From his adolescence onwards, Heath had to tolerate endless speculation about his sexual orientation – or lack of it. ‘You can’t imagine Teddy kissing a girl, can you?’ said Heath’s mother to his first sister-in-law. ‘But he says he loves them all a little bit.’ In the dying days of the Second World War, Heath attended a ‘liberation dance’. According to his fellow officer Major Harrington, Heath could not wait to leave: ‘Captain Heath did not stay at the dance overlong . . . After the CO left, he retired to his makeshift office in a local garage, to do more planning.’1 Not long after, at his selection meeting in Bexley, Heath would say: ‘I have no prejudice against matrimony. I just think that it is not a matter that should be rushed.’2 He was true to his word.
His bachelor status certainly did not help him in politics. It marked him out and caused much speculation, which evidently (and understandably) irritated him. In his first BBC interview as leader, Heath was asked by Robin Day whether being a bachelor would lessen his electoral appeal. He responded, rather tartly: ‘I don’t really see how you can expect me to decide that. I don’t really think so.’ Day persisted. Had Heath, he enquired, ever thought of taking ‘any personal initiative in that matter?’ Heath responded laconically: ‘No. You have recently taken one on, but I have not got one in mind, at least not yet.’3 This was not the only occasion on which he wisely used humour to deflect this line of questioning. Around the same time, a woman reporter asked what he intended to do about a hostess at No. 10, should he become Prime Minister. ‘Is that a proposition?’ he asked.4
Asked a few months later whether he would make a better Prime Minister were he married, Heath appeared to have given the matter more thought and replied: ‘I don’t know. It would depend to some extent on the woman, wouldn’t it? What I do know is that a man who got married in order to be a better Prime Minister wouldn’t be either a good Prime Minister or a good husband.’5 Heath’s friend and contemporary Ian Harvey did exactly that, though, marrying Christopher Mayhew’s sister principally to ensure he could have a political career. I think it is very much to Heath’s credit that he did no such thing. He had too much integrity. He certainly had plenty of opportunities, but the kind of women who would throw themselves at him were precisely the kind of women with whom he felt uncomfortable – as he saw them, subservient and simpering. An early example was a secretary at the Church Times who was so smitten with Heath that she followed him everywhere and (even) predicted he would become Prime Minister one day. He could not bear that; an attitude that never changed. Cecil King, a seasoned Heath-watcher, understood this: ‘Ruth* thinks Ted is fond of me; I think he is fond of her and finds the friendship of an intelligent and musical woman, with no possible axe to grind, very welcome.’6
Heath’s father once said: ‘Of course, we would be very pleased if he got married, but that is up to him . . . It would be good for him. I’ve tried to talk to him about it sometimes, but it’s no use. He’s married to politics and that’s all there is to it.’7 Unsurprisingly, Marian Evans, first wife of Heath’s brother John, devoted a substantial (but not unkind) section of her 1970 book to this burning question. Here is an excerpt that gives a flavour of what must really have upset Heath about her book:
‘[Mummy] and I would often speculate about Teddy and girls. We knew they liked him a lot and thought he liked some of them too. It wasn’t as though he didn’t notice girls or feminine things. He was always very quick to spot a new dress, hair style or perfume, and as his mother was not a woman to wear curlers or look other than immaculate he had a high standard of female beauty. Once when we were speaking of someone we thought he liked very much he dismissed her because she had thick ankles, though we thought he would have admired her fantastic brain! . . .
‘I’ve often thought that had Teddy married it would have been to a woman who was prepared to devote herself to him and not have a career of her own.’8
Asked by one interviewer whether his ‘shell’ had protected him, Heath answered: ‘It has prevented other people trying to cause damage and, to a certain degree, the feeling of pain. Music has helped there too. I never like to think of it as being an outlet, but it has enabled me to live a much fuller life . . . I was brought up not to go around shouting one’s own wares, so I have never done so. Perhaps that was my mistake.’9 Perhaps the most durable rumours of entanglements with the distaff side involved the oft-married concert pianist Dame Moura Lympany, who, by all accounts, would have been very happy to be the first Mrs Heath – and Katharine ‘Kay’ Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who had been widowed in 1963. There is a hilarious passage in Marian Evans’s book about the latter:
‘Perhaps the most ridiculous story was the one soon after the [1970] general election. American inspired, it was picked-up all too eagerly by our newspapers and I believe was little more than sensation. This was the rumour that Teddy and wealthy American widow Mrs Katharine (Kay) Graham were “smitten with each other”. A US columnist claimed that Teddy and Mrs Graham . . . were seeing each other every night in London and the woman had extended her visit to this country after the election. Mrs Graham promptly denied the story. Next day an interesting theory as to how the story started appeared in the Daily Mail’s Charles Greville diary. It seems there was some confusion between their names and those of a couple with similar names – a Ted Leith and a Kate Grahame, the girl an American.’10
When her memoir was published in 1997, Heath said to me, en passant, that she had been ‘very nice in it about our affair’. This was certainly an unusual remark, coming from Heath, but I merely stored it away until recently, when I obtained a copy of Mrs Graham’s memoir. In it, Heath is mentioned just twice, and the story of their ‘alleged romance’ – as Mrs Graham puts it – runs along similar lines to that told by Marian Evans.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that, because Kay Graham later served on the Brandt Commission with Heath and certainly became a confidant of his. Robert Vaudry recalls that she used to stay at Arundells and rather take the place over – ‘she was very comfortable with him, very relaxed and at home’.
