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Men might refuse to speak to each other for years on end, but the overarching exclusivity of European life in the colony returned. The clubs reopened, and restored their old rules of membership. From 1946, the roll at Kuala Lumpur’s Lake Club still comprised 40 per cent company directors, 30 per cent Malayan Civil Service and only 20 per cent planters and miners.102 In the hotels and dance halls a more egalitarian mood reigned; ballroom dancing was a great a social leveller in places such as the Atomic in Singapore. Malcolm MacDonald and his new Canadian wife embraced this new democratic style. MacDonald challenged the committee of the Tanglin Club by bringing the Chinese banking tycoon Tan Chin Tuan to dine. They wrote to him to complain. He later lent his patronage to the new Island golf club to develop it as a multiracial enclave for the great and good. Golf became the defining pastime of the new elite. The agent of the government of India, S. K. Chettur, adored the MacDonalds. They had, he reported, ‘no side’. But even the energetic and democratic Chettur found Singapore’s informality a little de trop. He complained of the long queues of soldiers and their girlfriends at the cinema – ‘too plebian and fatiguing’ – and was most perturbed that the Indian community in Singapore after the war did not observe the niceties of ‘calling’, where new arrivals left their cards at the houses of leading families as a genuflection to the hierarchy: ‘Social life as we understood it in Madras’, he wrote, ‘was unknown in Malaya.’103 This quaint colonial ritual did not revive in post-war Malaya, but other social norms did. Ralph Hone, ex-grammar-school boy and now a rising star of the colonial service, found that his progress to a governorship of the Malayan Union, or even the governor generalship itself, was barred because, in 1945, he had divorced and remarried. Despite their disagreements, Mountbatten took up the issue with his cousin George VI, who then abolished the bar on divorcees. Hone served as Secretary General to Malcolm MacDonald, and later was awarded his governorship in North Borneo. But in his letter of appointment Hone was told that under no circumstances would he be invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace.104

The old Anglo-Malay entente also revived. After the heady public displays of the BMA period, this was achieved comparatively quietly and almost behind closed doors. On 18 June the Malay political leaders and the rulers met together with Gent and MacDonald for the first time to establish the terms of their reconciliation; on 24 July the rulers and UMNO submitted their own proposals for a federal constitution. Whilst recognizing the need for strong central government and a wider citizenship, the ‘individuality’ of the Malay states and the ‘special position’ and rights of the Malay people were now acknowledged as paramount. From early August to early November an Anglo-Malay Working Committee – representing the same three parties – finalized the agreement. There was still much mistrust between them, and – as the British acknowledged – the threat of bloodshed overhung the entire proceedings.105 Gent continued to impress on London that a clear and quick acceptance of the Malay position was necessary, even before the proposals became public and other communities were consulted. The new Malay political elites strengthened their ties to administration when the British relaxed rules that forbade government servants – in which category most of UMNO’s leaders fell – to participate in politics. The Malay courts regained their equilibrium and many of the rebel commoners of UMNO took office in the state governments. In October, Dato Onn bin Jaafar became mentri besar, or chief minister, of Johore. His relationship with Sultan Ibrahim was never to be free from friction, but he exploited his ruler’s patronage and these months marked the height of Onn’s pre-eminence as ‘sole spokesman’ of the Malays. UMNO was