The day after my meeting with Chin Siong, James got hold of Charles Ladd of Jardine Wharf and asked him to fix a meeting with Lord Selkirk. On Sunday morning at 9am, James received a telephone call asking him to come for lunch. “I expected to see Charles, but Charles was not there. It was only Lord Selkirk, his wife Wendy and me.”
“During lunch I asked him, ‘Is it true that you told Austin Albu that Internal Security Council had been prevented from releasing all these detainees because of Lee Kuan Yew’s attitude?’. He said no he had not said any such thing. But Wendy Selkirk said, ” What do you mean you didn’t say these things? You did say those things. I was here when you said them.”
“If it was an act put on to create a split, I fell for it, If it was the truth, I believed it. I don’t know for certain and I didn’t know at that time for certain what was going on. I went back to my holiday bungalow and thought about it for a little while. Then I fixed a meeting with Harry.”
“I went to see Harry at his office at City Hall. I told him that I had been to see Selkirk. During the conversation he asked me whether Chin Siong was a communist. I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. He is a radical.’ This is what I told Lord Selkirk too. Chin Siong was very radical, much more radical than I was. And Selkirk said to me that the difficulty of releasing the detainees was largely the PAP’s position with them. I didn’t think Selkirk was telling a lie. I believed him. “
James felt that base on this he had no place in the PAP. He said to Harry, “I think you should release me, I will go back to university and get a job there and see what I can do. Harry said ‘No you can’t do that.’ It was left like that.”