Heath met Moura Lympany in 1961; and she introduced him to a range of her many musical and theatrical friends – including Joan Fontaine. She became a regular concert companion of his and gossip columns frequently suggested they might end up as a couple, though she again dismissed such suggestions as ‘nonsense’ in her memoir.
The journalist Lynn Barber interviewed Heath in 1998, in connection with the forthcoming publication of his memoirs. She was intrigued by what – if anything – made him tick sexually:
‘According to Kay Raven’s cousin, Pamela Hill: “I honestly don’t think there was, on her side, any romantic attachment.” Anyway, she married a pilot in 1951 and died of cancer in 1978 . . . Dame Moura Lympany . . . told Cockerell that during Heath’s premiership, someone came from the 1922 Committee to beg her to marry Heath, but she was in love with someone else at the time. Anyway, Heath knew nothing of this proposal! On the homosexual side, we have Margaret Thatcher’s remark to Sir John Junor: “When I look at him, and he looks at me, I don’t feel that it is a man looking at a woman. More like a woman looking at another woman” – and Barbara Castle’s comment about his redecoration of Chequers, that he made everything look “so much more feminine – another clue to Heath’s character?” John Campbell mentions an M15 claim that he had an affair with a Third Secretary at the Swedish embassy, and Alexander Waugh, the music critic, tells a story about Heath’s enthusiasm for a young German cellist called Felix Schmidt, whom he pestered with invitations and promoted so vigorously that one concert agent thought he was Schmidt’s manager. But such stories hardly amount to “evidence”; all we can say with certainty is that Heath is a bachelor who has totally repressed whatever sexuality he might have had.’11
Perhaps the mystery of Heath and his sexual nature was solved, intuitively, not by someone close to him, but by someone who, to the best of my knowledge, never met him but held him in high esteem, Kenneth Williams. In his published diaries, I was astonished to discover that Heath featured prominently. Williams evidently admired him very much indeed and, reading not too much between the lines, recognised some of his own qualities in Heath. In his diary on 23 May 1971, Williams recorded: ‘Wrote to Edward Heath saying I admire him very much: do hope he gets us into Europe.’ Against the odds, I located a copy of the letter in Heath’s shambolic archive. Writing from the Cambridge Theatre, where he was performing in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion by George Bernard Shaw, Williams in fact wrote: ‘As one who so much admired you during the Election Campaign – knowing the tremendous odds which you faced – I just wanted to let you know that I, and many others like me, still feel that admiration and affection as well.’ I noted with approval that Douglas Hurd had Heath respond personally. Is it too much of an imaginative leap to conclude that Kenneth Williams – the reclusive, frustrated, self-repressing, occasionally self-loathing, high-profile, high-achieving but congenitally dissatisfied gay man who found the thought of physical intimacy with others repugnant – sensed Heath was a similar soul?
No one will ever for sure know about Heath’s sexuality, but it was certainly something about which people would ask when I worked for him. I therefore pondered it long and hard, without any chance of coming to a definite conclusion. Often I would watch him closely in the hope of seeing someone – a waiter or waitress, a flight attendant, easy on the eye, male or female – catch his eye, but ne’er was there a flicker that I could discern. This seems to have consistently been the case with him, at least as far back as the 1960s. I was not the first Heath staffer to wonder, as Jeff Stacey can confirm:
‘The fourth researcher [on the Heath memoirs], also American, decided one day at Arundells while the boss was away to establish once and for all what his sexual preferences (if any) entailed. I would have nothing to do with this plot and tried to dissuade him from carrying it out, but, when I returned after a weekend in London, my colleague reported that he had searched Sir Edward’s bedroom and private library high and low, coming up with nary a single piece of paraphernalia. The boss was thereafter cleared of any such suspicion.’
