TNAG-1101-FCO40-1351-Legislation-on-homosexuality-in-Hong-Kong-including--Report--1981 — Page 462

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to set it to music, except for the fact that a tragedy lay behind it all. In my own

statements I had one or two minor errors due to lapse of time between the 1978 affair

and John's death in 1980. On checking old papers I found these slips and corrected them. But in their determination to blow my case, Counsel for the Attorney-General · and the Police tried to use these minor errors to destroy me credibility. It was almost amusing to see their own witnesses, one in particular, avoid answering quest- iono by pleading he couldn't remember. One magistrate completely confused two of my visits to the magistracy in two different years, but no one picked him up in his crror, a genuine and excusable error because two or three years had elapsed. Everyone's errors on the side of the police against MacLennan were excused, but the tiniest slip on my part became a huge lie. That is what lawyers are for under the British judicial system which is not justice but merely legal skirmishing. Other witnesses who did not favour the police side had their characters torn to shreds. I was lucky that they could find nothing against me morally, but I sympathised with those had struggled against homosexual tendencies to see them held up to rilicule by merciless counsel. Yet the Commissioner ruled that the Commissioner of Folice was not to be so questioned. And the Governor's own Counsel made it clear that he expected the Commission to go softly on the Attorney-General and the Commis- gioner of Police. He later moderated his statement, but it had already been said. Counsel for the Commissioner and the Commissioner for the Inquiry himself on several cccasions intervened on behalf of the witnesses beleaguered by Counsel for the Attorney-General and others of his ilk. It was the 1966 Riot Inquiry all over again, except that in 1966 the Commissioner and his Counsel also joined the police side and made no effort to be neutral.

How different the whole inquiry might have been, saving the public tens of millions of dollars, if the Commission had consisted of the Commissioner, his Counsel, a lawyer representing the MacLennans, and a clerk to keep records! How muy more independent witnesses might have come forward without fear of being torn to shreds in public! It is only a surmise that more of the truth would have come out, without the sickening effect on the public that the filth of the public inquiry created, and with little chance of knowing the truth in the end.

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