SOMETIMES it seems that the founding-father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, has spent more time trying to tear himself away from running the island-state than he did ruling it in the first place. Now 87, he was Singapore's first prime minister, serving for 31 years until 1990.

Rather than gracefully slipping into the background, however, he remained in the cabinet after 1990 as Senior Minister. Still unable to give it up, in 2004 a new post of Minister Mentor (MM) was invented for him in the cabinet of the government headed by his son, Lee Hsien Loong.

On May 14th, however, the elder Lee announced that he was finally resigning from the cabinet. Goh Chok Tong, Mr Lee's successor as prime minister, also declared that at the age of 69 he too was resigning his position as senior minister in the cabinet. But, inevitably, it was Mr Lee who grabbed all the attention. For any other politician of his age, the announcement could be taken as a final ending to a glittering career. Indeed, much of the mainstream Singapore media treated the event as such.

Not a bit of it. For a start, he will retain the parliamentary seat that he won (uncontested) in the general election on May 7th. He is sure to continue making plenty of speeches from the back benches, as he did in the last parliament, on almost every topic under the sun. He will doubtless continue to open hospitals, intervene in public debates and write more books, all in his stated quest to keep Singapore on the straight and narrow.

To quote the man himself (from 1988): “Even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel that something is going wrong, I will get up. Those who believe that after I have left the government as prime minister, I will go into a permanent retirement, really should have their heads examined.”

More significant, perhaps, is the manner of his latest (semi-) going. The party that he helped to create, the People's Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore continuously since independence, has just endured its worst pasting at the polls since separation from Malaysia in 1965. Due to the peculiarities of the first-past-the-post voting system, the opposition won just six out of the 87 contested seats. More significantly, however, the PAP share of the vote dropped to a dangerously low 60.1%. Only a decade ago the party was getting 75.3%.

In the election post-mortems currently being conducted within and without the PAP, the party acknowledges that it has ceased to connect with the voters as it once did. And the prime culprit for some is Mr Lee himself. Once a supreme electoral asset, he is now something of a liability, especially with those under 40 who don't remember the glory days. The straight-talking, almost bullying tone that served him well in the past doesn't wash anymore with a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and self-confident electorate.

Too often, his party colleagues were left to do the political fire-fighting after another round of old fashioned plain-speaking from MM. He upset ethnic Malays with remarks that they had not adapted well to Singapore, and then during the middle of the campaign he infuriated many when he said people who voted against the PAP in one particular constituency would have “five years to live and repent” their decision. That constituency went to the opposition, and the PAP government lost its very good foreign secretary.

Within the PAP, and for many other Singaporeans, Mr Lee remains a revered figure. But it's also clear that new generations of Singaporeans are ready to move onto a new era, and the PAP will have to reflect that or wither. It's unclear whether a few men in white coats took MM aside to finally do some plain speaking of their own, or whether Mr Lee took the decision himself to resign from the cabinet. But the result is the same; the founding-father will continue to opine, but the PAP will have a little more room to change and adapt to a changed electoral landscape.