SINGAPORE The Takeover
Down from the wall of Singapore's town hall came the portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Next day, shirtsleeved and Next day, shirtsleeved and tieless, Lee Kuan Yew, chief of the left-of-center People's Action Party that had just captured 43 of 51 Assembly seats, took the oath of allegiance as the Queen's first Prime Minister of the autonomous State of Singapore.
Taking down the Queen's picture was the most provocative thing Lee's forces did last week—as if determined to show how untrue were all those stories abroad that the Communists had now taken control of Britain's great Far East naval base. British officials on the scene, less alarmed, have convinced themselves that Lee's bark is worse than his bite. They agree that his bark is pretty ferocious, but they point to some paradoxes in his makeup. At 36, Prime Minister Lee is a Cambridge-trained barrister steeped in British ways of thought—as well as a mob orator who shouts to his barefoot followers: "It's us against the white men." A Singapore-born Chinese like his wealthy father and grandfather before him, he rabble-rouses more fluently in English than in Chinese, which he only began to learn two years ago. Among his golfing and Mercedes-driving companions, he is known convivially as "Harry Lee"; yet a touch of intellectual arrogance often makes him abrupt with friends and foes alike.
In his hour of victory last week, Lee ordained discipline for his unruly leftist party, and urged hard work on the 90,000 supporters who gathered on the grassy lawn to cheer him. Fulfilling a campaign pledge, he won release from custody of eight leaders of his party's extremist wing. On emerging from Changi prison, where they had been held since the 1956 riots, the eight signed a joint statement pledging "the attainment of party aims and objectives through constitutional process."
At a televised news conference, Lee promised that Singapore, which he hopes eventually to unite with the mainland's independent Federation of Malaya, will not go Communist "unless and until Malaya goes Communist." The British hope that the fervent anti-Communism of Malaya's ruling conservatives, and Lee's own comprehension of the island's economic, dependence on foreign trade and capital, will hold him on a moderate course. As he congratulated Prime Minister Lee last week, retiring British Governor Sir William Goode (who will stay on as High Commissioner until a native of Singapore can be named to the job) handed him a letter from Prime Minister Harold Macmillan offering Britain's cooperation and help in ruling the island city that Sir Stamford Raffles founded in tropical swamps 140 years ago. Sir William, the last British Governor, had his own particular ties to Singapore. As a corporal captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, Sir William was one of the hard-worked British prisoners who built the famed bridge over the River Kwai.