Last weekend, Pakistanis saw something they never expected to see: their prime minister, Imran Khan, in tears. He was addressing the nation on TV after being sent back to the national assembly by the supreme court to face a vote of confidence that he would go on to lose, to be replaced by Shehbaz Sharif.
Earlier he had refused to face the vote and had dissolved the assembly, but the court declared his actions illegal. Khan refused to accept the rules of the national assembly, tried to evade a ruling by the highest court in the land and only relented a few minutes before the midnight deadline imposed by the court. He turned a banal parliamentary procedure into a nerve-racking, edge-of-the-seat thriller. He behaved like a child who realises for the first time that other children have birthdays too. Because he believed that if he wasn’t in charge of the house, he might as well burn it down.
