Brian MacKinnon

Brian MacKinnon (born 4 June 1963) is a Scotsman who posed as teenager Brandon Lee to get back into medical school.

MacKinnon was a medical student in the University of Glasgow but he kept failing his exams and was eventually taken off the course. According to his later interview, he felt he had to abandon his studies because of an illness. He later returned to study biological sciences, but because he failed to register, he never officially graduated.

Determined to become a physician, he adopted a persona of Canadian teenager Brandon Lee who had been orphaned and was now living with his grandmother. In fact he was still living with his mother at the family home in Whitehurst, Bearsden. He intended to retake his Highers to circumvent his academic record and 1993 enrolled in the same school he had graduated from 13 years previously - Bearsden Academy in Bearsden, a suburb of Glasgow.

He changed his appearance by taking a perm and plucking his eyebrows and forged two letters of introduction; one of which was supposed to come from '60s celebrity Marsha Hunt; so although he was then 30, the teachers (many of whom had been there when he was "studying there" in the 1970s) and students accepted him as a 16-year-old newcomer. During the time of his imposture at the school he took an active role in pupil activities, participating in the debating society and playing the role of Lieutenant Cable in the school production of "South Pacific".

The imposture lasted for two years, during which he obtained five 'A' grade Highers in 1994 in Maths, English, Biology, Chemistry and Physics. He was accepted by the University of Dundee's medical school to begin classes that autumn, however he left after four months due to financial problems but was accepted to begin studying again in September 1995.

Shortly before he was due to re-commence his studies, an anonymous phone call to the school headmaster exposed him. However, initial media reports stated that he'd been exposed by local authorities after being arrested as a result of a bar room brawl whilst on holiday in Tenerife with two former Bearsden Academy students - a version of events that was later quietly forgotten by the press when found to be false. His exposure lead to media frenzy in Scotland which lasted several weeks. The University of Dundee promptly withdrew its offer of re-admission to its medical degree course on the basis of his deception.

Senior academic staff at the University of Glasgow Medical School disputed the account he gave to the media of his leaving their institution in the 1980s, commenting that in their opinion he was unfit to become a doctor due to the lack of integrity he had displayed in returning to Bearsden Academy and applying to Dundee Medical School under a false identity.

Margin Walker

The same year, he published his autobiography, 'Margin Walker' for free on the internet - the title taken from the Fugazi e.p. of the same name. A print publication had been negotiated, but had to be abandoned as it contained libellous allegations about the two medical schools and some of the pupils he had attended Bearsden Academy with under his assumed identity in 1993 and 1994, which Mackinnon refused to remove. It has since been removed from the internet, but copies still turn up in both .pdf and .doc format in various internet groups.

Mackinnon's most serious allegations was that his exposure had been down to the family of a Bearsden Academy pupil that had failed to enter Dundee's Medical School due to poor grades. Mackinnon alleged the mother of the girl was in a relationship with Scottish investigative journalist Allan Caldwell, and they'd threatened a high profile exposure of Mackinnon's duplicity (using Caldwell's media connections) at the medical school's expense unless she was allowed in: blackmail having failed, they exposed Mackinnon nevertheless in the hope the girl would then get the vacant place created upon his inevitable explusion. Whilst Mackinnon's claim could never be proved, the same girl had made headline allegations in the Scottish Daily Record that she'd rejected Mackinnon's attempts to become intimate with her, something both Mackinnon and those that knew him at Bearsden Academy dismissed as fantasy in the media elsewhere: the journalist behind the Daily Record's "exclusive" was one Allan Caldwell.

A film of the affair was also to be made entitled 'Younger than Springtime' after one of the songs he had sung in the school production of South Pacific. He withdrew his support for the project when he discovered the production company wanted effeminate comedy actor Alan Cumming to play him. With the release of the Drew Barrymore film Never Been Kissed, which followed a similar storyline, work on the production has ceased permanently.

In a 1997 interview he said he was going to go back to medical school, even if he has to become someone else again, however this never came to pass.

He took a case against the University of Glasgow, accusing it of mistreatment for 'pre-emptorily excluding' him from his studies, to the European Court in 2001. Since the European Courts were not in existence at the time of his original grievance, they could not do anything to help him.

Mackinnon And The Media

Mackinnon's relations with the media during the whole affair were prickly (perhaps understandably considering his allegations against the journalist Caldwell): a live BBC Scotland interview saw him tear strips off presenter Jackie Bird after she'd insinuated he was mentally disturbed (a suggestion first mooted by Glasgow University psychology lecturer Dr Geoffrey Scoble in his column for the Daily Record), his riposte was that her questions were little better than those made by her ex-husband (the then editor of the Scottish edition of The Sun tabloid newspaper): whereupon the interview was abruptly ended. An interview on ITV's This Morning the following day was more sympathetic.

In 2002, he again approached the Scottish media to report that he had been reduced to a state of poverty since his exposure and often had to sleep rough in his car at various locations around Glasgow: however other reports suggested that he was in fact still living with his mother in Glasgow.