On 9 August 1965 Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister of Singapore, famously shed tears on national television when he announced that his micro-state had exited from Malaysia. Lee lamented that for "the whole of my adult life… I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories… (of) people connected by geography, economics and ties of kinship".

British politicians, diplomats, journalists and businessmen were equally anguished. As historian Tony Stockwell has written: "For the British government, Malaysia's raison d'etre lay in the merger of island and peninsula; their separation in 1965 made a nonsense of the original 'grand design'.''