I tabled a motion of confidence in the government on 20 July 1961, to sort out the goats from the sheep in the Assembly.
On 18 July, only two days before the vote of confidence, Special Branch had reported that Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Sidney Woodhull and James Puthucheary had been to tea with Selkirk at Eden Hall. This was very odd. Faced with a crisis and an imminent rupture with the PAP non-communists, Lim and Fong were consorting with their arch-enemy, the British. I concluded they were sounding them out to discover whether, if their pro-communist proxies in the Assembly were in the majority, they would be able to take office. Keng Swee, Chin Chye, Raja and I decided that the British would welcome the chance to widen the gap between us so that there could be no reconciliation, no regrouping of the united front between the non-communists and the pro-communists in the PAP in the future. This suited us. The pro-communists had been an albatross around our necks. But we had to be careful how we ditched them. If we appeared opportunistic, dropping them after we had made use of them, we would lose the Chinese-speaking ground. Merger was the perfect issue on which to break.
Since their first statement on 4 June 1959, declaring unequivocal support for an independent, democratic, non-communist Malaya, and for Singapore achieving independence through merger, they had committed themselves to this policy again and again. Now they would be breaching the clear understanding upon which the PAP and the CUF had fought and won the election. If we could not survive a split over such a clear-cut issue, we would never survive anyway. We felt released from a very heavy burden. No longer did we have to give them cover. We would either succeed on our own or pack up. However, we could not thank the British for their ploy to get the communists to bid for power on their own; that would make us appear their accomplices. Instead, we decided to make the British appear the accomplices of the pro-communists. That was the line I took in the debate on the vote of confidence:
“Dinner parties, cocktails and luncheons led to friendly fraternisation between the British Lion and Messrs Lim Chin Siong, Woodhull and company. The pro-communists were led to believe that the PAP were wicked obstructionists, and that the British, wise and statesmanlike people, were prepared even to envisage a new ‘left’ government emerging in Singapore even more left than the PAP, provided their military bases were not touched. What has happened is that the British have become their own agents provocateurs. And how well they have succeeded! Quietly and insidiously they have instigated the pro-communists to attempt the capture of both the PAP government and the party. Young and inexperienced revolutionaries were so taken in that, in a crisis, Lim Chin Siong, Woodhull and Fong Swee Suan looked to the UK commissioner for consultations last Tuesday, the 18th, at Eden Hall, the home of the British imperialists’ representative.
“Sir, we felt that something curious was going on and we therefore kept the residence of the UK commissioner under observation. Lo and behold! The great anti-colonialists and revolutionaries turned up for secret consultations with the British Lion. … And the British may also have hoped that under attack and threat of capture, the PAP would fight back and finally suppress the communists, something they have so far failed in persuading the PAP to do. Meanwhile, to the PAP, the British had suggested that we should take firm action against the mounting subversion. In fact, a plan was to have been drawn up which would have culminated in an act leading to open collision with the communists in which the PAP either remained in office, and so became committed forever to defend British colonialism, or resigned, in which case a non-communist government not amenable to British pressure would have been got rid off.”
Several of our Chinese-educated assemblymen had asked me to withdraw the motion of confidence. I believed Lim Chin Siong and Fong wanted time to consider the implications of all this. I decided to press the issue since I had enough assemblymen to enable us to see merger through by 1963. I wanted PAP assemblymen to stand up to be counted.
Chin Chye made our position clear when he read extracts from a paper that Singapore government ministers had written and presented to the Internal Security Council at its first meeting on 12 August 1959. The paper explained our position as “non-communists”, while pinpointing and isolating Lim Chin Siong as our main communist enemy. It identified Lim as someone the British knew to be the most important front man for the MCP, yet the UK commissioner had received him at Eden Hall just two days before his supporters in the Assembly voted against the motion of confidence in the government.
The debate on the vote of confidence went on from 2:30 in the afternoon of 20 July through the night, with only an hour’s break for dinner, till 3:40 am the next day before the vote was taken. There was as much activity in the Members’ room and in the committee room as in the chamber itself. The pro-communists were hard at work trying to get as many PAP assemblymen as possible to vote against the motion. They already had eight. We expected several more to defect; the question was, how many. We needed at least 26 to govern without a coalition. And a coalition government would have been a disaster. It would mean taking in the SPA or the UMNO-MCA Alliance, both tainted by corruption. We would lose our most valuable political asset, incorruptibility.
We decided to lift the party whip and let all vote as they wished. We needed volunteers, not conscripts, for the nasty fight ahead. The pro-communists soon gave up trying to win over the Malay and Indian assemblymen, and concentrated on the bilinguals and the Chinese-educated. But they needed time, and many approached the whip, Lee Khoon Choy, to ask that the vote be postponed until the next day. We refused. So they filibustered, making long, repetitive speeches to drag out the proceedings.
