Thailand was on Thursday night waiting on the word of its 81-year-old king to discover how it could extricate itself from an increasingly farcical political impasse. But King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who had been expected to speak on the occasion of his birthday, was silent.

That may be no bad thing. Thailand purports to be a democracy. As such it ought to be able to resolve political conflicts between competing groups of its citizenship without recourse to the words of a monarch, however revered. That, after all, is what democracies are for.