Ted Heath: Child sex abuse probe widens
Police set to publish explosive dossier
THE controversial investigation into allegations that Sir Edward Heath was a paedophile has been widened, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Officials at Britain’s biggest ever public inquiry confirmed they are to study an explosive police report into claims that the former Prime Minister was a child abuser.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) – set up to investigate claims that a Westminster paedophile ring was covered up by the Establishment – will now look at the outcome of Operation Conifer, a two-year inquiry into Heath led by Wiltshire Chief Constable Mike Veale. His confidential report is due to be published in the next few weeks.
An IICSA spokesman said last night: ‘In the context of the Westminster investigation, the inquiry will be interested to see and consider the outcome of Wiltshire Police’s investigation into allegations against Sir Edward Heath.’ The statement follows a littlenoticed change on the IICSA website on August 30 that the scope of its Westminster inquiry is to be widened to take account of ‘recent police investigations’.
The amendment did not refer to Operation Conifer, but The Mail on Sunday has been told that it was linked to the imminent conclusion of Mr Veale’s probe.
The Mail on Sunday revealed this year how Mr Veale defied pressure to call off his investigations because he believed some claims were ‘120 per cent genuine’.
The developments came as one Conservative MP warned his party not to try to stop Mr Veale from publishing his findings.
Several Tory politicians have called Operation Conifer, which has cost £1.5million, a waste of time and cash. They say it is pointless because Sir Edward died 12 years ago so cannot be prosecuted.
But Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said Mr Veale had been wrongly vilified and there were ‘powerful voices who would like to silence Operation Conifer’. He called Mr Veale a ‘courageous and honest’ policeman who ‘must be allowed to complete his investigation, free of abuse, intimidation or pressure’.
In February, this newspaper reported that more than 30 people had come forward to Wiltshire Police with claims of sexual abuse by Sir Edward. The alleged victims were said to have given ‘strikingly similar’ accounts, even though they were not known to each other.
According to some sources, the findings of Operation Conifer support claims that Sir Edward’s alleged crimes were reported to police years ago but buried. Operation Conifer was set up in 2015 in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, but Mr Veale came under pressure to abandon it last year after claims of a paedophile ring at Westminster involving the late former Home Secretary Lord Brittan and ex-Defence chief Lord Bramall were found to be groundless.
Several senior politicians have dismissed allegations against the former Prime Minister as absurd, including former Cabinet Secretary Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, who was Sir Edward’s private secretary in No10. In a letter to The Times last week, he said the allegations were ‘totally uncharacteristic and unlikely’. Lord Armstrong also referred to unspecified ‘concerns about the conduct of the inquiry’.
At one point, Sir Edward was being investigated by five police forces: the Met, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Kent and Jersey. The claims, some of which were proved false, include alleged links to a convicted brothel keeper, Madam Ling-Ling.
A paedophile dossier compiled by Baroness Castle, a member of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1970s, said Sir Edward offered boys trips on his yacht.
A IICSA spokesman declined to say if the change in its official stance, as detailed on the website, was to enable it to consider the findings of Mr Veale’s report.
Wiltshire Police said it would send its findings to the national inquiry within the next six weeks.