A vanished file and troubling claims about Heath and young musicians
There’s no smoking gun. But after a week of shocking headlines, the Mail’s unearthed fresh allegations
THE late spring of 1978, and in a sunlit rehearsal hall a stout, shirt- sleeved figure, familiar from a quite different setting, is conducting a new orchestra of young musicians. Roaring and flailing as his proteges run through Ode To Joy from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, former British prime minister Edward Heath is clearly in his element.
‘That’s much better strings … much better!’ he enthuses. Afterwards, he tells a television crew which had been filming the event: ‘The orchestra here has a saying — “Tell them the Community isn’t only about the price of fish: it is about Beethoven and Brahms”.’
An odd comment you might think, if you did not know the political context. The ensemble in question was the European Community Youth Orchestra, and it was about to embark on its inaugural tour of EEC capitals. It was to be a flagship for pan- European cultural co- operation.
The 135 musicians, some of whom were as young as 14, were drawn from the then nine member nations. Heath, an enthusiastic amateur musician who had led the United Kingdom into the European Community five years before, was the orchestra’s founding president. He would also be its guest conductor for that tour and several tours to come.
Today, the orchestra he helped found — now named the European Union Youth Orchestra — goes from strength to strength. But the reputation of the man himself, who died aged 89 in 2005, is being posthumously trashed. Early this week, Heath’s name was formally attached to the wide- r anging allegations of historic paedophile abuse and cover-up by members of the British political establishment.
Within days he had become the focus of investigations by no fewer than seven different police forces examining historic allegations, Hampshire, Jersey, Kent, Wiltshire, Thames Valley, Gloucestershire and the Metropolitan Police, after it was claimed that the early 1990s trial of a Wiltshire brothel madam was dropped when she threatened to claim in court that rent boys had been supplied to the ex-prime minister. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is to examine the allegation, made by a former senior police officer.
The barrister who was to prosecute the brothel keeper — a Filipina called Myra Ling-Ling Forde — confirmed in a letter to The Times on Thursday that she had indeed made the threat, but it was not the reason the trial was halted.
Earlier in the week, it emerged that a man had also claimed that in 1961, when he was 12 years old, he had been raped by Heath at the politician’s Mayfair flat. A further allegation that Heath was part of a VIP paedophile and child murder ring that operated i n London’s Dolphin Square was subsequently aired.
In an intriguing development, the Mail learned this week that a file relating to Sir Edward and the infamous Paedophile Information Exchange group is one of those missing from official Government records.
It is among 114 missing files concerning child abuse identified by an independent review of how allegations were handled by the Home Office.
The title of the missing document, ‘Edward Heath MP [redacted] RE: PIE’, refers to the activities of the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Investigators discovered that the file disappeared more than 25 years ago after being moved to a Westminster record centre. They concluded that there was no evidence of any orchestrated attempts by officials over three decades to cover up child abuse.
But the unexpected absence of the file raises questions about the exact nature of the connection between Heath and the PIE group.
The only surviving record of its existence, a brief index, suggests it is linked to an individual Parliamentary question. Officials suspect the document was destroyed during a routine purge of documents after it was moved to the Queen Anne’s Gate record centre in March 1990.
One of t he most r e markable manifestations of this week’s hue and cry was the sight of a senior Wiltshire police officer making a televised appeal for ‘victims’ to come forward and ‘ suffer i n silence’ no l onger, f rom outside the gates of Heath’s palatial former home in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral.
Such grandstanding was criticised yesterday by Britain’s most senior policeman, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who said he did not believe Heath should have been named while unproven allegations were being investigated.
Today, we shall examine the credibility or otherwise of this ever- expanding swirl of rumour and allegation. Suffice to say they are now being chased by internet conspiracy theorists as well as those multiple police forces — the latter anxious not to repeat the mistakes or failures which saw men such as Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith MP go unprosecuted when there was clear and extensive evidence of paedophile activity over several decades. In the course of the Mail’s own investigations this week, further new allegations of sexual abuse and possible official cover-up concerning Sir Edward have come to light.
They centre on his relationship with the European Community Youth Orchestra.
