Ted Heath’s young oriental companion and the gay friend who claims the ex-PM hid his true sexuality his entire life
AFEW months before he died, Sir Edward Heath invited two old friends, Jeremy Norman and Derek Frost, to pre-Christmas drinks at Arundells — his 14th-century home in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral. Despite his reputation for prickliness, the former Prime Minister could be a generous host. And so it proved when he welcomed the two men into the drawing room, which was filled with paintings and sculptures as well as his collection of music and yachting memorabilia.
‘[Sir Edward] was as hospitable as ever,’ Jeremy recalls. ‘His housekeeper provided some excellent canapés and he opened a bottle of champagne.’
Drink and conversation duly flowed. But two aspects of the proceedings remain forever imprinted on Jeremy’s mind.
The first was 88-year-old Heath’s appearance. ‘Sir Edward was his usual charming and entertaining self, but he was now confined by his ample girth and swollen legs to the chair he sat in,’ Jeremy recalls. ‘We left somewhat saddened; it seemed he would not be long for this world.’
The second abiding memory revolves around a mysterious fourth person present at the convivial gathering. ‘A curious and unexplained character greeted us at the front door. A young, educated, oriental man, who seemed to be a close friend and confidant [of Heath].
‘He was clearly not an employee, as he stayed with us during our chat as though he were a friend. No explanation was sought or proffered as to his place in the household.’
A decade on, that young man has long been forgotten. And the room where they sat — containing Sir Edward’s beloved grand piano and his favourite armchair — is now part of a museum dedicated to his life.
Yet the events of that day in December 2004, not to mention the exact role of the fourth man’s role in Sir Edward’s life, have yet to be entirely consigned to the dustbin of history. Instead, an unlikely course of events have, in recent days, seen them lend fresh energy to a long-running — if somewhat unseemly — public debate. It concerns Sir Edward Heath’s sexuality. Specifically, the thorny question of whether this artistically inclined, lifelong bachelor spent his 51-year political career concealing the fact he was gay.
Jeremy — a prominent and pioneering gay entrepreneur who once owned Burke’s Peerage guide to prominent families and founded Heaven, London’s most famous gay nightclub — certainly thinks so.
Indeed, having known Mr Heath for two decades, he believes the former prime minister was a ‘deeply closeted’ homosexual.
‘How did we know Ted was gay?’ he wrote in a newspaper article earlier this month. ‘It’s called “gaydar”, the sixth sense that’s made up of gesture, looks and a list of characteristics common in gay men.’
Controversially, Jeremy — who now runs the Soho Gyms chain — suggests that the ‘young, educated, oriental man’ he met at Arundells in 2004 was, in fact, Heath’s secret boyfriend.
These intriguing views were brought to the attention of a wider audience recently, when they were shared with readers of The Times by Matthew Parris, a former Tory MP and Parliamentary sketch-writer who is one of Britain’s most famous gay commentators. Parris, who notoriously ‘ outed’ the Labour spin- doctor Peter Mandelson in an interview with Newsnight in 1998, told how he had recently stumbled across a copy of Mr Norman’s autobiography, No Make-Up: Straight Tales From A Queer Life.
The book sank without trace when first published in 2006, and failed to attract significant public attention a year ago, when Jeremy privately republished it.
Yet Mr Parris’s championing of the memoir may change all that.
He describes it as a ‘marvellous’ book, which consists of ‘a spiky miscellany of vignettes of exotic gay and bisexual men, spies and hedonists’. Most notably, according to him, an entire, revelatory chapter of the intriguing book has been devoted to the late Sir Edward.
The text in question tells the story of Jeremy Norman and Sir Edward’s unlikely friendship. It began in the midEighties after Derek Frost, an interior designer who is Jeremy’s civil partner, was hired to help renovate Arundells.
Jeremy claims that Heath deliberately pursued the friendship because he was drawn to the couple as two openly gay men.
His book also tells how Jeremy reached the conclusion that the former Prime Minister’s political ambition had forced him to keep his homosexuality secret — and suppress many of his sexual desires.
