From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Sunday Times
reported that Prime Minister Sir Lynden Pindling was
involved. No libel action followed. For the queen’s dinner on the royal yacht
Britannia
, Pindling offered all leaders a boat ride from our hotels to the
Britannia
. I decided to go by road. Near the wharf where the royal yacht was
berthed, we passed a crowd of demonstrators with placards denouncing Pindling;
several said “Chief is a Thief”. The chief and his other guests took much longer
by boat than we did by car. Either because the sea was choppy or the boat was
slow, they kept the queen waiting for over an hour. She was usually gracious and
restrained in her comments, but was not accustomed to being kept waiting. She
said to me that the dishes would be overcooked. The main dish was, but the
dessert was excellent.
I had lunch one day with President Junius Jayewardene of Sri Lanka and the
chief justice of the Bahamas. The chief justice spoke of the widespread cocaine
habit in the country and of the vast fortunes made by those in the drug network.
Smugglers flew into the Bahamas from South America in small aircraft. With
the connivance of customs and other officials, the drugs were taken by air and
sea to the US mainland. In transit, enough slipped through to the local
population to ruin many a family. High government ministers had been involved.
When I left Nassau, I had lost my last illusion of an island paradise anywhere in
the world.
My last conference was in Kuala Lumpur in October 1989. Like the previous
meeting in Vancouver, October 1987, it was uneventful and there were no “hot”
issues. I spent one long evening on Langkawi island, during the “retreat” (an
informal gathering of the conference members at some resort), chatting with
Prime Minister Bhutto and her husband Asif Zadari, learning about Pakistani
politics and culture. She had youthful good looks, a fair complexion and a finely
chiselled, photogenic face. He was an ebullient and outgoing wheeler-dealer,
with no inhibitions in telling me that he was ready to consider any deal in

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anything – cutting a good deal was what life was about for him. He was in the
fruit and other export business, in real estate and everything else. I promised to
introduce him to some fruit importers to buy his mangoes, which I did when he
visited Singapore accompanying his wife to some meeting in 1995. He was a
likeable rogue. But I never thought him capable of murdering her brother, a
charge made by the Pakistani government after she was thrown out of office by
the president.
That was my last Commonwealth conference as I was preparing to step down
as prime minister in 1990. The first conference in 1962 was in a different age
with a different set of leaders. The Commonwealth was then a relatively small
club, with deep and strong bonds of history and kinship between Britain and the
old dominions. They still had close economic and political links with the newly
independent countries, all still enjoying Commonwealth tariff preferences, with
Britain as their main trading partner. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a
man of empire from the generation that had fought on the Western front in
World War I, initiated Britain’s entry into Europe, the old white dominions were
aghast. They felt abandoned after having fought alongside Britain in two world
wars. Sir Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, in a powerful
intervention demolished Macmillan’s assurances that there would be continuing
close ties with the Commonwealth after Britain joined the European Economic
Community.
“I run a federation. I know how federations work,” he said. They were either
centripetal, in which case the states would come closer and closer together as in
Australia, or they were centrifugal, with the states moving further and further
apart until they eventually broke away. They were never static. There could be
no other dynamic at work in such groupings. If Britain joined the EEC, its ties
with the Commonwealth would weaken and atrophy. Looking back over the past
40 years, I have been reminded how prophetic Menzies was.
Britain and the Europeans have got closer together. Even the old
Commonwealth countries, kith and kin notwithstanding, no longer share those
deep emotional bonds of the 1960s. Their destinies have gone their different
ways in their separate continents. Twenty-five years later, in 1998, the British
were still divided over whether to be in one currency, the Euro, and (what many
fear and do not want) a federal supra-national government of Europe.
Already in 1989, with over 40 leaders, there was no longer that sense of
shared values. It was a club whose members came and went unexpectedly with
the vagaries of elections or coups, with no time to bid farewell. There was an

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ephemeral quality in most of the hot topics of the day – the New International
Economic Order, North-South dialogue, South-South cooperation, Rhodesia,
apartheid – they are part of history. Nevertheless each conference served a
purpose. A leader could highlight certain points directly with other leaders and
put the wrong party on the defensive, as happened when India supported the
Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Face to face, Mrs Gandhi could not, and to
her credit, did not defend India’s position. This made an impression on the other
leaders and influenced their stand on this problem. There was value in attending
these conferences. But I had attended too many and it was time to move on.
During Commonwealth conferences every head of government would be
granted an audience with the queen as head of the Commonwealth. The only
exception was the 1971 conference in Singapore, when for some reason the
Heath government decided that the queen would not attend. I had first called on
her in September 1966. She was amazingly good at putting her guests at ease
without seeming to do so, a social skill perfected by training and experience. She
was gracious, friendly and genuinely interested in Singapore because her uncle,
Lord Louis Mountbatten, had told her of his time here as Allied commander-in-
chief, South East Asia Command.
When I saw her in London in January 1969, she said she was sorry the
British had decided to withdraw from Singapore. She looked sad to see an
important chapter of Britain’s history come to an end. She visited Singapore in
1972 to make up for the visit she did not make in 1971. I made sure she saw all
the places Lord Mountbatten had told her about, including the City Hall
Chamber where he had taken the surrender of the Japanese, the Istana where he
had stayed and the Kranji Commonwealth War Cemetery. Surprisingly huge
crowds gathered on the roadsides waiting to see her pass by. They surged
forward to surround her whenever she got out from the car. Her assistant private
secretary, Philip Moore, who had been the UK deputy high commissioner to
Singapore in the 1960s, asked me not to have the security officers hold the
crowds back as they were friendly. The queen was completely at ease, happy and
relaxed.
To commemorate her visit, the queen made me a Knight Grand Cross of the
Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG). Earlier, Harold Wilson as prime
minister had recommended me for the Companion of Honour (CH) in the 1970
New Year’s honours list. It was not usual for such a high decoration to be

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awarded to a young man of 47. Before I was 50, I had received two British
honours much prized by those brought up in Britain’s former empire. Long years
of association had nurtured certain values. I have received honours from
President Nasser of Egypt, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, President Suharto of
Indonesia, President Park Chung Hee of Korea and Prince Sihanouk of
Cambodia among others. They do not carry the same emotional connotation. I
did not think it appropriate to use the title “Sir” that went with the GCMG, but
was happy to have received two coveted British trophies, even though they no
longer opened doors with the British as they used to in the days of empire.

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