The hounding of Ted Heath
Farce continues as the bill for police inquiry hits £900k 17-strong squad questions editors over 70s’ cartoons Off icers quiz his ex-aides in ‘naive f ishing’ expedition
DETECTIVES investigating lurid abuse allegations against Sir Edward Heath have intererviewed key figures at Private ate Eye – because the satirical cal magazine joked about his sexuality 40 years ago.
Police even visited the currrent editor, Ian Hislop, to ask k what he knew about the former Prime Minister, despite the journalist being a teenager during the periodod under investigation.
Officers have also tracked downwn former Downing Street staff to ask them if young men were ever sneaked into Number 10.
Wiltshire Police’s controversial inquiry into Heath – Operation Conifer – has now cost taxpayers almost £900,000, with 17 people still working on it, despite growing demands for it to be shut down.
However, Chief Constable Mike Veale has apologised to MPs and peers for the operation being launched in front of cameras outside Heath’s former house.
It comes after The Mail on Sunday revealed how an expert brought in by police to assess claims that Heath had been linked to a network of paedophiles who held satanic orgies, dismissed them as fantasy.
In the latest example of what has been branded a farce, Wiltshire Police rang former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams earlier this month because the journal often made jokes at the expense of Heath when he was PM from 1970 to 1974.
Unmarried Heath had been jokingly dubbed ‘Sailor Ted’ in a reference to rumours that he was gay.
‘The policeman said he wanted to know whether I had any information on Mr Heath,’ said Mr Ingrams.
‘I said, “You’re talking about jokes.” They’d obviously looked through old copies of the Eye to some extent. There were plenty of “Hello, Sailor” type of jokes.’
He added: ‘I told the policeman there was a general subject of speculation about whether the Grocer [Private Eye’s nickname for Heath] was gay or not. He had a dislike of women. He was very rude if he was sat next to women at lunch parties, just ignoring them completely.
‘It did all look like he was gay. But I never heard any evidence of paedophile rumours. It’s a waste of time and public money.’
Mr Ingrams said two officers have visited his long-serving successor at Private Eye. ‘Ian had said to them it was a bit silly asking questions about Private Eye in 1974 because he was only 14 at the time,’ he added.
The House of Lords was told last month that Operation Conifer has even looked into Heath’s activities inside No 10 Downing Street.
Lord Marlesford, a former adviser to Heath, told peers: ‘The method of fishing adopted by Wiltshire Police seems to vary between the utterly naive and the patently absurd.
‘I have been told by a former member of the Downing Street staff they were contacted by one of the investigating officers, who asked, first, whether they had noticed any untoward incidents in the behaviour of the then Prime Minister, and secondly, whether they had noticed any
‘Investigation is a waste of time and money’
young men slipping in and out of No10.’ Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, who was principal private secretary to Heath, told this newspaper he had been interviewed by two women from Operation Conifer but was asked only ‘in general terms about my views on the allegations’.
He told them Heath always had at least one policeman protecting him, from 1970 until his death in 2005, and that in any case the politician was ‘almost completely asexual’.
Wiltshire Police said the cost of Operation Conifer had reached £883,431 on December 22 last year, up from £674,472 in September.
There are now seven officers and 10 civilian staff working on it. Two people remain on police bail after being arrested but it is not known if they had any connection to Heath.
The force insisted the case is receiving ‘appropriate scrutiny’ from a panel including a human rights lawyer, an ethics doctor, a psychiatrist and a local resident.
Last month, Chief Constable Veale met Wiltshire MPs in Westminster and told them that he expected the case to be finished by the summer. A final report may then be handed to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
Wiltshire North MP James Gray said he told the chief constable he must make a public announcement if no evidence against Heath is found, as his name has been ‘besmirched’.
He said Mr Veale acknowledged it had been ‘wrong’ for Superintendent Sean Memory to launch the investigation outside Heath’s former Salisbury home in 2015, as it ‘tended to imply there was a case to answer’.
A spokesman for the local Police and Crime Commissioner, Angus Macpherson, said he ‘continues to monitor the progress of the investigation and its cost and he remains satisfied with the progress’.