A retired senior police officer, who served with several southern forces including Wiltshire, told the Mail that there were ‘always rumours’ about Heath, the former MP for Bexley.
The policeman — a widely respected officer with a distinguished career — asked that due to the sensitivities of the Heath investigations, he remain anonymous. He told us that the rumours did not come with any specific evidence against the former PM.
But he went on: ‘The exception were several allegations made against him in his role with the European Youth Orchestra. I understand there were credible claims that Heath indecently assaulted young people on tours to the Continent which he was leading.
‘These tours took place in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
‘It was never clear how old the victims were, or exactly what happened, and what was alleged was not at the top end of the scale of criminality.
‘Why these were never investigated I cannot say. I suspect it is because they took place overseas and the victims were from other countries.’
As Heath, the son of a carpenter, rose through the ranks of the Tory Party on the way to becoming leader, the prickly and enigmatic bachelor became the subject of gossip concerning his private life and sexual orienta- tion. In his 1998 autobiography, The Course Of My Life, Heath intimated that he had once been close to a young woman called Kay Raven. Separated by war service and work, he explained, she suddenly announced that she was marrying someone else.
Heath wrote: ‘I was saddened by this … I had taken too much for granted.’
This was the only suggestion of a close personal relationship.
Others believed that he was in fact homosexual but had suppressed his inclinations in order to advance his career, given that homosexual acts between two consenting adult men over the age of 21 were only decriminalised in 1967.
By then Heath had turned 50 years of age, had been an MP for 17 years and Leader of the Opposition for two. Britain was not ready for an openly gay MP, let alone prime minister.
A 1993 biography, published while Heath was alive, explored the subject but decided there was no ‘positive evidence’ that Heath was gay.
After his death, others were bolder. In 2007, Brian Colemen, a gay Tory member of the London Assembly, alleged that in the 1950s Heath had been warned by police to stop picking up men in public lavatories, though he did not produce evidence to support the allegation.
Yet Heath’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler, wrote that he found there was no evidence of homosexual leanings. In fact, the politician could well have been ‘asexual’.
What is not disputed is Heath’s love of music. Critics said that his attempts to master playing the organ and conducting an orchestra betrayed his chilly self-importance. (Two of his eight Desert Island disc choices were recordings of his own conducting, and when on an official visit to Rome, he gave as a present to t he Pope recordings of hi mself with t he London Symphony Orchestra.)
After losing power in 1974, Heath continued to explore ways of combining his politics with his music. The solution came in the form of the Youth Orchestra, which was first mooted in 1976. ‘I had long felt the need for the Community to extend its activities beyond political and commercial affairs,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘This is possible with music because it is a single common language.’
Auditions were held in the autumn
Detectives found the file had gone 25 years ago ‘Why these were never investigated I cannot say’
The internet is now awash with lurid rumours
of 1977, with Heath on the panel of judges. More than 1,000 young Britons aged between 13 and 22 applied for a place. In the end, they made up almost one-third of the complement of the first orchestra.
At each concert in that first tour, Heath conducted the overture, which consisted of the national anthem of the host country and the anthem of Europe, Ode To Joy.
So could he have assaulted some of the young musicians, as the former police officer suggested this week?
The Mail has contacted a number of British former members of the early orchestra, none of whom recalled being aware of anything untoward involving their famous conductor.
One violinist who joined at its inception described Heath as a remote figure whose Special Branch protection officers discouraged the young musicians from approaching him off stage.
Of course, Heath being a very private man did not mean he was necessarily hiding an outrageous secret. Nor did being gay mean that he had a predilection for underage boys. Indeed, much of what has been alleged this week is questionable in the extreme. But that is not to say there may not be some truth in some of the allegations.
Former Fleet Street journalist Alun Rees, who spent 20 years investigating the PIE, told this newspaper that Heath’s name had appeared in a dossier of Westminster paedophiles compiled by the controversial Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens, who made a number of allegations about sex abuse among the political elite during the 1980s.
Meanwhile, award-winning local j ournalist Don Hale, l ong- time editor of the Bury Messenger, says that he was approached in 1984 by Labour Party grandee and child protection campaigner Barbara Castle, with what he understood to be a feature from the Magpie magazine published by t he PIE group.