Among those they were working on were three very disparate Chinese-educated Members who had not succumbed to the lure of communism. The bravest of these was Chor Yeok Eng. He lived in rural Bukit Timah, a communist-infested farming area. He was physically at risk, but he stood firm. So did Chan Chee Seng, a strapping 26-year-old judo black belt who had great courage and was personally loyal to Pang Boon and me. In contrast, Lee Teck Him was a man of 55 who worked as a secretary in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, a first generation immigrant, born in Fujian. He also stood firm. For some reason, he did not share the young Chinese high school students’ zeal for the new China. He might have had word of what had happened to his relatives there. Whatever it was, I was much encouraged that he stood by us.
We were not sure how the voting would go; we thought it might be a photo finish. Chan Chee Seng and I did a head count and were certain only of 25 – one short of a majority. And that was where Sahorah binte Ahmat came in. Sahorah was a large, overweight lady of 36, a good platform speaker in Malay, simple and straightforward. She was sick in bed in the Singapore General Hospital, where she was approached by the Plen’s sister – apparently with success, for with only a few hours to go before the vote, several Malay assemblymen also visited her and reported that she had been won over by the rebels. But at a meeting in the Members’ room during a break in the debate, Chee Seng said he had visited Sahora only the day before and was confident he could get her to come to the Assembly to vote for us. I had given up and told him not to waste time, but Chin Chye interjected that there was no harm in trying.
Sahora told Chee Seng that her Malay colleagues had been distancing themselves from her at government functions, showing that they despised her. So she had refused to be persuaded by them to support the government. But she liked Chee Seng and agreed to come. Chee Seng immediately arranged for an ambulance to bring her to the Assembly House, where she was carried on a stretcher to the Members’ room. From there, she managed to walk the 15 yards into the chamber just in time for the crucial vote.
Twenty-six PAP assemblymen voted for the motion, giving us a clear majority of 26 out of a house of 51 members. Had we lost the vote, the government would have had to resign. Then either the pro-communists could form a government with more defections from the PAP or there would be general elections, which they believed they could win.
Dr Lee Siew Choh, parliamentary secretary to the minister for home affairs, and his supporters who voted against the motion believed that in the long run the communists were bound to win. As we hardened our position and they beguiled him with promises to make him their leader and prime minister, he seized his big chance. He was an inveterate gambler from his days at Medical College. Broadset for a Chinese, he had physical energy and a loud voice that was overconfident and a little boastful. He played rugger and chess. On the rugger field his method was to bulldoze his way through without any deception or diversionary tactics, and he was therefore easily foiled. Keng Swee, who had frequently played chess with him, found him bold to the point of recklessness. He was always initiating some spectacular manoeuvre to break his opponent and crash through, forgetting that an experienced adversary would never be tempted to take risks when he could make a steady, relentless advance against an adventurer. This time he was embarked on his biggest gamble – prime minister or nothing.
Our two barber assemblymen voted against the motion. They were not even remotely communist, but for several months before the Anson by-election, communist cadres had latched onto them and had written speeches and articles for them. When I had summoned them and reprimanded them after hearing their untypical speeches in the Assembly, they had apologised, but after the PAP defeat in the Hong Lim by-election, they felt, like others who defected, that their future lay with the unions and the “masses”.
Lim Chin Siong’s first objective had been to win enough assemblymen to his side to form a new government. When that failed, he tried various strategies to stop the government from continuing to negotiate merger with the Tunku. He formed a new party, the Barisan Sosialis (or Socialist Front). Dr Lee Siew Choh, its chairman, then called for fresh elections.
Lim Chin Siong was silent for a week after the debate on the confidence motion. Then on 28 July, the Straits Times published a letter from him that carried the fingerprints of Woodhull and Puthucheary. “Let me make it clear once and for all that I am not a communist or a communist front-man or for that matter anybody’s front-man. …” he declared. He had not even wanted to re-enter the political arena after being released, and about his appointment to be political secretary to the ministry of finance, he said, “Not only was I reluctant to accept the post, but I had offered to withdraw from politics if he (Lee Kuan Yew) so desired it. He did not desire it. Instead, he wished to show the people that I was identified with the government.”