‘ He was clearly not rampantly heterosexual, and given that he was ambitious, it seems likely that he had decided early in life to sublimate his sexuality to his political ambitions,’ writes Norman.
‘How deplorable that society forced this man, like so many others, to make a choice between career and a love life.’ He goes on to suggest that this sacrifice perhaps explains the grumpy demeanour and air of misanthropy for which Sir Edward was famed.
We’ll return to the book later. But first, it should be noted that Mr Norman is a long way from being the first person to wonder if Heath —
‘How did we know Ted was gay? It was a sixth sense’
who was in Downing Street from 1970-74, was modern Britain’s first gay prime minister.
Born in 1916, he never married. And aside from politics, his only publicly acknowledged passions were f or classical music — particularly the organ — and sailing, which prompted Private Eye magazine to bestow upon him the camp nickname ‘Sailor Ted’.
He also showed little interest in women, aside from having a reputation for being prickly towards many of his female acquaintances and colleagues — most notably Lady Thatcher. In fact, his years of hostility towards her became known as the ‘Incredible Sulk’.
Only two women came close to being regarded as ‘girlfriends’. One of them was a childhood friend, Kay Raven. She and Heath exchanged letters for several years, but she is said to have become tired of waiting for their relationship to become more intimate. She wrote to him in 1950 announcing that she had decided to marry an RAF officer.
Another was the musician Moura Lympany. A platonic friend, she was approached during Heath’s prime ministership by the Conservative MP Colonel Sir Tufton Beamish, who said: ‘Moura, Ted must get married. Will you marry him?’
Moura revealed the details of this bizarre approach in a 1998 interview with the TV documentary-maker Michael Cockerell.
She’d replied in the affirmative, she recalled. But Sir Edward had never proposed. Indeed, Moura said, the most intimate thing he’d ever done over the years was to ‘put his arm around my shoulder’.
Heath, for his part, never directly
In the Fifties he ‘was warned to stop cottaging’
discussed his sexuality in i nterviews — thus allowing rumours occasionally to circulate.
In the Sixties, for example, a Cold War- era Czech defector called Josef Frolik claimed in a memoir that his country’s secret services had mounted a secret homosexual blackmail plot against Heath — then an up-andcoming frontbencher.
The supposed sting revolved around a handsome organ virtuoso called Reinberger, who had been ‘schooled in the arts of homosexual approach and seduction’ and was allegedly sent to meet Heath in London.
He was then supposed to have invited Heath back to Prague to play the world-famous organ at the city’s magnificent baroque Church of St James. During the trip, Reinberger planned to seduce the English visitor, leaving him open to blackmail.
However, the visit to Prague never took place, and there is no concrete evidence the plot existed.
A BBC documentary two years ago reached the plausible conclusion that Frolik’s allegations, which received UK press coverage at the time, were fabricated in order to advance the agenda of Right-wing Tories, who wished to undermine the centrist Heath.
And both of Sir Edward’s biographers, John Campbell and Philip Ziegler, believe he was effectively asexual — and probably too selfish to share his life with another person.
Campbell, whose book came out in 1993, found no evidence that Heath was gay ‘except for the faintest unsubstantiated rumour of an incident at the beginning of the war.
‘It’s not impossible that he is a latent or repressed homosexual. The alternatives are that he is a repressed heterosexual or that he is simply asexual.’
Ziegler, who was given access to Heath’s papers for his authorised 2010 biography, regards him as ‘pretty well sexless’, telling me: ‘I have come across no evidence remotely plausible suggesting that he ever had intercourse with anyone, male or female.’
A third informed writer, Michael McManus — who wrote Tory Pride And Prejudice, a history of the
Conservative Party’s relationship with the gay movement, and who worked for Sir Edward from 1995 to 2000 — takes a similar but subtly different view.
‘Heath was a gay man who had sacrificed his personal life to his political career, exercising iron self- control and living a celibate existence as he climbed the “greasy pole” of preferment,’ he believes.
‘This is the obvious, default explanation for Heath’s bachelor status, bouts of narcissism and notoriously prickly relationships with women.’