It was, he told us this week, ‘about Heath offering weekend trips for boys from Jersey on his yacht. Heath had a number of racing craft named Morning Cloud.
‘She deliberately showed me this and asked what I thought. I was a little confused and asked her “You don’t mean [this is true]?” — and she nodded, and said yes.’ Again, not conclusive. Heath t ook up competitive yachting in the mid-Sixties, on the advice of Tory image-makers who wanted him to have public interests which went beyond classical music.
As the Mail reported this week, the timeline of his involvement with sailing undermines the claims of the man previously mentioned who says he was raped in 1961 by Heath in a London flat in which ya c hti ng pi c tures were hung on the walls. Heath did not take up the sport until years after the alleged rape.
Allegations t hat Heath may have taken boys aboard his yacht now appear to be at the centre of the Jersey police interest in him.
A public inquiry into historic abuse of children within the island’s residential care system began last year. A police investigation had recorded 553 alleged offences, more than half of which were committed at Haut de la Garenne Children’s Home.
The internet is now awash with sensational allegations that Heath invited boys from Haut de la Garenne for pleasure trips on his boat. Once aboard, they were abused and, the more outre accusers say, murdered and their bodies thrown overboard.
Yesterday’s Daily Mirror carried a report about a woman named Linda Corby, who claims that in the early 1970s she saw 11 boys aged between six and 11 — from the notorious Haut de la Garenne home — board Heath’s yacht, but that when they returned hours later from a sailing trip, only ten children disembarked.
Ms Corby, an author, claimed that when she went to the police to make a statement a few days later, along
Scotland Yard will interview the ex-madam
with a local politician who had also been a witness, officers told her ‘someone above’ had told them not to investigate.
It is not clear if there is any independent evidence to back up her claim.
One person who could not be relied upon to give truthful evidence is the woman who sparked this week’s furore, the f ormer Salisbury brothel keeper ‘Madame Ling-Ling’, who is alleged to have threatened to expose the former prime minister as a paedophile — a suggestion she denies.
She was once described by a judge as being a ‘thoroughly unscrupulous’ person, when she was jailed for forcing children as young as 13 to work after school in her brothel, a mile from Sir Edward’s mansion, which he bought in 1985.
A former associate of Madame Ling-Ling called her a ‘compulsive liar’.
Yesterday, Myra Ling-Ling Forde — aka Madame Ling-Ling — confirmed she was due to be interviewed by Scotland Yard detectives. Speaking outside her flat in North-West London, she went on to claim that she had a cache of papers containing ‘all the names’ which she would make available to investigators.
The 67-year-old initially said she had been told not to speak about the scandal.
She continued: ‘I was told strictly by my solicitor, because I can’t — I am going to be interviewed by Scotland Yard.’
Asked if the interview was in connection with the Ted Heath probe, she replied: ‘Yes’.
‘They will know everything because of the papers’, she continued. ‘Not newspapers. Papers from the trial. I have them all in a pile, a pile of papers from when I went to court. All the names and everything.’
One is minded to believe that when she was facing trial in 1992, she brought the rough and ready survival instincts of the Manila back streets from which she emerged to bear on a sleepy English cathedral city and a famous man who had long been a target of rumour. And yet now those rumours won’t go away.
A few days ago, a second retired police officer contacted t his newspaper. T hough because of the sensitive nature of the unfolding investigation he did not want to be named, he recalled being at a CID course at the Hendon police college in June 1978 — the time that Heath was embarking on the first youth orchestra tour.
His class was being addressed by a lawyer from the office of the Director of Public Prosecut i ons ( t hen Si r T homas Hetherington).
The speaker having invited questions from the floor, one officer, known to be a detective sergeant in Special Branch — the police arm of the security services — stood up and asked: ‘As we have a file on Edward Heath, why hasn’t he been prosecuted for young boys?’
The man from the DPP hastily ducked the question, the former detective recalls.
This week, the questions about Sir Edward Heath came thick and fast. Yet it should be reiterated t hat nothing which has yet been unearthed amounts to solid evidence that the former Tory leader committed any offences whatsoever.
Now, with seven police forces investigating historic claims, we must wait to see what other allegations will be levelled against this enigmatic man.