The conclusions I had drawn from his tea with Selkirk he shrugged off as anti-communist hysteria:
“In their nervousness, they began to shout about communism and chaos, expecting to frighten some people into believing them. The communist left who are supposed to be arch-conspirators have now, we are told, been taken for a ride by the British. How funny can people get? My meetings with Lord Selkirk have been few and far between. If meeting Lord Selkirk makes one a plotter then Mr Lee is the greatest of all plotters for he has dealings with Lord Selkirk more than anyone else in Singapore.”
That same day he made a two-hour speech at a union meeting, at the end of which he again touched briefly on the tea party: “Regarding Lim Chin Siong drinking tea and eating with the British, it is a very common thing. The question is whether the stand is firm or not. We cannot say that when we drink tea with them, then we are in league with them.” He must have sensed that the workers were fearful that the British had taken him in. He and his pro-communist followers were now exposed and isolated without a credible non-communist cover. But he was not going to get away with his evasions. If he had been reluctant to re-enter politics and to accept a government post, why see Selkirk?
I hit back on 4 August with a letter to the Straits Times in my capacity as secretary-general of the PAP:
“We … were extremely concerned with the tremendous problems that would crop up after the election. One of the problems was what he and his friends would do after we had released them. He offered to retire from politics and go away to Indonesia. First, it was not an offer made seriously. Second, we did not think it right and proper that we should make it a condition that he should retire from politics before we decided to contest the election to win. We have to face the communist challenge whether or not Mr Lim personally is in the Singapore political arena. …
(As for the tea party) “he has still not explained why he went to see Lord Selkirk … In an explanation published in the Chinese press on July 29, he stated that he met Lord Selkirk for social purposes, giving the impression that his talks with the UK commissioner were purely social. There was no social occasion on Tuesday, July 18. There were no other guests present besides Mr Lim and his friends.”
An explanation was to be forthcoming, but not from Lim Chin Siong. In a letter to the Straits Times published nine days later, on 13 August, Woodhull quoted a conversation Puthucheary had had with Keng Swee after the Anson by-election. Keng Swee had told Puthucheary that British intervention was imminent, that they would not sit back and see the pro-communists destroy the PAP, and that if the non-communist leadership was opposed in public, the PAP for its part would fold up and let the British finish the pro-communists off.
The following day Keng Swee recounted in a letter the gist of several conversations Puthucheary had with him:
“… After Anson, Mr Puthucheary became progressively more and more agitated. He appealed to me, in the name of sanity, to reverse our policy and to accommodate Lim Chin Siong and his faction. The alternative must be the destruction of the PAP as a political force. This prospect he viewed with the utmost dismay. …
“It was at this juncture that I entered into a series of serious and sometimes tense and emotional discussions with Mr Puthucheary on the future of the party and the country. I said I knew that Lim Chin Siong had thrown the whole weight of his trade union organisation to defeat the PAP at Anson. I said I also knew that the full weight of Lim Chin Siong’s trade union cadres had been deployed against our organising secretaries and branch committee members, as a result of which large numbers had defected. But, I pointed out, the situation was not novel. The same thing happened in 1957, when pro-communist trade union cadres mounted an assault on the party organisation and came within an ace of capturing the party central committee. I said, in 1957, the result of this pro-communist assault against us was to draw openly and clearly the fundamental distinction between the pro-communist and the non-communist groups in the party. This adventure provided the British with a pretext for carrying out the big swipe.”
Keng Swee thought that the pro-communists wanted to see Selkirk because they took this as a hint that the British were about to carry out another “big swipe” against them now. In a reply published on 21 August, Puthucheary gave a different interpretation, repeating what Woodhull had already said: what they had sought from Selkirk was clarification of an assumption the PAP had expounded, namely that there could be no alternative government to the present PAP leaders, that they were the only group the British would allow to hold power. But the implications were in fact the same: they wanted reassurance from the British that they could go ahead with their plans with impunity.
Years later, in 1982, Selkirk told an interviewer that Puthucheary telephoned him on the morning of Tuesday, 18 July, to ask if he could see him with one or two friends. Selkirk suggested lunch the following day. Puthucheary said it was urgent and he would like to see the commissioner as soon as convenient. Selkirk “reluctantly invited them to tea” at 4 pm. Selkirk said the essence of what they asked him was:
“‘Was the constitution written for the special benefit of Mr Lee Kuan Yew or was it a free constitution?’ I said simply this: ‘It’s a free constitution, stick to it and no rioting, you understand?’ That was really the sum of it. Well, they went away and I then told Lee Kuan Yew, before the debate, that I had seen them.”
