The Politics of Defeat: Preliminary Chapters and the Secret Diary of Francis Thomas. It was a diary that had first sat at the back of a locked steel cabinet for two decades and then in a taped box for close to another four decades. A secret diary kept by a Cabinet Minister of the discussions and decisions that went on behind the scenes and that determined the path of Singapore's political development during the late 1950s. It was a tumultuous time that saw the People's Action Party come into power because of the ineptitude - or, in the words of Lee Kuan Yew, the corruption and stupidities - of the Labour Front government. The diary was kept by Francis Thomas, an Englishman who made Singapore his home and who played a key role in the dying days of the Labour Front government. The Politics of Defeat is his inside story of those days.