Ten years ago, many other men were ahead of Lawrence Wong in the race to become Singapore’s fourth prime minister. How did he pip them?
Listen to Episode 2 of “The Neighbourhood Boy” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in again next Friday for Episode 3.
00:00 - Introduction
Today, Chan Chun Sing, K Shanmugam, and Ong Ye Kung all report to Lawrence Wong. But if you wound back the clock ten years, and asked who might be prime minister today, all those men, and many others, would have been ahead of Lawrence Wong in the pickings.
Donald Low: “I think he will be quite the first person to say, if not for COVID, he wouldn't be where he is. So, you know, you can say that whether he was lucky or unlucky, he ended up with this.”
That’s Donald Low, an academic who’s also Lawrence’s friend and former civil service colleague.
Donald Low: “He did not plan for this. He did not aim for this. He did not volunteer for this, even…I think he would agree to the characterisation of him as an accidental…he didn't want the job.”
An accidental Prime Minister? That doesn’t sound very Singaporean. We’re known for our methodical, meticulous, long-term planning—trimming every hedge to perfection, spotting litter before it’s dropped, selecting future scholars when they’re barely out of their diapers.
How did Singapore’s far-sighted leadership succession model falter? How did a sudden pandemic lead to Wong’s unlikely rise to the top? And what does his ascent say about the People’s Action Party and its future?
My name is Jean Hew. I joined Jom fresh out of university. After three years as its Head of Research, I left to teach yoga and now I’m working in corporate investigative research. I’ve been developing this podcast for the past three years; reading, writing, talking about Wong.
I’m also fascinated by how Wong’s story parallels the Singapore story. What’s changed in the three decades since he joined the public service? And what’s stayed the same? I’m curious about what lies ahead for Singapore and for me. What kind of life opportunities will I have? What kind of life can I build here in Singapore, my home?
Our future, as ever, will depend on the PAP. And on Wong. Who is Lawrence Wong, the person leading Singapore at this juncture. And what can we expect of him and his party?
We’re going to find out. You’re listening to “The Neighbourhood Boy”, a podcast about Singapore’s fourth prime minister. Over four episodes, we’ll be exploring Wong’s roots, his ascent and his possible future.
In the previous episode, we got to know Lawrence, the man, by speaking with people who’ve known him for decades. Now we’ll find out how exactly Lawrence, the politician, rose to the top. This is Episode 2: “Party games”.
02:12 - Tharman and Heng Swee Keat
In 2004, Lee Hsien Loong became Singapore’s third prime minister. That was no accident. Lee Kuan Yew, our first prime minister, had long been grooming his eldest son for the role. By then, the elder Lee was senior minister. And the younger Lee’s wife was the boss of Temasek, a state investment company. They formed a powerful trio at the top of society.
Some critics alleged dynastic politics and nepotism; some got taken to court. But most Singaporeans, having enjoyed four decades of economic growth, were comfortable with the paternalistic embrace of the Lee family.
I grew up in Lee Hsien Loong’s Singapore. When he took over as prime minister, I was six.
At that point, there was no obvious fourth prime minister in waiting. Lee Hsien Loong said at his swearing-in speech in 2004, “Leadership succession will be one of my top priorities”.
Twelve years later, in 2016, the papers announced a shortlist: Lawrence Wong was one of six Chinese men. Some outsiders might wonder, eh? I thought Singapore was multicultural? Why isn’t it reflected in their leadership? Singaporeans are less baffled. Just five years prior, the ceremonial role of president was contested by four Chinese men—all with the same surname, ‘Tan’.
Thankfully, the six potential prime ministers in 2016 had different names. And for the first time in Singapore’s history, we were contemplating a future without the Lees at the top.
But there was one obvious non-Chinese omission.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam: “We had every disadvantage you could think of for a nation and we did not expect to survive, we were not expected to survive. But that, to Lee Kuan Yew and the Pioneer team of leaders, was converted to advantage because it forces you to realize that all you have is yourself. The world owes you nothing.”
