Ted Heath 8 out of 10 guilty, ‘police chief told MPs’

THE police chief who led the Edward Heath inquiry told MPs he thought the former prime minister was ‘eight out of ten guilty’, it has been claimed.

One of Sir Edward’s closest advisers, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, alleged Wiltshire Police chief constable Mike Veale had privately assured MPs that he thought Sir Edward was guilty of sexual abuse.

In a meeting with MPs and Heath supporters in December last year – during the £1.5million probe – the chief was asked whether he thought the late Tory was a child abuser ‘on a scale of one to ten’.

According to Lord Armstrong, who yesterday called for a judge-led inquiry into the police investigation, Mr Veale replied: ‘Eight out of 10 guilty.’

Sir Edward’s former principal private secretary, who was at the meeting, added: ‘[Mr Veale] was concerned at that moment to justify the investigation … we were all so astonished.’

Yesterday there were calls for an independent review of the probe, after a summary report last week concluded police would have interviewed Sir Edward, had he been alive, over seven sex abuse claims detectives consider credible.

Mr Veale was at pains to stress that no ‘inference of guilt’ should be drawn from the report’s findings. But Lord Armstrong

‘Highly prejudicial’

told the Lords the report had left a ‘cloud of suspicion’ and that ‘the dead deserve justice no less than the living’.

He was backed by Lord Lawson, who called for an audit into the ‘misuse of large sums of public money’ by the probe.

Home Office minister Baroness Williams of Trafford said it would be up to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate the matter.

A spokesman for the Sir Edward Heath Charitable Foundation, which has requested that the matter be referred to the IPCC said ‘the remark [by Mr Veale] was highly prejudicial’.

A Wiltshire Police spokesman said Mr Veale categorically denied making the comment, adding: ‘The chief constable briefed a number of relevant different stakeholders … these briefings did not, at any stage, disclose any operational detail … We have a full record of notes from this meeting and can categorically state that this comment was not made.’