Things You Never Knew...

per Lord Cross of Chelsea, p 458-459:
The feature in the two stories upon which attention was concentrated in the courts below is that both youths said that the appellant suggested not that he should bugger *459 them but that they should bugger him. This was said to be an 'unusual' suggestion. If I thought that the outcome of this appeal depended on whether such a suggestion was in fact 'unusual' I would be in favour of allowing it. It is no doubt unusual for a middle-aged man to yield to the urge to commit buggery or to try to commit buggery with youths or young men but whether it is unusual for such a middle-aged man to wish to play the pathic rather than the active role I have no idea whatever and I am not prepared, in the absence of any evidence on the point, to make any assumption one way or the other. As I see it, however, the point is not whether what the appellant is said to have suggested would be, as coming from the middle-aged active homosexual, in itself particularly unusual but whether it would be unlikely that two youths who were saying untruly that the appellant had made homosexual advances to them would have put such a suggestion into his mouth.

The bit in bold raises all sorts of questions in my head, but I shall... refrain. Hats off to Lord Cross for delivering all this with a straight face though. Law Lords have this amazing ability to take the juciest of fact situations and turning them into boring, mind-numbing long-winded judgments.