They all had to develop their own institutions, political structures and economic position in the world. They had to make arrangements for their own defence.

They had to define their own cultures. Some were much more successful than others.

If the test of success is a stable democratic constitution, the rule of law, economic prosperity, freedom from crime, advanced structures of health and education, and the ability to provide a national identity for different ethnic groups, Singapore is a conspicuous success.

Indeed, in international league tables for stability and competitiveness, Singapore is usually listed among the leading countries of the old as well as new world, bracketed with successful and peaceful old nations like Switzerland.

The post-war process of nation-building produced many remarkable leaders, as it always has. George Washington remains one of the greatest of American Presidents, only matched by Abraham Lincoln who led the United States in the Civil War.

Pandit Nehru, Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela made great personal contributions to the independence and development of their own countries.

Lee Kuan Yew made a similar, and equally essential, contribution to Singapore. In all of these cases, the personality of the "father of the nation" emerged out of struggle.

An understanding of the struggle is essential to understanding the personality of the leader, and the influence of that personality on the newly independent nation in its formative stage.

Lee's memoirs make it clear that his primary struggle was not against the British, though he had his difficulties with them and was the most effective leader of Singapore's independence movement.

His true formative experience came in the years of the Japanese occupation of Singapore.

Until the Japanese invasion, he had grown up as the intellectually gifted and serious-minded son of a well-to-do English-speaking family of Chinese descent. In 1936 he entered Raffles Institution, where his form master noted on his report card that "Harry Lee Kuan Yew is likely to attain a high position in life".

But for the war, his life would have been an easy and agreeable one, with academic honours, a successful law practice and high professional income as the almost inevitable results of his intelligence, energy and relatively privileged start.

From February 1942 to September 1945, he had to learn the brutal lessons of survival under a murderous military occupation. There was no silver spoon in the Japanese years.

As he writes: "The three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life. They gave me vivid insights into the behaviour of human beings and human societies, their motivations and impulses.

"My appreciation of governments, my understanding of power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this experience. I saw a whole social system crumble suddenly before an occupying army that was absolutely merciless."

That is the real starting point, for Lee and for Singapore. With the British, his relationship was different. The Japanese invasion had destroyed the myth of imperial power. Lee knew that, so did the people of Singapore, but so did all but the stupidest of the British.

Immediately after the war, he went to Cambridge to study law, and got his First. I belong to the same university generation; when he was at Cambridge, I was up at Oxford with two other remarkable people of power in our generation, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

The mood of that time was one of seriousness; the undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge had mostly been through the war, though Rupert Murdoch, who is younger, came up a few years later and straight from school. We were not a student generation that saw life as an easy game.

This first volume of memoirs finishes in 1965 at the point at which Singapore had to break away from Malaysia. Lee had to thread his way through the complicated maze of Singapore politics in the period before the original declaration of independence in August 1963, after joining Malaysia in September 1963 and through the Malaysian experience.

He had to deal with the communists, who were ruthless opponents and unreliable allies. The communists undoubtedly thought they could use him to create a communist-controlled Singapore.

He used them. He also used his contacts with the British, some of whom were pleased to find someone of his ability, but suspicious of him nevertheless.

How could he do it? It was not the lawyer of Cambridge University and the Middle Temple who had learnt these political skills, but the young man who traded in the black markets of war-time Singapore in order to feed and care for his family. The story is one of improvisation and realism, qualities which enabled him to survive.

Survival also takes resilience and courage. Lee became Prime Minister of Singapore in 1959, when he was only 35; the People's Action Party had already won 43 out of 51 seats at the election. He may have been a young Prime Minister, but he was certainly not a naive one.

The use he made of power reflects both the Chinese culture of his family and his predominantly English education. He has a Chinese sense of tradition and authority. There is a charming picture of Lee at the age of four, dressed in the old Chinese costume as a page at his aunt's wedding; he looks like a baby Mandarin.

He writes touchingly of his well-blessed marriage to a woman fortunately as intelligent as himself. He also writes of "my determination that my three children should be brought up in the language and culture of their ancestors".

In a speech in 1956, he talked about the English culture in which he had been educated. "I was sent to an English school to equip me to go to an English university in order that I would then be an educated man -- the equal of any Englishman, the model of perfection. Sir, I do not know how far they have succeeded in that. I grew up and I finally graduated.

"At the end of it, I felt -- and it was long before I entered politics -- ... that the whole set of values were fundamentally and radically wrong."

Yet, of course, he did not quite think that. He had experienced, in a catastrophic form and later in a more promising form, the end of the British Empire, but his own personal culture is both Chinese and English, and so is the culture of Singapore itself.

He has absorbed a great deal of the virtues of English culture, even if he rejected its characteristic defects.

One can see the same cultural conflict at the end of the Roman Empire. St Patrick, who converted Ireland to Christianity in the fifth century, was a Celt, born in Britain, whose father had been a Roman official. He brought the Christian faith to the tribes of Ireland, but also the Roman sense of law, administration and passion for order.

St Patrick could not have done what he did if he had not himself been a Celt, of Celtic culture; he would not have done it without his Roman education.

Lee Kuan Yew experienced, at a most sensitive age, the collapse of an Empire which had lost both power and moral authority.

Yet, the hours spent reading Shakespeare at Raffles Institution, or studying the law of tort in his Middle Temple exams, were not wasted for the Prime Minister of Singapore.

The writer contributed this piece to Sunday Review.

About the reviewer

LORD REES-MOGG, 70, started his career in British journalism in 1952 with The Financial Times in London.

He was editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981, before taking up directorships in several companies.

He has also chaired public bodies including the Arts Council (1982-88), and authored books including The Reigning Error: The Crisis Of World Inflation (1974).

Since 1992, he has been a columnist with The Times.