Tall, suave and smart, Tharman Shanmugaratnam wows audiences everywhere, including at the Saint Gallen Conference in 2015, where he celebrated the resilience and grit of Singaporeans.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam: “You're a piece of granite rock, fortunately it's Granite by the way. Not even a waterfall or mountains that allow you to have a little bit of hydroelectric power. Nothing, just a group of people of different origins who are willing to work hard and had to fend for themselves and make themselves relevant to the world.”
Tharman is now president, a largely ceremonial role. But a decade ago he was a minister, and the PAP’s top electoral performer. The party gave two reasons for passing him over. He doesn’t want the top job. Oh, and Singaporeans simply aren’t ready for a non-Chinese prime minister.
Mmmmm, is that true, though? Look at the Workers’ Party’s leadership transition from Low Thia Khiang to Pritam Singh. The party’s Hockchew base never seemed bothered by the colour of his skin.
At the time, Tharman enjoyed broad, cross-party adoration. If the party had chosen him as prime minister, it would have pulled the rug from under the opposition. The PAP would have likely enjoyed a long period of dominance.
So why didn’t it? Party insiders say another reason is that he’s too liberal for the old guard. And so, for the PAP’s succession planning, ideology matters, maybe more than a person’s popularity. It’s the old conservative patriarchs in backrooms who must choose—not the people.
In 2018, the party finally settled on Heng Swee Keat. A very different person from Tharman. Small, quiet, seemingly always lost in a million thoughts, the classical Singaporean administrator. More policy wonk than politician.
And at the 2020 general election, this became too obvious to ignore. The party parachuted Heng into the East Coast district at the eleventh hour, to head off a strong opposition challenge.
“For our east coast residents, we also have a plan for the east coast, we have uh east coast singapore, we have together at east coast plan we care at east coast…”
I voted for the first time in the 2020 election. And even I could tell the whole affair was a bit strange. After months of dorscon yellow, then dorscon orange, then dorscon yellow again, people around me just seemed a bit on edge. We were all feeling a bit down and disoriented from the pandemic. Heng Swee Keat’s “East Coast Fumble”, while human, was also a rare opportunity to poke fun at our straight-laced politicians.
Ultimately, Heng’s team won with just 53 percent of the vote. A photo of him circulated on Twitter right after the results were announced. In it, Heng looked like he was nervously pacing around what seemed like a car park, phone pressed to his ear. Was he getting grilled? Or worse, kena scolded ah? He clearly didn’t have Tharman’s charisma, or his popularity. It seemed only a matter of time.
In April 2021, less than a year after the election, Lee Hsien Loong called a press conference. Lee said that Heng wanted to discuss succession with the other ministers.
Lee Hsien Loong: Earlier this afternoon we met the pap mps to inform them of the outcome of these discussions this press conference is to make the news public. I will now invite DPM Heng to speak and then Kim Yong and Lawrence will brief you on the outcome.
Lee Hsien Loong: “Swee Keat…”
Heng Swee Keat: “Is the mike, is the mike tu-”
Lee Hsien Loong: “You press..”
Heng Swee Keat: [nervous laughter]
Aiyo, the teacher was irritated by his fumbling protege. Or former protege. That was the beginning of the end of Heng’s political career. Right before GE2025, he retired.
For the first time since it came to power in 1959, the ruling PAP had, remarkably, bungled a leadership transition.
09:28 - Chan Chun Sing and Ong Ye Kung
Once Heng was out, the two front runners appeared to be Ong Ye Kung and Chan Chun Sing.
Reporter: “This time round, Mr Ong is coming back stronger and more confident.”
Ong Ye Kung: “The other day a minister was chatting with me about the elections and he said well, looks like you learned something in the last 5 years. I said hopefully I learned a little bit more than something…”
To his fans, Ong is precisely the sort of leader Singapore needs in uncertain times.
Somebody who is affable and politically savvy; and who can listen to diverse views and then act quickly and decisively, with a conviction steely enough to fend off naysayers.
