Was it murder or suicide? This was one of the questions a Commission of Inquiry into the death of police Inspector John MacLennan was tasked to answer in 1980. He had been found in his locked flat, shot five times. Nigel Collett's book is the first exhaustive study of the circumstances surrounding MacLennan's death and the context in which Hong Kong's colonial government sought to cover up a scandal. The incident itself is significant for it pointed to the need to reform the British-imposed laws outlawing homosexuality because they encouraged blackmail that allowed triads to control government officers to the detriment of the community. The commissioner of the Commission (Justice T. L. Yang, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Hong Kong) also chaired the Law Reform Commission's subcommittee on homosexual law reform which in 1983 recommended decriminalizing gay sex in private among consenting adults. In Collett's own words: “The waste of John MacLennan's life is a reminder of what all too easily can occur if law and prejudice combine to discriminate against a minority that has no defense” (xiii).

The book, although long and in need of more careful editing, is well written, organized into 29 shortish chapters, fully referenced and convincing. Nigel Collett's study also highlights the glaring lack of an archives law in Hong Kong which has allowed the Hong Kong government to simply dump records it does not wish to keep. Collett found, for example, that the Hong Kong government and the police “denied the existence of transcripts of the [commission of] inquiry” (xii), an incredulous result that makes holding authority to account, for example, that much more difficult.

As Enze Han and Joseph O'Mahoney's new book, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality (Routledge, 2018) makes clear, the British colonial authorities imposed laws outlawing homosexual behaviour in their colonies, laws that reached Hong Kong from 1865. Prior to this there were no such laws in Hong Kong. It was to enforce these laws that the Governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, and the Attorney General John Griffiths (“the author of the policy”) took action in 1979 that became “open season on homosexuals” (p. 137), a “witch hunt” (p. 138). At the same time MacLehose and Griffiths sought to shield senior government, legal, judicial and police officials who were homosexual (there were allegedly many) to preserve the “prestige” of the British colonial government. They then led a campaign against homosexuals in lower ranks of government and the police and in the community, utterly hypocritically. MacLehose was also motivated, Collett argues, by a desire to restore the trust of the community in the police (a “fragile organization,” according to MacLehose), which had been badly tarnished by decades of corruption, and by the police active defiance of the newly created Independent Commission Against Corruption. The police rioted in 1977 and were granted an amnesty. MacLennan had joined the police as this was all playing out.

Collett points out that the public record on this period is incomplete. “There is an unusually large number of Foreign and Commonwealth Office files listed in the [UK] National Archives covering the period 1979-80 but which remain embargoed for periods of 40 or more years. Some of these relate to [Police Commissioner] Roy Henry and [Chief Justice] Sir Denys Roberts. Files on identical subjects, both for years before and after this period, have not been similarly embargoed” (p. 126). The files are itemized in endnote 27 on pp. 414–15, and should be made public in 2020.

When the Commission came too close to exposing the homosexuality of the Commissioner of Police and other senior government, legal and judicial figures, MacLehose won Foreign Office approval to force the Commission into in camera sessions, and to set a fixed date for it to report. In the end, however, he did not use this authority.

Implementing the policy was the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the police, which Collett shows was staffed by homophobes, and, in the case of MacLennan, motivated by revenge to get back at him for going outside the chain of command to force the police to reinstate him (p. 149). He had initially joined the police in 1973 but was let go in 1978, for an alleged homosexual incident which he denied. “He was brass necked and arrogant for challenging his dismissal,” a SIU leader wrote in MacLennan's file. Officers of the SIU carried out their work through threats, physical assaults and intimidation, and repeatedly lied about their actions to the Commission of Inquiry. This is laid out in two excellent chapters, “The SIU case collapses” and “Discrediting the police.”

Collett faithfully records the mild conclusions of commissioner Yang, and then based on his own careful research offers a substantially different assessment. While none of the principal players, including the Attorney General and the police leadership, broke the law, Collett writes, they committed “heinous errors of judgement and took courses of action motivated by selfishness and malevolence, failures sufficient to cause them to face administrative penalties and even the end of their careers. Police officers of the SIU broke both the law and police regulations… Both sets of those involved lied, and in the case of the SIU, intimidated others in order to protect themselves” (pp. 352–53). Yet no one was punished, and yes, MacLennan committed suicide.