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In an era where Twitter and Facebook are popular means of communication, political reaction is not just publicised very quickly, but it is also much more difficult to control. Ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra's response to the government's plan to strip him of his past honours was swift and sharp. "If they could use the law to kill me, they would have done it," he tweeted, adding to the already heated debate of whether his opponents are doing the appropriate thing. In other words, some of his close aides say, you can kiss the dream of reconciliation goodbye.

However, it always takes two to tango. Plan to revoke the fugitive's royal decorations has come hot on the heels of the bombshell from Cambodia - offering Thaksin political asylum and rumours that he might just accept it.

The proposal was almost as if a rotten egg was thrown in the face of the Abhisit government before and during the Asean Summit, and it came just after Thaksin's brand new nominee in the Pheu Thai Party, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, visited Cambodian leader Hun Sen.

Thaksin could say he had nothing to do with this, but nobody would believe him. If we are to believe that his opponents would have used the law to kill him if they could, then believing that Thaksin conspired with Chavalit and Hun Sen to embarrass Thailand wouldn't be too far-fetched an assumption either.

The crossfire in Thailand's political conflict has never stopped. Every time things start cooling off at the battlefield, something new comes up and everyone is on the edge again. This means that reconciliation between the enemies has been and will always be a pipe dream. Though efforts to reconcile the red- and yellow-shirt movements have been made from the bottom up, noticeably by mediators in Phayao and Chiang Mai, the Cambodian asylum issue and the royal decorations controversy are not helping the process.

Rumours from the Thaksin camp - that he is ready to talk, will accept any reasonable "give-and-take" deal - have not really stopped. However, with his main demand apparently being a royal pardon while his opponents insist that he come home to serve his jail term, it is becoming harder than ever to see where the differing sides will meet. The more Thaksin feels he is being treated "unfairly", the more he will want to exact revenge. The more his opponents feel he's playing games - and increasingly dangerous games - the more they want to shut him out.

The revocation of royal decorations might be the government taking revenge after the Asean ambush or vice versa. It doesn't matter what caused what. What matters is that both issues are serving to keep Thailand firmly at an impasse and at a spiralling cost.