Ted Heath is owed full inquiry into police child sex abuse witch hunt, says Tory peer
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The official historian of the Conservative Party has called for an independent investigation into the police’s disastrous handling of false child sex abuse claims against Sir Edward Heath.
Lord Lexden said there was an “overwhelming and unanswerable” case for a review of Wiltshire Police’s £1.5 million investigation into the former prime minister after its former chief constable was barred for life from policing.
Mike Veale, the former chief constable of Wiltshire police, who presided over the investigation into uncorroborated claims that Heath raped and indecently assaulted boys as young as 10, was found guilty of gross misconduct and barred from policing for life in July after a disciplinary panel found he had made inappropriate sexual comments to colleagues.
The Conservative peer said: “We owe it to the memory of a dead statesman, the only first minister of the Crown ever to be suspected of such serious criminal offences, to get at the truth of this grave matter and settle the doubts created by the disgraced Veale.”
Wiltshire’s Operation Conifer saw one of Veale’s senior officers make an unprecedented public appeal outside Heath’s house in Salisbury, but detectives failed to interview potential key witnesses during the costly inquiry.
Main complainant a fantasist and convicted paedophile
The main complainant against Heath was a fantasist and convicted paedophile who claimed that the former PM had abducted and raped him after picking him up while he was hitchhiking on the A2 in Kent in 1961, when he was just 11.
But a Telegraph investigation showed the man, now aged 73, had a string of convictions for child sex abuse dating back almost 50 years.
Three siblings contacted by this newspaper had no recollection of their brother being abducted and then raped by Heath, as he claimed.
Wiltshire Police failed to interview any of the relatives about the rape allegation. Heath died in 2005 and could not defend his reputation.
Writing in The House magazine, which is published Monday, and speaking in the House of Lords, Lord Lexden said: “It is imperative to carry out an independent review of the seven allegations made against Sir Edward Heath long after his death, which Veale failed to clear up after a long investigation that one of his officers contemptibly publicised on television in front of Ted Heath’s house in Salisbury.
“The outcome of the disciplinary case, brought following an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, should be followed by renewed scrutiny of his handling of the allegations against the former prime minister.”
Lord Lexden, who is the official historian of the Conservative Party, said there was a “strong suspicion” that former chief constable Veale “left these allegations open, neither proved nor disproved, to save face” after failing to find any evidence to support the claims against Heath.
Wiltshire Police launched Operation Conifer in August 2015 with a public appeal for “victims” to come forward in a televised press conference made outside Heath’s Salisbury home, Arundells.
At one stage officers searched all of Heath’s private papers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, during a two year operation that cost more than £1.5 million.
Two siblings no recollection of brother being abducted
In October 2017 The Telegraph disclosed how two siblings had no recollection of their brother being abducted as he claimed as he walked along the A2 in Kent.
He alleged he was picked up by Heath and raped in his flat. The siblings, then aged five and 10, said the boy never went missing.
In a letter he later wrote to his family from prison the man admitted he made the claim against Heath only because he faced paedophile charges of his own.
The Lords’ Home Office minister, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, told the Lords that it was for the Wiltshire Police and Crime Commissioner to decide whether an inquiry was necessary, adding: “The investigation has already been subject to considerable external scrutiny and the Government do not see the grounds for government intervention.”
Mr Veale resigned as head of Cleveland police in 2019 after being accused of inappropriate behaviour towards the two women, just ten months after taking up the post following his departure from Wiltshire.
He had previously denied having stated a view on Heath’s guilt, saying: “Our role is to objectively and proportionately go where the evidence takes us.”
