Ted Heath allegations
The Herald reports:
The woman at the centre of the Sir Edward Heath child abuse storm is a Filipino prostitute who ran a brothel just a kilometre from the late Prime Minister’s former home in Salisbury.
Myra Ling-Ling Forde, 67, has twice been jailed for operating as a madam out of her home in the Wiltshire town where Heath lived after leaving office. But in the early 1990s it is alleged she had a prosecution dropped after threatening to expose Heath as a paedophile.
A retired senior detective came forward last year to allege that his colleagues quietly dropped a trial against twice-married Forde to protect the reputation of the former Tory leader. That allegation is now the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation, but Wiltshire police have also appealed for any potential victims of Heath to come forward.
Heath is now at the centre of five separate police investigations.
Is this smoke without fire, or is there substance to the allegations?
There has been long-standing speculation on Heath being homosexual, or alternatively asexual. But the suggestions of pedophilia are relatively new, and of course massively different. It is important to note there is only one specific allegation, and so far not substantiated.
Dan Hodges writes in The Telegraph:
Edward Heath. Former prime minister. Former leader of the opposition. Mentioned in dispatches during the Normandy campaign. All gone now. In the blink of an eye. Or the blink of a press release. His entire life – a lifetime of public service – completely erased. And replaced with a putrid, fetid, sordid stain.
That is literally all it takes now – in Britain, in 2015. One letter. One phone call. One meeting. And it’s done.
It’s time it was undone. I’m bored of listening to the howl of the mob. Watching sun glinting off the scythes, and being told this represents “justice”.
Yes, I know. My first thought is supposed to be for “the victims”. But I don’t think there are any victims of Edward Heath. I think the man who has come forward to the claim he was abused by Ted Heath when he was 12 is mistaken. I think the former brothel keeper – who has a conviction for perverting the course of justice – and who is one of the other main “witnesses” against him is lying, or mistaken as well.
The problem is that we have learnt from the Jimmy Saville affair, that the establishment didn’t pursue complaints against famous or powerful people, with any vigour. We may never know the truth.