In 2007, Brian Coleman, a senior Tory member of the London Assembly who was then one of the party’s most prominent gay politicians, wrote i n the New Statesman magazine that Heath had once been warned by police — who were vetting him for membership of the Privy Council — to stop ‘cottaging’ (going to public places) for gay sex.
‘The late Ted Heath managed to obtain the highest office of state after he was supposedly advised to cease his cottaging activities in the Fifties,’ said Coleman, alleging that the incident was ‘common knowledge’ in Tory circles. However, he was unable to produce evidence to back up his assertion. And party colleagues disputed his version of events.
An intriguing response to his claims, though, came from none other than Matthew Parris.
In a column written shortly afterwards, he recalled how ‘as a young Tory MP, [when] I escorted his car i nto my constituency, l eatherjacketed on my motorbike, I used to notice the twinkle in Ted’s eye.’
Yet Parris concluded the talk of ‘cottaging’ was almost certainly false, since ‘like many of his generation, Heath would have been superdiscreet in his private affairs.
‘If there ever was love or sex in his life, he would have been very, very careful that he could count on the complete discretion of the other person’, he wrote.
All of which brings us back to Jeremy Norman, whose book tells how Heath, after hiring Derek Frost as his designer, would, for years, invent spurious reasons to get in touch — phoning late at night to claim (on one occasion at 10pm on Christmas Eve), for exam- ple, that ‘those overpriced cushions you made for me are falling apart’.
‘It was clear to us that he was lonely and looking for an excuse to meet,’ Norman wrote. ‘We sensed that, in his own highly inhibited way, he was reaching out to us as a gay couple.
‘He undoubtedly felt comfortable in male company. With us, he was relaxed and at ease.’
In discussions over home decoration, Heath often expressed a
‘In his own highly inhibited way, he was reaching out’
‘long-buried gay designer gene’, Jeremy adds. And during walks in Sir Edward’s garden, he often spoke avidly about roses in a way that made Jeremy ‘sense he was about to reveal himself, but he stopped, made a joke, and moved on. He knew we were a gay couple and we felt he was trying to reach out to us but simply couldn’t find the words or courage to do so.’
That, along with Heath’s ‘exaggerated affection for his mother, his great artistic sensibilities and his bachelor, almost monastic life’, led Jeremy to the conclusion that ‘if he had a sexuality, as everyone must, he had to be inclined towards men.
‘That impression was reinforced by his monosyllabic answers to questions about his love life . . . he clearly had something to hide.’
In an article for last weekend’s Sunday Times, Mr Norman speculated that Heath’s frustrations about his sexuality lay behind his legendary grumpiness, since it prevented him from forming close friendships.
‘He had so schooled himself to suppress and hide his nature that it made him too guarded to become close,’ Jeremy wrote. ‘At times, the strain must have been unbearable and, at those moments, he turned to the solace of music.’
He adds that when they once discussed gay rights (albeit in a political context), Heath seemed h hopelessly conflicted: he admitted t that he’d long believed in an equal a age of consent for gay sex, but had v voted against it in Parliament to avoid upsetting the Tory faithful.
Then came the strange pre-Christmas drinks, attended by Mr Heath’s ‘ young, educated Oriental man’ and lubricated by champagne and canapés.
Sadly, however, it was to be the last time the former Prime Minister and the gay entrepreneur met.
‘He died in 2005,’ Jeremy writes, ‘and we attended his memorial service in Westminster Abbey.’
Sir Edward’s ashes were interred in Salisbury Cathedral. In his will, he left just two legacies: £25,000 to his brother’s widow, and £2,500 to his housekeeper.
One of the most memorable tributes at the time came from the author Leslie Thomas, Heath’s neighbour in Salisbury, who recalled being interviewed by a BBC crew to mark Sir Edward’s 80th birthday.
‘Bluntly, the producer asked me: “Is he gay?” ’ Thomas recalled, with a mischievous grin. ‘ “No,” I replied, “he’s bloody miserable!” ’