There are no shortcuts to wellness. Neither to Shifa.

The events of the last week have shown yet again that Imran Khan remains more relevant to the system than the government may acknowledge, and less relevant than PTI imagines. The distance between jail ward and hospital ward is – no surprise – tortuously long and tantalisingly short.

And so begins another episode of the never-ending soap opera whose tiresome characters struggle to deal with the twists and turns of the script they have no control over. There's more in store this coming week as the Supreme Court takes up the government's petition to decide if Khan is trucked to Shifa or PIMS or stays put in Adiala. Never has so much hype – and breathless coverage – followed events that mean so little. Yes, you heard that right – so little.

The Supreme Court's order, the government's quasi-panicked reaction, the flowering of a thousand deliciously palatable conspiracy theories, and the PTI's barely restrained exuberance – all these produced a combustible politico-chemical reaction that appeared to have redrawn the contours of Pakistan's hard realities. Whereas, in fact, it did not. There's only so much ferocity a storm can generate inside a teacup.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying Khan's health and the purported legal relief is, in of itself, unimportant. It is not. For him, and his family, and his millions of supporters, it is priority number one. As it should be. His shifting to a hospital, as and when it happens, will also trigger fresh personal and political dynamics. His........

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