FROM high drama to low farce, on and on rumbles the saga of the Swiss letter. Sept 18 is the new deadline, a day that will mark the fifth time a prime minister will appear before the Supreme Court this year. And yet, there is no sign of the letter being written, nor of the court surrendering to the logic of elections and the democratic project. The extraordinary has become the new normal and it has reached the point where even the media and the public cannot really muster much interest. For what is left to be said at this stage? Rewind to former prime minister Gilani’s first appearance before the Supreme Court earlier this year and contrast it with the reaction to Prime Minister Ashraf’s date with the court yesterday — the three-ring circus of spectacular proportions has degenerated into an almost pitiful sideshow. Perhaps in this clash of institutions and rhetoric, the present impasse is the least bad of outcomes: the two sides have not budged from their original positions but then neither side has launched a truly destabilising attack on the other.

As luck would have it, another fundamental part of the equation has moved, however: as days and weeks and months have been slowly swallowed up by the cut and thrust between the court and the PPP, the deadline for a general election has come closer and closer. Whereas in January, when the court took up the issue of the NRO with gusto again, it was a question of how the government could survive 15 months of this tussle, now it is down to a question of a few short months. If, as rumour has it, the government is contemplating a spring election, the country is on the cusp of a pre-election interim set-up. In that may lie the way out for everyone.

Prime Minister Ashraf will almost certainly have to go now that the court has set in motion a repeat of the Gilani affair. But Sept 18 is now the earliest date at which the prime minister can be charged for contempt and, if the court’s recent mood is anything to go by, he will have at least several more weeks before a final order for his disqualification is signed. That would take the country into an interim set-up timeline, so if the court were to oust Mr Ashraf at that point, the government could call an election and be done with this numbing ebb and flow of its tussle with the court. However, already the next question looms: what will the interim prime minister do about the small matter of a letter to Switzerland?