LONDON, Feb. 17: President Pervez Musharraf who has been rejecting all recent polls showing him and the PML-Q losing popularity has predicted that on Monday the former ruling party and its coalition partner MQM will “certainly have the majority”.

“Whether they will be able to form a government is a question mark,” he was, however, humble enough to admit to Imran Khan’s former wife Jemima Khan in an interview published in the Independent on Sunday.

“He seems to have lost both height and swagger (after retirement from the army). And his body language seems just a touch defensive. The immaculate hair also troubles me. Boot-polish black, artfully grey at the temples, it shows signs of some work,” reflected Ms Khan who found that somehow his civilian clothes have diminished him.

She said he saw himself as a father figure to the next prime minister and in any case “I won’t have to see for weeks”.

(President Musharraf’s spokesman, meanwhile, has denied that he made some comments on the upcoming elections in an interview with Imran Khan’s ex-wife, according to AFP.

“At no stage did President Pervez Musharraf say this or predict victory or a majority for a particular party,” Maj-Gen Rashid Qureshi said.

“She asked the president whether he could predict what is going to happen in the polls, to which the president said nobody can predict what is going to happen,” he added.

Musharraf’s spokesman added: “She is no journalist. She just wanted to meet him and in the meeting asked him a few questions initially related to Imran and then she said could you predict what is going to happen. “… (T)he president said it will be very difficult to predict because it is the choice of the people, whoever they vote for will win.”)

When questioned about Nawaz Sharif’s vow to reinstate, if elected, the judges he dismissed on November 3, Musharraf is said to have retorted incredulously: “It is not a dictatorship here! How can you reinstate judges if you become prime minister? How”?

Ms Khan says: “This rhetorical question comes from a man who on November 3 dismissed 60 per cent of the superior court judges, including three chief justices, in anticipation of their ruling against his re-election as president while still head of the army. Many remain under house arrest.”

Recalling her last encounter with him three days before the 2002 elections, Ms Khan said both were disappointed with each other; Musharraf was disappointed in her because of her opposition to him and she in him because the corrupt got off scot-free. “And now it looks as though he will shortly be doing business with the very same politicians he wanted to get rid of.”

“Disarmingly he agrees -- something he does a lot of. And I sense it’s genuine rather than appeasement. He argues that he had no other choice but to deal with the existing leaders of the main parties. This is a little disingenuous. The national reconciliation ordinance which he promulgated in October 2007 effectively guaranteed life-long immunity from prosecution to corrupt politicians such as Benazir Bhutto, her husband Asif Ali Zardari and others, and enabled her to return to Pakistan to contest elections. He asks if he is being recorded. I say yes. He hesitates, then answers tellingly: “Yes, I agree with you (that charges should not have been dropped). But then Benazir has good contacts abroad in your country, who thought she was the future of the country’.”

He tells her if he had not agreed to the NRO “they would have all joined and then I would have been out”.

At this point, according to Ms Khan, he looks a bit wild eyed. He quickly adds that, of course, being in power has never been his ultimate goal. How much easier it would be, he adds wistfully and a touch unconvincingly, if he’d just resigned to play golf.

“Often he fails to see the irony in his own words, which can be unintentionally comic. Several times I have to suppress a smile. When confronted with the suggestion, for example, that he will have to work with a coalition government consisting of some the most infamous crooks in Pakistan; he responds with great sincerity, ‘I’m not running a martial law here. What can I do?’ He adds: ‘My role as a president is simply the checks and balances -- the seatbelts”.

Ms Khan says the image he paints of himself as a benign, legitimised dictator is at odds with the recent Human Rights Watch report that accuses his regime of hundreds of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, harassment, intimidation and extra-judicial killings.

To Ms Khan, Musharraf seems to be someone who feels painfully let down and misunderstood. She says this is particularly the case when he talks about her ex-husband, Imran. “You know, I liked him. But he is the most unrealistic person. I wanted to support him.” He mentions him a few times in the interview.

And the strange thing is, she adds: “I detect hurt. President Musharraf, dictator, despot, guardian of the West against Al -Qaeda -- and all I can see are the wounded eyes of a betrayed lover when he talks about my ex. Under his regime, in the past year, Imran has been held under house arrest, jailed, then released and has had his movements restricted. Hell hath no fury like a general scorned.”

Discussing the recent polls he dismisses them saying: “They are biased, conducted by local organisations that are against me. They have been abusing me right from the beginning and you will never get good results from them.”

According to Ms Khan, Musharraf seems increasingly paranoid as he tells her: “The media have let me down ... The NGOs are against me. I don’t know why. I think I have been the strongest proponent of human rights ...”

In fact, the only people who are not against him, he tells Ms Khan, are the Western leaders who he says are “absolutely supportive” and “express total solidarity”.

“If anything, the impression (she gets of Musharraf) is one of amateurishness and of a naivety that would be endearing if it had not been so profoundly damaging to his country. And in recent months he has become belligerent with local journalists.Ms Khan said Musharraf denounced the deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, as “the scum of the earth -- a third-rate man -- a corrupt man”.

And the lawyers’ movement? “With hindsight,” he replies solemnly, “it was my personal error that I allowed them to go and express their views in the street... We should have controlled them in the beginning before it got out of control.”

According to Ms Khan, Musharraf mentions democracy a great deal. He seems sincere. He is genuinely likeable. But it seems he just can’t help himself. You can take the general out of the army but not the army out of the general, she says and adds, it reminds her of the Aesop fable about the scorpion and the frog. The frog gives the scorpion, which cannot swim, a lift across the river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings him. “Why did you do that?” asks the frog. “Now we’ll both die.” “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”

While parting both agreed that it would be the saddest day for Pakistan if Benazir’s “crooked” widower is in power by Monday.