But I was convinced they had been tricked. Selkirk was no inexperienced politician. He knew the meaning of protocol. For the senior representative of Her Majesty’s Government in Singapore to receive Lim Chin Siong and Fong personally during a crisis in which the future of the government was at stake was to signal something significant. The pro-communists were bound to interpret it as a nod that the British were prepared to consider working with Lim, an ex-detainee who, under the 1958 constitution, had been prohibited from taking part in elections. Moreover, none of the four who had seen Selkirk were members of the Legislative Assembly and they therefore had no standing to justify any discussion about the formation of a new government. I could not accept Selkirk’s explanation that he had met them out of diplomatic courtesy, merely giving them a constitutionally correct reply. Secretly I was delighted that he had. Now we were free of the albatross.
Keng Swee and I believed that the brain behind this move was not Selkirk but his deputy commissioner, Philip Moore. Moore was a man of energy, vitality and keen intelligence. He was well-built, about six feet tall, with a friendly face and smiling eyes. There was something engaging and open about him. He was British middle-class and educated at a public school. He had served as a navigator in a Lancaster bomber during World War II and been shot down in December 1942 over Germany, where he was a prisoner of war until 1945. After that, he went to Oxford, where he would have taken a First had he not joined the British Civil Service before his finals. He was a rugger “blue” and had played for England; it showed in his athletic frame and his agile movements.
Moore and the other members of the UK commission found it difficult to get to know the PAP leaders because of our self-imposed and much publicised rule that ministers should cut down drastically on attendance at non-official functions. We had seen how Marshall and Lim Yew Hock’s ministers had become part of the cocktail circuit and lost their standing with the people, who saw them as social climbers. Moore got around the problem by playing golf with Keng Swee and me after every Internal Security Council meeting for the opportunity of long discussions on the golf course and over drinks after the game. Thirty-four years later, after his retirement, Moore told me that by the end of one year, he had concluded that Goode was right when he wrote in his haul-down report that I was not a crypto-communist but a crypto-anti-communist. Goode’s report was crucial in determining British policy because Sir Ian Wallace, then permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office in London, to whom Moore reported, after talking to me for nearly three hours in 1961, also agreed with Goode’s assessment.
From British archives I found documentary support for our deduction that the British had planned to split the pro-communists from the PAP, in a report dated October 1961 from Philip Moore to Ian Wallace, setting out the problem of Singapore and merger:
“Once Lim Chin Siong becomes convinced that the people of Singapore are going to support merger, then I suspect he may well revert to the original long-term policy of the MCP – a socialist government throughout Malaya. The opportunity of overthrowing Lee Kuan Yew and achieving a communist-manipulated government in Singapore seemed, in July, to be so golden that Lim Chin Siong could not resist it.”
The “opportunity so golden” Moore referred to in this report was the vote of confidence that came up in July. Selkirk’s confirmation that “It’s a free constitution, stick to it and no rioting, you understand?” was exactly the same line the British took with the Tunku. Moore reported in the same letter of 18 October that “we had to explain to the Federation that, provided Barisan Sosialis behaved in a constitutional manner, there was no question of preserving Lee Kuan Yew simply by putting the Barisan Sosialis leaders in jail or suspending the Singapore constitution”. In other words, the British took the position that, provided the Barisan acted in a constitutional manner, they were perfectly free to take over power under the constitution.
Lim Chin Siong and his comrades took the invitation to tea by the UK commissioner and what he told them as a signal that the British were willing to deal with them, that they would not be locked up to prevent them from taking power. Selkirk spelt out the correct constitutional position and they worked out the implications for themselves and made a bid for power, breaking off from the PAP and attempting to remove it from government.
The seemingly simple constitutional stand Selkirk took achieved three objectives. First, the PAP government had either to take action against Lim Chin Siong and his fellow communists or face the danger of being ousted by them. Second, it offered Lim and his comrades the possibility of a constitutional takeover of power. Third, it showed the Tunku that the consequences for Malaysia would be grievous if he refused to take Singapore in.
Once the Tunku had announced his plan for Singapore and the Borneo territories, and I did not yield to Lim Chin Siong’s call for the abolition of the Internal Security Council and more “democratic freedoms”, the Plen decided to destroy the PAP and me, because merger had to be prevented by all means. This was revealed years later by Koo Young, who had been Lim’s subordinate in the CUF organisation, and was confirmed by Lim Chin Siong in 1984 when he told the Internal Security Department that he had seen the Plen three times between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and that at one of these meetings, the pro-communists were told to break with the PAP. The Plen evidently thought we would be fearful of the strength of the pro-communists, which was true. He thought that we were soft, bourgeois, English-educated, pleasure-loving middle-class types, beer-swilling, golf-playing, working and sleeping in air-conditioned rooms and travelling in air-conditioned cars. He did not see that there was enough steel inside this bourgeois English-educated group to withstand the heat he could put on us.