Singapore has started seven days of national mourning after the death of its founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
He died at the age of 91.
Mr Lee was Singapore's Prime Minister for 31 years - turning the city-state into a global financial hub and one of the wealthiest nations on earth.
Lord Powell of Bayswater met Lee Kuan Yew frequently while serving as former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Private Secretary.
The two developed a firm friendship, and Olly Barratt caught up with him - and started by asking him of his memories of official meetings with Lee Kuan Yew.
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TAKE LORD POWELL OF BAYSWATER
"I had so many meetings with him over the years…many of them together with Margaret Thatcher, for whom I worked. They all made a strong impression, he was quite simply a remarkable man, a remarkable leader."
OB:
"Remarkable in what sense? What was it about him that made him remarkable?"
LORD POWELL:
"Well first of all, his achievement in turning Singapore into the world's most efficient, most admired economy, quite frankly. It was a remarkable achievement to have built Singapore with no natural resources into a place which is generally regarded as the best place in the world for companies to do business. But more than that, it was his single-minded determination. The idea that leadership and government could achieve a great deal while still supporting the free market economy. He was a believer in the state's role in the economy, in creating the right environment for a country to flourish. That is what made him really remarkable. He was not a socialist, and yet he built a country which really led the world."
OB:
"How did Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher get along together?"
LP:
"Lee Kuan Yew was a man to whom one listened. Because he had so much to say and so much to offer. Margaret Thatcher regarded him as one of the great brains of the modern world. She says in her memoirs quite openly, 'I relied on Lee Kuan Yew's wise advice, and extraordinary knowledge of politics throughout my time as Prime Minister.' And my memory is that whenever Margaret Thatcher was heading towards Asia I was instructed to plan a programme which diverted her to Singapore because as she once said to me, 'Charles, how will we know what to say, if we haven't talked to Harry?" I think they first met each other when she was education secretary in ted heath's government in the early 1970s and she regarded him as a friend and mentor from that time on. And you know, at many Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings, the two principal agenda items would be the view of world economic affairs, and a view of world political affairs. And either Margaret Thatcher or Lee Kuan Yew would lead on one or the other. And it used to be rather like going to Wimbledon, because they were the two champions, hitting the ball to and fro across the net while the rest of the commonwealth countries looked on, with their heads going from side to side because they were such virtuoso performers. So he played a far beyond the confines of Singapore. He was recognised really globally as a remarkable statesman, certainly the most important Asian statesman of his generation."
OB:
"Were there similarities between Lee Kuan Yew and Margareth Thatcher and their ways of doing business?"
LP:
"I think there were similarities in that they both were single-minded, they were both determined to change their countries for the better, they didn't spend much time on opposition, on worrying about what everybody thought. They knew they were elected to do a job and they got on and did it, in their not very different ways. Yes, there were great similarities, both believed in the free market, both were disciples you might say of Milton Friedman, and one of Mrs Thatcher's proudest achievements was when she was able to say that Lee Kuan Yew had congratulated her on the changes she had brought about in the British economy because for decades he had been a great critic of how Britain had allowed itself to deteriorate and the fact that he approved of what she'd been able to achieve by the later 1980s was perhaps one of the greatest satisfactions she had in her time as Prime Minister. And that illustrates how deeply she respected him."
OB:
"How big an influence do you believe that LKY had on the wider British political establishment?"
LP:
"Well he certainly had a wide influence, most of our Prime Ministers knew him, talked to him, consulted with him. and he made a point when he came here, of trying to take the opinions of widest number of people he could see. He would regularly see the heads of our intelligence and security agencies, for instance,and he had a circle of friends here, of whom I was proud to be one, who he met for dinner and listened to and also educated. Tony Blair was close to him - I remember hosting a dinner for him and Tony Blair at home when they had three or four hours of really profound conversation. So yes his links with Britain were obviouslyy an important feature of his life. He was disappointed in Britain, I think, during the 1970s and 80s, and indeed after our withdrawal from east of suez in 1968, and the way the economy declined, and the country seemed to be on a permanent downward slope, but he was much encouraged by the revival of the 1980s and 1990s and he came here in a way, I think, just to refresh himself from his Cambridge experience, from his earlier days in the UK, but also to promote Singapore. Which he did extremely successfully. One of his ideas, which I was a participant in, was to set up a Singapore-British Business Council, to try to revive the trading and economic relationship between Britain and Singapore and I was first Chairman on the British side, indeed for 10 or 12 years, and it was highly successful, we did really engage with Singapore in a business sense, thanks to his inspiration."
OB:
"When you look around the world at the various areas of unrest, we've had the Arab Spring, there are too many other regions to mention where times are difficult - do you think more and more people around the world are looking at the singapore model and scratching their heads at how they've done it?"
LP:
"Well I think a lot of people do study the Singapore model - it's not an easy one to replicate. Singapore is a small country, and you can't always apply what works in a small country to others. One of the particular lessons you can take from Singapore, and you know I think the people most interested are mainland china - china itself, i think, sends a lot of delegations to Singapore. And I remember Lee Kuan Yew himself telling me how some senior Chinese would say to him, well tell us, what's the secret of singapore? How do you both be a democracy but also have this astonishing economic success and the same political party always wins the elections? And he said that his reply was always - you have to be close to the people. And I think that was the secret. He was always close to the people because he knew what they wanted and he was able to deliver what they wanted."
OB:
"Tell me a bit about the role - the important role - that Lee Kuan Yew played with Margaret Thatcher in terms of Britain's negotiations with China over Hong Kong."
LP:
"Well Margaret Thatcher often tapped into Lee Kuan Yew for advice - in particular I recall on Hong Kong and the future of Hong Kong. She had the very delicate task of coming to an agreement with China about Hong Kong's future in the early 1980s and she had frequent conversations and messages from him at that time about how best to handle the Chinese, the best way to present her ideas and so on. She found that enormously valuable . She also found valuable his strong aversion to communism and to communist influence spreading in Asia, and his support for the americans, in the vietnam war, his willingness to provide naval and other facilities to western forces. He was a strong believer in maintaining a strong US presence and always regretted that Britain reduced its presence. SO he had a strategic sense, a global strategic sense, in which Singapore played quite a minor role but the fact that his powerful voice from singapore would be heard on these issues was enormously influential."
OB:
"What do you believe Lee Kuan Yew's legacy will be for Singapore but also for the wider Asia region?"
LP:
"Well his legacy to Singapore is very obvious - it is modern singapore itself is his legacy, and you couldn't have a better legacy than that. And I think despite tensions with malaysia and indonesia over the years, I think they too respected his leadership and singapore's success. He was strong minded - he had a fairly blunt way of expressing himself which did not always go down well with some of his neighbours, indeed I know Margaret Thatcher rather relished it because she wrote in her memoirs that he wouldn't stand for the sort of left wing rubbish one often heard at commonwealth prime minister's meetings, so that didn't always win him friends, but even if people didn't agree with him they knew he was right. And that is what matters."
ENDS