No cancer, only eczema

Richard West Hong Kong rr he colony of Hong Kong, whose social life was condemned by Ken Livingstone as a 'rat race' (see last week's Spectator), also lives by a different moral code from that of Ken Livingstone's London. Shortly after his holiday in Hong Kong, which he compared unfavourably with the Communist mainland, Mr Livingstone turned his attention to what he describes as the persecution of homosexuals. He made a promise, since fulfilled, to give financial assistance to 'gay' organisations in London. Oddly enough, the treatment of homosexuals is once more a major point of debate in Hong Kong, thanks to the still simmering row over the case of Inspector MacLennan. In an article 'Overstepping the Oriental mark' (Spectator 5 March 1980), I wrote that the coroner's court inquiry into the death of Inspector John MacLennan had 'caused the biggest scandal in Hong Kong since the corruption affair, which also involved the police force'. However this scandal concerned not bribery but homosexual behaviour.

At the time of the inquest (and of my previous article), the following information had come to light. In 1978, after a European solicitor had gone to prison for sexual offences with Chinese boys, the Hong Kong police had set up a Special Investigation Unit (nicknamed the 'Bum Squad') to follow up allegations on homosexuals, particularly those in the judiciary, the Attorney-General's department and the police themselves.

Among those investigated was John MacLennan who had previously been dismissed from the force after an allegation (never pursued) that he had made an indecent assault on the son of a Chinese colleague. By January last year, the SIU claimed to have got sufficient evidence to charge MacLennan with eight different counts of indecent assault or buggery. On 14 January, MacLennan was told to report next day for an interview, where, as he knew, he would be arrested. That evening he told a senior officer of his fears and claimed he was being arrested because he himself had been investigating what he called 'queer hawks', among whom he named a very senior policeman. Later that evening MacLennan drew from the stores a standard .38 revolver.

When MacLennan failed to turn up for his interview and arrest, a group of policemen went to his flat where they found him dead with five bullet-wounds in the chest and abdomen.

As I wrote last year: 'The extraordinary number of bullets fired, as well as the allegations made by MacLennan before his death, have given rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories... ', some of which were aired in the British and Hong Kong press. The New Statesman declared (21 March 1980): 'The dead Inspector ... is probably not a homosexual at all.' And Private Eye, getting it all wrong for once, produced the idea that MacLennan was murdered to stop him talking. In Hong Kong, MacLennan's cause was upheld by Mrs Elsie Elliott, the 'one-woman opposition in Hong Kong council.

Concern and rumour became intense when the South China Morning Post published a letter from a Mr Parnell, the foreman of the three-man jury which had returned an open verdict at the coroner's court. He argued, among other things, that: the locked doors in MacLennan's flat did not prove suicide as the windows were not locked but merely closed; that there was little alcohol in MacLennan's bloodstream, contrary to the claim of the AttorneyGeneral; that although MacLennan had taken a gun from the store-room, it might have been meant not for suicide but for self-defence; that his suicide note could have been written under duress; that the police gun had killed him but this was not necessarily suicide. It seems that the jury, like so many people in Hong Kong, found it difficult to believe in the suicide by five bullets. After all, have we not seen on TV how just one bullet from a police revolver will hurl a man spreadeagled against the wall? This letter from the foreman of the inquest jury decided the government of Hong Kong to appoint Judge T. L. Yang to head a commission of inquiry into Inspector MacLennan's case. His terms of reference included finding if there were grounds for believing MacLennan's death was other than suicide, if the investigations were properly conducted, and whether the charges against MacLennan (which would have been brought on the day of his death) had been prepared in a proper manner. Justice Yang brought enormous energy to this task, for which he employed many lawyers, researchers and private investigators, at a cost finally totalling £2 million, and last month he offered his findings in a report of 400 pages which, thanks to its clarity and its fine prose, as much as its lurid subject matter, became an immediate best-seller.

The Yang Report clears up all doubt on what might be called the mechanical side of MacLennan's suicide. It gives overwhelming evidence that a murder was impossible and shows, with abundant ballistic and physiological detail, that a man can indeed shoot five .38 bullets into his own chest and abdomen. Many tests were made with the gun in question, which was found to have a trigger pressure of ten lbs, uncocked. Apparently MacLennan used both thumbs to fire at himself and could have fired five shots in two or three seconds. I do not pretend to understand this part of the report but it has not so far been challenged by forensic scientists. But I could understand Judge Yang's surmise on MacLennan's behaviour before his death; it seemed most plausible.

Before discussing MacLennan's sexual habits, Judge Yang tries to discover the personality of the dead man who, of course, was as unknown to the judge as he was to most of Hong Kong. MacLennan was born at Nigg on the Cromarty Firth in 1950. He was religious in outlook, punctual, eonservative in his dress; he greatly admired the Royal Family, and liked hearing tapes of bagpipe music and Churchill's speeches. 'Not the most popular of persons' at any time, when drunk he grew arrogant, loud, pompous and `Kiplingesque'. These were some of the epithets used by drinking companions in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Tudge Yang listened to many reports about John MacLennan's sexual habits. According to one boon companion, MacLennan confined his sexual advances to women of 'less moral standing', to 'ladies of the night' or `ladies of easy virtue'. He was known to have gone out with only three 'decent' girls — a Chinese from a dance hall, an army nurse and a Filipino maidservant. With other British people, he took a censorious stance towards homosexuals; he said they should leave Hong Kong because 'the law is the law'. Other policemen spoke of him as a womaniser. A masseuse, one Nancy Chan, was called to describe her sexual relations with the Inspector, which consisted of oral sex and stimulation with a vibrator. 'Although Nancy Chan i§ a female,' Judge Yang observed, 'her evidence ... supports my belief that he favoured homosexual practices.'