In the absence of outright evidence, I reasoned the matter through. If Heath had been sexually attracted to women, then why on earth would he have denied himself the pleasure of dalliances or long-term relationships with them? In his pomp, he was pretty dashing, not hard up, with a substantial public profile. At one point he was both a leading politician and a UK team captain in international sport. There seemed to me only one credible answer to the conundrum. The downside was that it was totally unoriginal. I expressed my opinion forthrightly in a book I wrote in 2011 about the tangled history of the Tories (who stand, if for anything, for personal choice and freedom) and LGBT rights in the UK, to which they have only belatedly (and only partially) converted:
‘The author of this book worked for Sir Edward Heath between 1995 and 2000 and was left in no doubt whatsoever that Heath was a gay man who had sacrificed his personal life to his political career, exercising iron self-control and living a celibate existence as he climbed the “greasy pole” of preferment. This is the obvious, default explanation for Heath’s bachelor status, bouts of narcissism and notoriously prickly relationships with women – and there are plenty of reasons for subscribing to it, contrasted with few (if any) for rejecting it.’12
To my disgust, when allegations were made, in the summer of 2015, about Heath abusing under-age young men, this quotation was wheeled out, as if it were in any way supportive or indicative of allegations of illegal activity with boys, when, if anything, the opposite is true. So too were the words of Jeremy Norman, included in the section of this volume dealing with Heath’s later life in Salisbury, referring to the way in which Heath in old age relaxed into the company of gay men and became a supporter of LGBT equality. I don’t believe any of the nonsense about Heath bothering boys or going to prostitutes or cruising on Hampstead Heath. He was a very fastidious man, who disliked physical contact of any kind. That wasn’t an act, put on for show.
I suspect Heath never had much of a libido at all, nor do I believe he ever had an intimate relationship with anyone – but I do also agree with a colleague who once said to me, during a conversation on this topic, that dismissively to dub anyone ‘totally asexual’ was to deny them their very human identity. I think that is right. So, to my mind, Heath still must have made a conscious decision at some point – an ordinance of self-denial – and diverted his energies elsewhere. There are numerous tales – not least in this volume – of Heath being disappointed when women to whom he was well disposed went off and married other men. Certainly he was fond of several of them and could be charmed by women, but it seems to me his disappointment was simply (and understandably) that he could no longer count on being the focus of their attention; and it would probably be inappropriate for each of them, once married, to be his ‘plus one’ at social events. How typical of Heath to demonstrate a mixture of selfishness as well as propriety.
Even if, as I and many others believe, Heath had no sexual desire for women, he could, of course, still have found a wife. There are plenty of precedents for that, especially in politics. Finding a wife could have made Heath’s life easier in so many ways: certainly he would have avoided all those awkward questions, dark hints or ‘hello sailor’ doubles entendres. No, Heath decided early in life that this part of his life would be closed off. In some respects this helped him, enabling him to devote his energies and time to other matters, but it would also, crucially, have given a wife to Caesar. Political wives (or husbands) can be invaluable sources of sincerely well-intentioned and entirely confidential (though not always excellent) advice and provide a way of letting off steam. For all his legendary rudeness to women, he didn’t do perhaps the cruellest thing of all, by marrying one. All of which brings us back to the allegations of 2015, which, at the time of writing, still hang over the name and reputation of Heath as the investigation continues, spawning various lubricious and ludicrous website posts and rants.
On 20 April 2015 a BBC researcher contacted me with what seemed to me a mystifying line of questioning. Had I attended Coombe Hill Junior School, he asked? Slightly warily, I confirmed I had. Was I there in the spring and summer of 1979? I confirmed this too. That was my final year before going to grammar school. He asked me if I recalled a road traffic accident, in which a child from the school had been killed or seriously injured? I had no such recollection – and it’s not something one would likely forget. He then ran a number of names past me, none of which I recognised. The researcher was reluctant to give too much away, but I pressed him. It subsequently became clear I had been contacted as a consequence of the investigations by the Metropolitan Police into allegations made against a number of public figures, by someone operating under the pseudonym ‘Nick’. One senior detective had described his claims as ‘credible and true’. A team at the BBC had realised that ‘Nick’ had made one crucial slip, because, amidst all the vague allegations, he had made one – just one – that was time- and place-specific and therefore verifiable, claiming a boy (a victim of abuse) had been deliberately run down and killed outside Coombe Hill in the spring of 1979. The BBC was now seeking to track down former pupils of the school who had been there at that time – ideally in their final year – as both ‘Nick’ and the alleged ‘victim’ supposedly had been.
