisan Nasional, which managed to win 79 seats.  

Khairy said the failure to speak the truth in order to protect Najib was something that he personally had to live with for the rest of his life.

“Was there a signal? Yes, there were clear signals, but we were oblivious to them.

“This must not happen again. We must not ever allow our leaders in Umno to be detached from reality and not ask tough questions.
“If we continue with our feudal mindset of protecting the leader from the truth, Umno will become extinct.”

Khairy said that Umno couldn’t afford to make the same mistake of only changing the head of the party, like what it did in 2008 when BN replaced his father-in-law and then-prime minister Abdullah Badawi with Najib, after the then-ruling coalition had lost the two-thirds majority.

“They thought that everything would sort itself out by changing the head. We cannot make the same mistake again.

“It was not just a rejection of Najib, but also of Umno and BN. It was a systemic rejection of what we stand for.

“If we can accept that, then we can start to rebuild this party.” – May 15, 2018.