But then, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin isn't your normal kind of coup plotter. He will surprise you with his readiness to answer all the questions a reporter is afraid to ask.

So, when a member of Matichon's editorial team mustered up the courage to pose that highly interesting question, the answer from the "reluctant" putsch leader was not only revealing but also extremely enlightening.

The reporter didn't shoot from the hip, though. There is a certain tact one observes in posing such a sensitive question. So, instead of asking "Is yours the last coup in Thailand?" the question was phrased in a tantalisingly ambiguous, but clearly politically correct, tone:

"Dare you hope that the new constitution will take us along a path that won't necessitate another military coup?"

Was General Sonthi caught off-guard? Did he sport a mischievous smile? Or did he retort the way a confident army general in total control of the situation would: "Dare I hope? Dare you ask?"

No, none of the above. General Sonthi took it in his stride and even tried to come up with what he must have considered an intellectually justifiable answer.

He said: "This is a difficult question to answer. But the question is how to make the people, all the way from the 'grass-roots' level up, understand genuine democracy. If the people from the highest level to the 'grass-roots' still don't understand what true democracy is, then it's difficult to move ahead ...

"Now, it's absolutely necessary to make people understand democracy. They must know that buying and selling votes [in an election] makes for the wrong kind of democracy. If that's the case, then the system under which the country is run would be dragged down by a sheer majority … this law and that law would be amended … and there would be gaps. Things would recur. The lessons so far should enable understanding [about democracy] all the way down to the 'grass-roots' level. Then, I think we can move along our democracy, Thai style …"

The answer, as I said, was revealing in that it didn't reveal anything. Neither did he promise that September 19, 2006 was to be the "last tango".

Hidden somewhere, ironically, in that rather incoherent reply was even a veiled threat that if democracy, as he understands it, wasn't understood by all sectors of society, then who knows what will happen to democracy in Thailand?

It's a pity, albeit perfectly understandable, that the reporter didn't pursue the question. Understandable because even if he had pressed for a clearer answer with an equally polite and courteously worded question, he wouldn't have obtained a clearer response anyway.

What mattered in that exercise was that the crucial question had been raised, however obliquely, and an answer had been given, however evasively. The real answer is now left to the country's political system as a whole.

The four official reasons cited for the coup were, together, specifically designed to dispose of "Thaksinomics".

The questioner didn't pursue the point by asking whether similar conditions in the future would justify another military "fast-track" action.

But in his famously roundabout way, General Chavalit Yongchaiyuth, the ex-prime minister, former Army chief and now the "man for all political seasons", has provided an answer to that question you were too afraid to ask - despite the fact that nobody asked him to do so.

He said - at first with a straight face and then the following day calling it a "joke" - that if the Council for National Security headed by General Sonthi didn't live up to people's expectations, another group of soldiers (he even mentioned Class 9 by name) may decide to stage another coup against the last one.

He didn't say it in so many words, but the implication was probably that coups do have their own "standards" and if the first one does not quite live up to public expectations, perhaps a second one may be in order.

Somewhere, somehow, someone made a somewhat disquieting comment: "Have we seen the last of Thaksin's kind of politics? If that's the case, then we may have seen the last coup."

Are these nothing more than good clean jokes - generals pulling each other's legs? Or is the vicious circle coming back to haunt us again?

Suthichai Yoon