I called an old schoolmate and he, too, had no recollection of any such incident. What we both did vividly recall was that there had been at the school a poor little girl who had been born with a hole in the heart. When she – not unexpectedly – died, the excellent head teacher, Mrs Keane, had suspended the normal activities of the school for a time and held a special, unified assembly. It was a traumatic, unforgettable event. If one of our peers had perished in an accident, that would surely have been indelibly seared on our minds. I consulted my father, who was working at the time in the Education Department of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Any such event would have crossed his desk at once and he too is certain this was fantasy. He checked with his former colleague Mike Dale. The answer was clear: no, this had not occurred. The local press too looked into it and found no record of such an occurrence.13 The BBC duly produced a broadcast that discredited ‘Nick’ utterly and the Metropolitan Police Operation Midland ended soon afterwards, amidst a flurry of grudging semi-apologies. Harvey Proctor, a living victim of the witch hunt, has spoken and written eloquently of the human consequences of what occurred. He, at least, is protected by the law of defamation. Heath does not have that privilege. The BBC investigation, which was criticised by the police, had tugged at the one verifiably loose thread in the cloth of deceit woven by ‘Nick’, which was now falling to bits.
On Friday 31 July 2015 I received an email, forwarded from my personal website, from a journalist on the Mirror newspaper. ‘I wonder if you could give me a call when you have a moment,’ it read. ‘Working on something to do with Ted Heath that I would like to discuss with you.’ I called the journalist and he explained he had got wind of a story about Heath, to the effect that he had been accused of using the services of a ‘madam’ in Salisbury to procure young men. I laughed it off. I thought no more of it until the following Sunday evening, 2 August 2015, when I received a lengthy email from a colleague. Here is an excerpt:
‘Tomorrow at 12.30 the Independent Police Complaints Commission [IPCC] will issue a statement announcing that they are investigating Wiltshire Police in relation to a case from the early 1990s.
‘A young Detective Constable was prosecuting a woman for brothel keeping. He was approached by her solicitor who said that if the case wasn’t dropped then she would allege that she had procured boys for Edward Heath. He then referred this information up the chain of command. Then the case may have been dropped. Nothing further then happened until the police officer, who had by then risen through the ranks, reported the facts to his senior officers. They then referred the matter to the IPCC who have now decided to oversee an investigation.
‘The difference between this situation and the trickle of vile allegations that have appeared on the internet over the years, is that this will be the first time that an official body has announced an investigation in to an allegation involving (albeit tangentially at this point) Sir Edward. The police intend to deploy officers outside the house tomorrow to ensure order (albeit it could also have the advantage for police PR of implying an investigation in to Sir Edward). They expect that the announcement may lead to camera crews turning up and there may be protesters.’
I was stunned, and hoped that what seemed to me a non-story would come to nothing. Unfortunately that was not to be. On the next day, Monday 3 August, the IPCC did indeed announce it was going to investigate the conduct of Wiltshire Police, in connection with a claim that ‘a criminal prosecution was not pursued when a person threatened to expose that Sir Edward Heath may have been involved in offences concerning children’. In May 2016 the IPCC found there was no evidence to support this allegation, although a separate investigation continues to look into a number of complaints that have arisen since the call for victims at Arundells was made.
In life Heath was not totally immune to far-fetched allegations – for instance, in January 1984 an alleged rapist claimed Heath had appeared in pornographic photos, along with a detective sergeant – that had been stolen by the police. That claim was rapidly dismissed. The announcements in 2015 by the IPCC and Wiltshire Police, however, led directly to a wild outburst of media speculation that has caused such damage – possibly irreparably – to the posthumous reputation of a statesman who is no longer protected by defamation laws.
What has been so striking since then is that, so far as I can ascertain, no one at all believes what has been alleged. They have good reason. While certain newspapers took advantage of the story as something colourful with which to fill their front pages in August, traditionally the quietest news month of the year, more thoughtful columnists in the classier elements of the press – notably the Telegraph and the Sunday Times – soon righted the balance by stating obvious and salutary facts: there was no evidence; an ugly climate of fear was being created; and Heath was unable to defend himself.