When he was Minister of Education from 2018 to 2020, these qualities helped him push through significant reforms in our education system. These include changes to the Primary School Leaving Examination scoring system; the phasing out of secondary school streaming; and the introduction of aptitude-based admissions at the tertiary level.
But to his skeptics, this confidence and conviction can tip over into arrogance and hard-headedness.
Reporter: “Has anyone told you you look like Daniel Dae Kim from Lost?”
Ong Ye Kung: “Actually no, but I was told I look like the other guy from Hawaii Five O.”
At the recent GE, Ong put his foot in his mouth. He attacked opposition politician Chee Soon Juan.
Ong Ye Kung: “But for Dr Chee, I would really suggest before he does that, he needs to give a better explanation for why he abandoned Bukit Batok to come to Sembawang West.”
Like this also called abandonment ah? If switching districts before elections is considered abandonment, the majority of Singaporeans are like dogs dumped at SPCA. Academic and journalist Cherian George was equally flabbergasted by Ong’s abandonment narrative, and shared his surprise on the Ya Lah But podcast:
Cherian George: “When he talked about the opposition abandoning its…like what? You don't
realize how this would backfire on you, who “abandoned” Aljuned? Yeah, and so
what do I gather from one of the smartest politicians in town is that it confirmed in my mind how this political environment that really coddles ministers, insulates them from tough questions from a probing press…how over years of this it makes you frankly intellectually lazy.”
Thankfully for Ong’s party, this little boo boo didn’t seem to have any electoral impact.
Ong is well liked. Voters ranked him Singapore’s joint third-most popular politician in a pre-election Jom survey, tying with Pritam Singh, just behind Lee Hsien Loong and Lawrence Wong.
Here, I’ll take a moment to share a bit about Jom’s editorial vision. I joined Jom as its first employee. From the beginning, we were committed to building an organisation invested in independence, rigour and truth-seeking. Every single piece of work involves hours of research, discussion, writing and of course, fact checking. My time at Jom nurtured in me a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the role of journalism in a democracy. I believe that a healthy media ecosystem must consist of more than just the mainstream media. The dream for Jom was always to create a media outfit accountable primarily to you, our reader. If you value our work, if you see potential in Jom’s voice, if you believe in the importance of independent journalism, I encourage you to consider a paid membership. Go to jom.media/jean for 10 percent off your annual membership. Now, back to the podcast.
Chan Chun Sing: “You will never be seasoned one lah. Like for example, when I did my first speech everybody remember it as the kee chiu speech…”Sure, the former general is known to be smart, folksy, frugal, a straight-talker and a hard worker from humble beginnings who tirelessly works the ground. He seems to exude an endearing Singaporean-ness, a quintessential ah beng-ness, if you will. And you see that in his appearance on The Daily Ketchup podcast.
Chan Chun Sing: “You look back right and some people said “is that your mistake?” so it depends on what’s your horizon. You look at it, the here and now, wah see minus point already, people laugh at you and things like that. But there was a serious message in that. It was just because of the way we speak and we used to speak, amongst friends. Because I treat the audience as my friends.”
General chatter suggests that Chan was the favoured 4G minister of Lee Hsien Loong, then prime minister, and his wife Ho Ching.
And yet, as much as those around him like Chan, he has often seemed ill equipped for public engagement, for the cut-and-thrust of politics. In an era when Singaporeans are looking for leaders with more political saviness—like Lawrence Wong and Ong Ye Kung—Chan can seem like an anachronism, a throwback to a time when politicians were just administrators.
It’s not just his obvious gaffes, like once saying that cotton comes from sheep, or a leaked recording during Covid where he called some Hong Kongers and Singaporeans idiots for their panic buying.
In Parliament, he’s also been found wanting in debates.
Chan Chun Sing: “Get you the questions. I mean, we can get you the numbers.”
In 2020, Pritam Singh of the Workers’ Party had requested a breakdown of employment growth between citizens and PRs.
Chan Chun Sing: “But let me say this. What is the point behind the questions?”
