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Then, quite suddenly, Dorman-Smith began to overplay his hand. In October 1945 he had been prepared to give Aung San the benefit of the doubt and even at his bitterest he still had some time for the man. At the turn of the year, as Aung San’s rhetoric intensified, Dorman-Smith’s tone soured. In mid December Ralph Michaelis, a radical journalist who published an ‘independent newsletter’, reported that the governor was so obsessed by his trial of strength with Bogyoke that he was losing his grip on the fragile administration. Rather than answering Aung San’s charges of delaying Burma’s independence, the governor had chosen to reopen the old Rangoon Yacht Club, a ‘prewar stronghold of the futile snobbery of the British colony in Rangoon to which no Burman was admitted’. Yachts, Michaelis’s pamphlet noted, were once again being built at the club and were being guarded at the expense of the British taxpayer.110 Dorman-Smith’s political touch seems to have been deserting him. His dysentery, which flared up in the miserable conditions of post-war Rangoon, was getting worse. His view of Aung San became darker and darker. By April he was talking about ‘Aung San and his band of thugs’, by whom he meant the rapidly proliferating network of paramilitary People’s Volunteer Organizations. Loosely administered by the AFPFL, the PVOs now effectively controlled large parts of the countryside. Dorman-Smith could almost feel British power draining through his hands into the swamps of the Burmese delta.

As the administration began to lose the propaganda war in Burma, Dorman-Smith searched for a way to stop what he viewed as the country’s slide towards ‘fascism’, a sorely overused term in Burma at the time. One issue on which Aung San seemed to be vulnerable was the persistent rumour that he had murdered a village headman with his own hands during the Burma Independence Army’s advance on Rangoon in early 1942.111 This rumour had been relayed to London in 1945, but had wisely been shelved by the Burma Office. When Dorman-Smith was scouting around for politicians to appoint to his newly constituted executive council in early 1946, he approached Tun Oke, an old rival of Aung San. Tun Oke then used the more public forum of the legislative council formally to accuse Aung San of murder. This was a proceeding of dubious merit, not only because it tied the attack on Aung San to Dorman-Smith’s political manoeuvring, but also because Tun Oke was himself wanted by the American military police for atrocities against Allied troops in 1942. According to one account he had had the heads of three British soldiers cut off and impaled on stakes outside a village, posting a notice beside them that read: ‘The dirty, cunning English people came to Burma and not only committed the crimes of thieving brigands but cut off the heads of so many of our Burmese people… What I have done is revenge for that.’112 By working with Tun Oke, Dorman-Smith therefore managed to offend not only Aung San’s followers but the British military too. One of Tom Driberg’s correspondents described the reaction: ‘There are several thousand British troops in Burma who are not at all keen on dying to defend a government which is close to such men as Thakin Oke.’ Why, asked Driberg in exasperation, ‘does Labour choose ex-ministers of the Chamberlain government as agents of its colonial policy?’113

Nevertheless, Tun Oke’s allegations against Aung San gained momentum. In March newspapers in Rangoon, India and Britain began to report on the case and the police apparently had some success in digging up pertinent evidence. Determined to rid himself of the troublesome young nationalist, Dorman-Smith wrote to London seeking permission to arrest him. At this stage the British government had not thought through the implications of trying Aung San. While attending a conference in Singapore Dorman-Smith received a note from Whitehall ordering him to proceed with the arrest. He rushed back to Rangoon. The CID was alerted but, at the last minute, a telegram