His practical understanding of terrorism there perhaps outweighing his ignorance of Malaya

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 164.

Police leave was cancelled and guns were handed out to the planters. The European population of around 12,000 soon bristled with weapons, which they had to deposit on entering the bar of the ‘Spotted Dog’, the nickname for the Selangor Club.19 On paper it seemed an uneven contest between about 8,000 Communist guerrillas and over 10,000 full-time police, ultimately backed by 11,000 regular troops including Gurkhas, Seaforth Highlanders and the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. In reality, more than half these were support troops, and there were only about 4,000 combat effectives available for fighting in the jungle. The main burden of the conflict was carried by the police force, which swelled to around 70,000 men, the vast majority of them Malay special constables.

The British were a fractious bunch, plagued by animosities old and new. The planters believed that Gent’s shortcomings were an expression of policy emanating from the despised ‘Socialist regime’ in London. In fact the Labour government’s Commissioner-General for South-east Asia, Malcolm MacDonald, urged London to recall Gent, who died on 4 July when the plane bearing him home suffered a mid-air collision as it landed at Northolt airport outside London. It took three months for his successor to arrive. This was Sir Henry Gurney, an experienced colonial official who had served in Africa and Palestine, his practical understanding of terrorism there perhaps outweighing his ignorance of Malaya. Not the least of his problems was that the security forces were bitterly divided between officers who had fled the Japanese occupation and those who had stayed and had been interned under terrible circumstances. There were tensions between the Police Commissioner, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the tiny Special Branch, which functioned as an intelligence-gathering agency. London-based MI5 also had a local presence.