Operation Conifer

Debate between Lord Thomas of Gresford and Lord Armstrong of Ilminster

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Armstrong of Ilminster (CB)]

My Lords, I support the Motion to Regret so ably and forcefully moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden.

I have no complaint about the thoroughness with which Operation Conifer was conducted. It spent two years, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, and £1.5 million. It interviewed a great many friends and colleagues of Sir Edward Heath, and staff and protection officers who had worked for him, and not a single one thought that Sir Edward Heath had been a child abuser.

They interviewed me for over an hour. I was interviewed by two well-spoken young women—one of them, I think, a police officer; the other was said to be an expert in child abuse, whatever that means—and they were chiefly interested in my duties as principal private secretary to Sir Edward Heath when he was Prime Minister. They spent so long on it that I wondered whether they were hoping that I would say that one of my duties was to procure children for Sir Edward to abuse. If they were expecting that, they were disappointed. I said that I never suspected anything; never even wondered whether he might be a child abuser. In fact, as we know, he was far too cautious and protective of his political and personal reputation to have gone in for anything so risky, even if he was minded that way.

One interviewer said to his interviewee that the investigation was a farce; that the only reason why he was doing it was that he was being paid to do it. So my complaint is about the judgment of the senior officers who initiated and supervised the inquiry. The final responsibility there, of course, must lie with the then chief constable of whom the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has spoken. They permitted themselves to announce that they were investigating Sir Edward Heath by means of a televised statement made outside his house in Salisbury, thus ensuring that from the very beginning the operation was conducted in full public glare. Later there was the episode to which the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, referred, when the chief constable was quoted as saying that he was 120% sure of Edward Heath’s guilt. If he said anything of the kind he was going grossly beyond any responsibility of a chief constable. The duty of the police is to investigate, to collect evidence and to follow the evidence where it leads, but not to pronounce verdicts. The fact remains that the allegation in the newspaper was never categorically denied.

Their decision to publish a summary report and to hold a press conference at the end of the investigation was an unusual—indeed, I would say unprecedented—course to which they were forced by the fact that the whole investigation had been made public. As we have heard, about 90% of that report was given over to justifying the decision to conduct the investigation and then disposed of 35 of the 42 allegations which had been received, I think all or most of them made after the announcement outside Arundells, and left the seven unresolved allegations to which the noble Lord has referred. Four of them are clearly without foundation, and that is probably true of the other three. One wonders whether seven were left unresolved in order to ensure that Sir Edward Heath remained under suspicion.

Hence the need for an independent inquiry. The police and crime commissioner said that he would welcome an inquiry but not one initiated by him. That was because, he said, this is a national matter. The Home Secretary, when the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, and I went to see him, refused to conduct an inquiry because it is a local matter. I do not know of any way in which one can resolve this dilemma. Is it a national matter or is it a local one? They do not seem to be able to agree.

This is a matter of justice for Sir Edward Heath and it ought not to be left in its present state. I believe that there is probably no one who now thinks that Edward Heath was a child abuser. What is needed is to nail that down. The best way to do that would be to hold an independent inquiry. If that is not to be done, what is needed in order to reinforce the conclusion is an authoritative statement that the information available on this matter, including Operation Conifer, does not satisfy the standards of probability that would justify a decision to prosecute. That may be as far as we can get at this stage because Sir Edward has been dead for 12 years and his reputation has been grossly undermined and clouded by the injustice that has been done to him through Operation Conifer.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, I too welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to the Dispatch Box for the first time in a debate. We look forward to hearing from her many times in the future. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, on the immense tenacity that he has shown on this very important issue which concerns the reputation of one of the statesmen of this country. I did not know Sir Edward Heath; I never met him. The only connection I can possibly cite is that when Sir Alistair Graesser, who some noble Lords may recall, lived in my house before I bought it from him, Sir Edward Heath spent the night there. That is the most I can ever say about my connection with him.

We have to start with Operation Marble. In March 2015, the Wiltshire Police made a referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate a suggestion that a criminal court case may have been dropped in 1994 to protect Sir Edward Heath. It was based upon the recollection of a former senior officer who in August 1992 as a young detective constable had been involved in an undercover operation into the existence of a brothel at an address in Salisbury. It was his job to go to the brothel to demonstrate that a Ms Myra Ling Ling Forde was willing to offer sex for sale. Ms Forde was charged with keeping a brothel and when her case was listed to be heard at Winchester Crown Court in February 1994, the officer in question, who has retired, recalled that he was approached by Ms Forde’s solicitor and told that if the case proceeded, Ms Forde would notify the media that she had been supplying young boys to Sir Edward. That was his recollection, but he had not recorded anything in his notebook or diary. He said that he was reminded of it 21 years later, after watching a television programme about Jimmy Savile. He named other officers who had been involved in the investigation. Two of them were named in his police notebook as having attended court with him but he said that that was not right because he was there on his own. He said he had telephoned his headquarters in Salisbury about this suggestion, but he could not remember who he had spoken to. The trial of Ms Forde did not take place and he had inferred that this was to protect Sir Edward from these allegations. That is the foundation of it; that is where it all sprang from.

All the case papers had been destroyed in the ordinary course of events both in the police station and in the court. The IPCC carried out an investigation. None of the officers in the case or the senior officers in the police station at the time had any recollection of this alleged threat. The defence solicitor and the defence counsel were both interviewed and they too had no recollection of a threat being made to expose Sir Edward by their client. Prosecuting counsel was Nigel Seed, who has in the interim become a Crown Court judge. He wrote a letter to the Times following the commencement of the IPCC investigation in which he stated that there had been three prosecution witnesses in his case. Two of them, who were said to have chaotic lifestyles, had failed to turn up on the morning of the trial and the third was brought to court in custody but refused to come out of the cells to give evidence. Mr Seed did recall that there were members of the press from London hanging about, and he was told that there was media interest in case Ms Forde gave evidence of supplying rent boys to Sir Edward, who lived in Salisbury. Perhaps that is where that detective constable got the idea. But the only evidence left for Mr Seed to prove that the premises were a brothel was a bag of used condoms. He personally had taken the decision to withdraw the prosecution and drop the case. That is exactly what one would expect of a competent counsel who was acting responsibly.

Ms Forde declined to be interviewed by the IPCC in Operation Marble but through her solicitor gave interviews to several reporters for both the national and local press in which she said that Sir Edward was not a client of hers and she had never threatened to expose him. That seems likely because in the following year she was tried and convicted of brothel and prostitution offences and was sent to prison. Even in those circumstances she made no suggestion or threat about exposing Sir Edward. The IPCC concluded that the 1994 case had not been stopped due to any threat of exposing Sir Edward and that it was a complete fabrication. That was the result of Operation Marble. There was no evidence at all that the recollection of the retired police officer after 21 years was correct or true. But on 3 August 2015, as the investigation was just starting, someone in the IPCC decided to issue a press release which contained the following sentence:

“It is alleged 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”.


At no point until the IPCC press statement had Sir Edward Heath’s name been mentioned in anything.