Gradually, the storm abated, calm discussion ensued – and widespread scepticism about the allegations gradually took hold. On 30 August, it was reported that the former police officer who had exposed Jimmy Savile as a wholesale child sex offender, Mark Williams-Thomas, had warned that the witch hunt against Heath was being led by individuals who were ‘not evidence-focused, preferring to pass off rumour as fact and, very worryingly, in a few cases, putting pressure on victims of child abuse, which has led them to name high-profile people as offenders . . . The police job is to investigate an allegation and collect evidence or challenge the allegation made . . . Yet none of this has properly occurred before going public, with unsubstantiated allegations, and totally trashing Heath’s reputation.’14
In considering the allegations, some of us who knew Heath well have gone through a three-part process. The first question we asked ourselves was whether we believed Heath would have desired sexual contact with underage men or boys. Not one of us, based on hundreds of years of combined experience of the man, believed he would. Nothing appeared to suggest it. If that was Heath’s penchant, he made a superhuman and 100 per cent successful effort to conceal it.
The second question was, even if Heath had harboured such desires, would he have succumbed to them? In this context we can speak meaningfully of the iron discipline he possessed and also of the extraordinarily busy life he lived, first as an ambitious young politician who either worked or travelled, or enjoyed music or sailed, in every waking moment. He had so very much to risk from any illegitimate liaison; and he was so driven to succeed. It seems most unlikely he would risk it, even if he did want it. This was, let us remember, a man who harboured leadership ambitions until the 1980s – when he was almost seventy years old.
The decisive ‘clincher’ for me – not unrelated – is the third point, which is how Heath lived his life, from the time he became a whip (and, incidentally, someone responsible for monitoring any moral turpitude or peccadilloes amongst his colleagues). Between 1951 and 1965, politics was already his life. He put in hours, in Parliament, in Bexley and out on tour that barely gave him a moment’s privacy or peace. From 1965 until 1970 his life was controlled utterly by his private office; between 1970 and 1974 he was Prime Minister; and, after 1975, he had constant police protection and surveillance.
Peter Batey trawled through his private papers and archive on a number of occasions and remained a friend until Heath’s death:
‘There was nothing in his private papers, my extensive discussions with him and frequent travel with him to suggest Heath was homosexual. Most of his friends and staff were male, with the exception of his secretaries and housekeepers, but this was hardly uncommon, both for his time and for Westminster. In many ways he was naïve. We had to advise him against using the term “cruising” in his memoirs when referring to a holiday as we thought there was a risk it could be misconstrued and used against him. He meant the term innocently and was genuinely taken aback when the risk was explained to him. The historical allegations of paedophilia are shocking and I cannot believe them, based on my time working for him and my extensive dealings with him for the remainder of his life. Ted Heath fought for his country in the Second World War, served his country in Parliament and in the governments of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, eventually rising to become Prime Minister himself. He even represented his country as a sportsman. He does not deserve this.’
A politician whom I greatly admire, Norman Tebbit, who admits he did not like Heath, calling him a ‘cold fish’, wrote a fine piece in defence of his posthumous right to fair treatment and a fair ‘trial’:
‘Now, 10 years after his death, when he is no longer here to defend himself, there has been a sudden storm of allegations that Heath was a particularly foul pervert who found pleasure in the sexual abuse of young boys. There are, his accusers declare, questions to be answered. Indeed there are, but Ted Heath is unable to answer them, while his accusers have free rein to canvas throughout the media for victims to come forward to denigrate him.
‘If we are looking for justice, then this is a dangerous step to have taken. Who do we think will answer this call? Perhaps some of those disturbed people who may sincerely believe, among their many fantasies, that they have suffered wrongs or abuse at the hands of those in power. Or maybe those who are excited at the thought of a moment of fame. Or, the worst of the bunch: those tempted by the prospect of financial gain . . .
‘As to Mr Heath, none of us can judge because he cannot speak. I did not like him, but that does not make him a pervert. His claim to justice is no less valid than those who claim to be his victims.’15
In these pages there is a comprehensive portrait of the man – of a decent, shy, sometimes frustrated, often difficult, rarely charming, wantonly brusque, proud, public servant who always believed in fairness and who loved his country – and who never hurt a fly. Heath was very different, yes. He never married. He had to deal with innuendo all his life. He may have been gay (‘So what?’ most younger readers would say – and good for them), but in death he has been treated abominably. What does it say about us as a society that we can hand out such treatment to people who have so faithfully served their country?
As I have explained in this book, I struggled to get on with Edward Heath, but I do retain a certain affection for him and I also admire him for his manifest achievements. I also believe passionately in his entitlement to fair treatment in death – his right not to have people wantonly trash the ‘immortal part’ of himself – his reputation. Only time will tell, but I hope and believe the investigations by Wiltshire Police will ultimately exonerate Heath of these gruesome allegations and his reputation will be restored.
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* Cecil King’s wife.