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Going back to at least the middle 1980s, otherwise tame newspapers have often been filled with graphic sexual details. At one point the daily tabloid Malay Mail got its hands on the illicit pictures of a romp between an ethnic Indian politician and a beauty queen. The newspaper couldn’t run the pictures themselves, but it got its artists to produce amazingly realistic pictures of the beauty queen’s various lecherous poses – then showed her the photographs and photographed her humiliated reaction at seeing them.

All of this is despite the fact that the so-called khalwat cops – conservative Muslim patrolmen – patrol assiduously to ensure there is no “excessive closeness” between people of opposite sexes, busting the odd luckless teenage couple caught smooching. But in the houses of power the powerful have been going at it like goats nonstop for years, and not just with the four wives they are allowed under Islamic law. In 2002, the Reformasi website named top public figures and officials who were having relatively public affairs, including Najib Tun Razak, then the defense minister and now the prime minister, who was caught in a Port Dickson hotel room with the actress and singer Ziana Zain. None have been apprehended by the khalwat police.

“It’s in the culture — not that sex is a scandal in itself but that Malays like to aib or cause shame to their enemies,” said an ethnic Malay lawyer in Malaysia. “Khalwat is a tool to eliminate or shame your enemy. It’s partly rooted in perasaan hasad dengki – good old jealousy to bring down the other fella who has more than you. Islam itself forbids spying. That’s what khalwat is. They are obsessed with khalwat. I think it’s bullshit. Utter nonsense. That’s all they do.”