Chan came across as evasive, and the government as opaque.
Arguably his worst performance was in 2017, ahead of the presidential election that had controversially been reserved for Malays.
A full seven months before the election, before any candidates had been announced, Chan rose to address Halimah Yacob, then speaker.
Chan Chun Sing: “Madam President I think today is not the occasion for us to go through this again [laughter]”
Why did he call her president instead of speaker? Was it a Freudian slip? Maybe. But he did it not once but twice, laughing along with his fellow PAP politicians. They, led by Chan, made a mockery of our democratic process. Sure enough, Halimah left her speaker role months later to contest in the presidential election. She won in a walkover. The army general seemed unable to distinguish between the barracks and Parliament, between jokes amongst bros and the decorum expected of high office.
More recently, when Chan was minister of education, he came under fire by parents for his lacklustre response to the teaching of a skewed Israel-Gaza history to kids.
There seems little doubt that Chan is a great administrator; the question is whether he’s also a great politician.
16:59 - A pandemic star is born
Whatever their flaws, Ong and Chan were close to becoming Singapore’s next leader. But then Wong was given the most bizarre, unlikely national platform to exhibit his own brand of leadership.
Reporter: “Travelers to Singapore who show symptoms of Covid-19 may be given swab tests starting from late tomorrow…[fade out]”
The year is 2020. Like something out of a dystopian novel, a mysterious virus had begun spreading around the world. Fear. Panic. Uncertainty. Eventually, the Coronavirus reached the shores of our crowded island city.
Lawrence Wong: “Border controls are still useful at this stage of the epidemic because we can still identify where the sources of risk are and then we can take appropriate measures to reduce the risk from these infected sources.”
Wong, who was Minister for National Development at the time, was appointed co-chair of Singapore’s Multi-Ministry Taskforce on Covid-19 in January 2020, alongside then Health Minister Gan Kim Yong.
Over the next year, toilet paper flew off the shelves, anti vaxxers yelled on social media. In a time of fear and uncertainty, many looked to Wong as a steady captain.
Gillian Koh: “[A]ll of us would have tuned in during covid, you know, and watched. Him as co chair of Covid Response Team, and found him to be even tempered, patient, because he was willing to talk and explain and explain again, but most certainly also, you know, soulful and compassionate in the sense that, you know, he understood that it would be difficult.”
Gillian Koh is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies at the National University of Singapore. Dressed in a killer powder pink suit, Koh hosted the Jom team at IPS’s colonial-era office building in Bukit Timah.
Gillian Koh: “He always emphasised the need to not just stick to the letter of the law, but to understand the spirit of it and to uphold it…a moral values based leadership is what Singapore has always treasured, required…so this appeal to abiding, not simply to the letter of the law, so that if nobody is watching, you flout it, but to the spirit of it, to abide by it even when nobody is watching, but even more so, to go the extra mile. And in Singapore's case, for not just your interests, but the interests of society and people who are not like you, because Singapore is so diverse, that is something that is laudable.”
Singapore’s COVID-19 response would eventually garner accolades globally. Even though our migrant workers were trapped in what the BBC called one of the longest Covid confinements anywhere in the world, exposing the horrific inequalities that stalk our nation. But for citizens and residents, Lawrence’s main constituents, vaccinations were administered quickly, food was generally available, lockdowns were brief and well managed, and the country opened up quickly. Singapore recorded one of the world’s lowest mortality rates during the pandemic.
But what Koh said struck me. It wasn’t just that Singaporeans were acting out of self interest, because somebody was watching, as we’re so used to doing. Many just wanted to help others. Mutual aid efforts emerged. Those in need could seek help with groceries and bills, “no questions asked”. Neighbourhood Telegram channels sprung up, creating an online kampung where people offered help where they could. My friends and I set up a fundraiser for migrant workers. It was an odd time, and we were often heartened and despondent, hopeful and scared together.