Judge Yang returned to the allegations from 1978 that Inspector MacLennan had made an indecent assault — more like an advance — on a boy not yet 18. The evidence rings all the more true because it contains a misunderstanding due to the well-known Chinese mispronouncing of English. The boy claims that MacLennan rubbed his body and said he liked 'Chinese fresh'. This is how it appears in the Yang Report, but clearly MacLennan was talking of 'flesh'.

Although it is clear that MacLennan did make a pass at this youth in 1978, there was not enough evidence for a prosecution. It might have been sensible of MacLennan to end his career at this time: he was not dismissed but the Hong Kong police did not renew his contract. However, he sought and obtained reinstatement. During the next year or so in Hong Kong, he quite frequently had sexual intercourse with young Chinese males, who were casual or full-time prostitutes. This fact, after the Yang Report, is no longer in doubt. However, Judge Yang's inquiry also revealed that the Hong Kong police on this assignment used threats, blackmail and probably actual violence to force young men to give evidence against MacLennan.

As a preface to his report, Judge Yang quotes Lord Mansfield in R. v Wilkes, a notorious legal battle of 1770: 'I will not do that which my conscience tells me is wrong, upon occasion, to gain the huzzas of thousands or the daily praise of all the papers. I will not avoid doing what I think is right, though it should draw on me the whole artillery of libels.' The Yang Report greatly displeased Mrs Elsie Elliott, who appears in it as a reckless trouble-maker; it was not well received by John Griffiths, Hong Kong's Attorney-General who set up the SIU and instigated what in effect was a purge against homosexuals. The report strongly implied a rebuke to the Hong Kong police for the way they extracted statements for use as evidence against MacLennan. As for MacLennan himself, the report is understanding. Remarking that his sexual proclivities were not all that unusual (`there are many others like him') it says: 'But for the tragedy that befell him he would perhaps have worked and lived in blissful anonymity. He was not perfect. Neither was he the scum of the earth... He loved his parents and was loved in return. He, still in his prime, has died; his parents, elderly and feeble, still live. To them, now living out their days in a remote village in Scotland, his memory still holds dear.'

Although, as a matter of fact, Nigg is now a bustling oil town, this sentiment of the judge has a happy fitness to Hong Kong. During the 19th century, Scotsmen like Jardine and Matheson came to plunder this part of the South China coast, bringing the opium traffic, then war and colonisation. It is appropriate that in the dusk of the British Empire, a Chinese judge should express such pardon and loving-kindness towards a Scotsman who went astray.

Athe time of the MacLennan inquest last year, Mr John Griffiths gave me a briefing on why his Attorney-General's office had set up the S1U and started investigating homosexuals in government service. The gist of it was that such men are not only open to blackmail but ought to be specially strict in obeying the law. Moreover, and this was, I think, Mr Griffiths's main point, homosexual behaviour that might be condoned in England was not acceptable to the Chinese community.

This point has been much discussed ever since. I have heard some say that the Chinese do not care tuppence about MacLennan. Others refer to the disapproval and shame which Chinese families feel about homosexuals, who often before were forced to marry against their will some (still more unfortunate) girl. Perhaps the truth of the matter was best expressed by Judge Yang himself who wrote, after a year of investigating homosexual behaviour in Hong Kong, that he had found 'no cancer, only eczema'.

The Chinese have a strong moral tradition but this is seldom confused, as it is in the Christian and Muslim world, with a sense of sin, let alone damnation; homosexual behaviour is generally thought undesirable, even repugnant, but not a pretext for purges or persecution. On the other hand, the Chinese would expect homosexuals to be discreet and to avoid giving offence by, for instance, seducing children.

Here in Hong Kong, one can see how the English have gone wrong and got in a muddle on moral offences such as homosexual behaviour. These used to be tried (if at all) by the church courts. The decline of religious belief and growth of a secular state, left Parliament undecided on how to deal with behaviour which, though it was still widely considered immoral, was not a crime in civil law. The result was the decision to make homosexual behaviour a serious crime — with all the consequent hounding of men like Oscar Wilde; with blackmail; police agents provocateurs; in short, the kind of things that led to the death of MacLennan.

Recently, when our Parliament rightly decided to decriminalise homosexual behaviour (for consenting adults), everyone hoped that the topic was dead. But since then, advocates of the 'New Ethic' — psychologists, sociologists, feminists and the whole tribe personalised in Ken Livingstone — have proclaimed that homosexual behaviour is not only not a crime nor even a moral offence, but something positively desirable. Hence the aggressive homosexual propaganda that Auberon Waugh has dubbed `homosexualism'. Hence the 'gay' TV programmes, church services, plays, workshops and lectures to schoolchildren. The last is extremely repugnant to many parents who might not subscribe to the old Christian morality.

Most people, even in England, probably rather resent this propaganda. Nor do they want a return to the kind of hounding and malice which caused the death of Inspector MacLennan. What is required is more tolerance and discretion on both sides. It seems to me that the Yang Report is a wise and admirable document on this ancient topic.