But we could not find a PAP woman member who was a good enough speaker to take on the programme in English. After Choo had auditioned the wives of two candidates in Lee office, she came into my room, where I was in discussion with Keng Swee and Raja, to tell me that they sounded too soft, not tough enough. When she left us, my two friends suggested that she should do it. I asked her, and after a moment's hesitation, she agreed. Raja wrote the first draft, which she amended so that it would sound like her. It was cleared by the central executive committee and translated into the other languages, and she delivered it in English over Radio Malaya. One paragraph was crucial:

"Our society is still built on the assumption that women are the social, political and economic inferiors of men. This myth has been made the excuse for the exploitation of female labour. Many women do the same kind of work as men but do not get the same pay.... We are fielding five women candidates in the election. .... Let us show them (the other parties) that Singapore women are tired of their pantomime and buffoonery. I appeal to women to vote for PAP. It is the only party with the idealism, the honesty and ability to carry out its election programme."

This was a serious commitment, or l would not have agreed to my wife making it in a broadcast. I wanted to implement it early, although it meant urgent work for the legal draftsmen in the attorney-general's chambers. They searched for precedents in the legislation of other countries, and drew up the Women's Charter, which we passed into law within a year. It established monogamy as the only legal marital condition and made polygamy, hitherto an accepted practice, a crime - except among Muslims, whose religion allowed a man to have four wives.

The charter was comprehensive and altered the status of women. But it did not change the cultural bias of parents against daughters in favour of sons. That has still not been achieved. There were, in addition, several easy, popular points to be scored that required no planing, including a series of "anti-yellow culture" prohibitions imposed by Pang Boon as minister for home affairs.

"Yellow culture" was a literal translation of the Mandarin phrase for the decadent and degenerate behaviour that had brought China to its knees in the 19th century: gambling, opium-smoking, pornography, multiple wives and concubines, the selling of daughters into prostitution, corruption and nepotism. This aversion to "yellow culture" had been imported by school teachers from China, who infused into our students and their parents the spirit of national revival that was evident in every chapter of the text books they brought with them, whether on literature, history or geography. And it was reinforced by articles of left-wing Chinese newspaper journalists enthralled by the glowing reports of a clean, honest, dynamic, revolutionary China.

Pang Boom moved quickly, outflanking the communists with puritanical deal he ordered a clean-up of Chinese secret society gangsters, and outlawed pornography, striptease shows, pin-table saloons, even decadent songs. It did no harm apart from adding some-what to unemployment and making Singapore less attractive to tourists.

But the Seamen who had always been a part of Singapore's transient population soon found their way to the amenities still offered in the more obscure corners of the island to which we turned a blind eye. Prostitution continued discreetly; we left it alone because we could not ban it without taking silly and ineffective action.

Our most significant programme was to give every child a place in school within a year. My gum-making brother-in-law, Yong Nyuk Lin, now minister for education, did us proud: in 12 months, he doubled the intake of students, converting each school into two by splitting it to provide a morning and an afternoon session.

He ran a crash programme to train the teachers needed, and promoted many of the seniors to be principals, headmasters and headmistresses. He also started adult education classes to teach Malay, now the national language, and launched a Chinese literacy drive, using Mandarin as the common language of all Chinese dialect groups. People wanted to feel they were improving themselves and their prospects, and we gave them the means. We adopted the proven methods of our communist adversaries.

As with the mass campaigns, we saw no reason why we should give the MCP a monopoly of such techniques.

                                                      ****

I had known that a frustrated Ong Eng Guan was plotting with some of the assemblymen, but paid little heed because I was confident he could never get a majority to support him. But he had become reckless. If he could not be in power, he would ruin us even if the MCP benefited. At a party conference in June 1960, his Hong Lim branch introduced 16 resolutions, four of them designed to win him communist support.

In order to dispel my suspicions, Lim Chin Siong and his comrades had earlier protested that they would have no truck with Ong. The Trade Union Congress had issued a statement that although the PAP had made mistakes, they would not support him. But I believed it was not beyond them to have got hold of his close friends to put him up to this. The resolutions called for a more anti-colonial policy, the immediate release of all detainees, and immediate constitutional revision. In other words, internal self-government was not good enough. So Ong, too, wanted independence. We were set for a showdown. He was isolated in the party, and after two days of argument, the conference suspended him and two assemblymen who backed him - S.U Lingam and Ng Teng Kian, a Chinese-speaking Hokkien like Ong. All three men then crossed the floor of the Assembly to sit with the opposition.

Ong was restive. He had lost his star status and was not making the headlines. He therefore set out to attract attention by doing the unexpected and the eye-catching. In September, he tabled a motion calling on the prime minister to fight in the Internal Security Council for the unconditional release of all political detainees. This could not help him. Once again, it would only help the communists although they distrusted and despised him. But it would embarrass the government. I was away in Sarawak, so Chin Chye moved an amendment to point out that it was unlikely that the Federation government, which had the deciding vote in the Internal Security Council, would agree to release persons who it was convinced were promoting the cause of the MCP. And since it was the government's business to advance the welfare of the people of Singapore through merger with the Federation, it had no intention of going against the Federation's stand. Ong's strategy had been to show us up as lackeys of the imperialists, and he now took this a step further. In October, he said George Thomson, director of Information Services, was now my guide and philosopher; I was "a ventriloquist's dummy and George Thomson the ventriloquist". He wanted to diminish my standing with the Chinese-speaking by portraying me as the mouthpiece of a colonial speechwriter and mentor. He alleged that Val Meadows, whose office he had demolished, and Alan Blades, the commissioner of police, were similarly manipulating me. When I challenged him to repeat these statements outside the Assembly, he kept silent.

Instead, at the next Assembly meeting in December, he accused me of nepotism, claiming that I had appointed Kwa Soon Chuan as deputy commissioner of the Inland Revenue Department because he was my brother-in-law. Again, I asked him to repeat what he had said outside Parliament. When he did not do so, Chin Chye, as leader of the House, introduced a motion to condemn him for his dishonourable conduct and to suspend him until such time as he apologised to the Assembly. Ong tabled a motion to claim that the Assembly had no power to condemn a Member. He challenged me to resign with him and stand in by-elections in our respective constituencies, renewed his charges against the PAP, and said that the Public Service Commission was packed with PAP supporters. He agreed to an investigation of these charges by a committee of the whole House, but before the Assembly met on the day fixed for it, he resigned his seat. We announced that a commission of inquiry would be formed with a high court judge as chairman to investigate his allegations, and that after the report had been placed before the House and debated, a by-election would be held in Hong Lim.

On 3 January 1961, Mr Justice F.A. Chua was appointed to head the commission, which held ten sittings between 17 January and 1 February. My main objective in the inquiry was to press him to substantiate all the charges he had made against me. Chua's report, submitted in February, found that there was no truth at all in any of the allegations, that they were groundless and reckless, and that Ong was "not a person to be believed". We debated it for two days in the Assembly and condemned Ong for his dishonourable conduct. I had exposed him as a liar and a petty, vicious person. I hoped that this would shake his hold on the Chinese-speaking in Hong Lim. I could not have been more wrong.

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