COVID-19 offered Wong a public platform, but also a rare opportunity to tap into Singaporean solidarity and communality. This theme would inspire his sloganeering about a "we first" society; less "I, me, and mine". More "we, us, and ours. It would also form the base for his "Forward Singapore" report - a whole-of-society effort geared towards refreshing Singaporean society—our priorities, our goals and how we get there.
COVID-19 was a boon to Wong, the accidental prime minister, as academic and friend Donald Low put it. But that’s not to imply that it was a flash in the pan, or a big surprise to those who knew him.
Donald Low: Lawrence, his entire career, you know, has done important things in government and has performed very well as a policy analyst, as a policy director, and then later as the Chief Executive Officer of the energy markets authority. So I had no, you know, evidence to suggest the contrary. All my experience working with or observing Lawrence has been that he's very qualified in the roles that he's been placed in and those roles were quite wide ranging, right?...So for me, it was surprising that nobody saw him as PM material. I mean, for me, it was like, isn't it obvious that he's the most…maybe it reveals my own bias, because I'm an economist, I think people kind of look to the prime minister. Oh, we want certain…Oh, he must be a visionary! He must be very extroverted! He must have great public speaking abilities! But Singapore is not like that, right? We prefer our PMS to be technocrats, right? So, so for better or for worse, for better or for worse…I think most people pay more attention to the performative aspects of politics, whereas in Singapore, and certainly with the PAP, they pay more attention to the technocratic and substantive policy making aspects of being a minister and a prime minister.”
Jean Hew: “I think it's quite sweet that you have always been very confident in him.”
Donald Low: “Oh, it's not because I'm sweet. I only just want to be right.”
Touché. But something he said about the performative aspects of politics resonated with Koh’s view of Wong.
Gillian Koh: “You know, when the world is going through a lot of dramatic developments and all that, no drama is good. Micro, micro gestures are what really strikes us. And if you look at our leaders, then you know you're looking at the half skull, or you're looking at a smirk, or whatever, and that would send a certain signal, how much more so in a different media landscape today, because we can scrutinize, we can go back…So this is the age where if you're not authentically committed to this role, you will be found out immediately. The same situation may appeal to Trump, and he can mobilize a certain crowd in a certain way that he wants. But what is appropriate for Singapore?”
Maybe the most important lesson during COVID-19 for Lawrence the politician was the use of digital media. When to play the role of a steady captain. When to show vulnerability. When to celebrate the achievements of your colleagues. When to lose yourself in introspective guitar riffs.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that Wong can’t wow a room full of leaders the way Tharman can. With each passing month, he seems to be getting more adept at making TikTok videos.. Maybe he actually does understand the performative aspects of politics—for today’s world.
All this gels with another optimistic hypothesis about Wong. That as head of the PAP, he might chart a new course of leadership. One that moves away from heroic leadership and towards a more collaborative, team model.
Perhaps we can call him an “open-minded conservative”.
But even if Wong may be ready for a more collaborative leadership approach, is the PAP?
Let’s not forget Wong’s long journey to the top, and the fact that his erstwhile rivals are all around him. Chan Chun Sing and Ong Ye Kung are two of the five wise men he chose for his leadership team. Given their talents, having Chan and Ong around could be great for him, the PAP and perhaps Singapore too. But if Wong fails to assert himself then problems could arise.
How will Wong’s government confront key challenges of today, like the public housing conundrum, widening inequality and the rising cost of living? The powerful home affairs minister K Shanmugam and Lee Hsien Loong, the supposed last of the Lees in politics, are still breathing down Wong's neck. Will these two arch-conservatives delay any attempts at progressive change?
We’ll explore these questions in Episode 3, “Growth at what cost?”
“The Neighbourhood Boy” is brought to you by Jom, a weekly digital magazine about Singapore. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider a paid membership. Go to jom.media/jean for 10 percent off your annual membership.
“The Neighbourhood Boy” is produced and hosted by me, Jean Hew. The script is co-written by Sudhir Vadaketh and myself, with input from Abhishek Mehrotra. This podcast is edited by Artwave Studio, with original music by lowkeii.