By Jock Mulligan.
A Prince has fallen and the name of a PM caught in a threesome with Epstein and Maxwell has been redacted. It tip of an iceberg of a scandal… In comparison, another child rape scandal is rarely spoken about. Its only nine years since the business of Sir Edward Heath and the heavy shadow of Operation Conifer and most people have forgotten it.
It is a tale that split the country right down the middle and because the man went to his grave in 2005, there was never going to be a judge or a jury to settle the matter. Instead we are left with a police report from the Wiltshire branch in 2017 that didn’t find guilt but found enough to say that if the man had been alive they would have hauled him in for an interview under caution. This was at the time another top British figure had went to the grave before the law had caught up with him. Jimmy Saville’s victims will never see justice- even though many who facilitated that monster are still hob nobbing with the elite- and amongst the elites of the UK. Like Saville, Heath never had time in court to clear his name, or face justice.
Out of forty-two people who came forward with their tales of the dark, the police found seven specific cases where the suspicion was enough to meet the threshold. They say these stories show a pattern that stretched for over thirty years from the time he was a rising star to long after he had left Downing Street behind. He was accused of a terrible crime against an eleven-year-old boy in London in 1961 and a “chance encounter” with a 10 year old boy in Kent a year later. The shadow followed him to Guernsey in 1967 while he was the Leader of the Opposition and even into the nineties when he was an old man in Wiltshire there were stories of assaults in gardens and hotels.
The difference between a police threshold and the cold hard proof of a court for an interview under caution only needs a “reasonable suspicion” which is a far shorter ladder to climb than proving a thing beyond all doubt. The Wiltshire police were careful to say they hadn’t proven he did the deeds and without the man there to look his accusers in the eye and give his side of the story the evidence is as one-sided as a crooked deck of cards. For some these seven voices were the truth finally coming into the light but for others they were just unproven stories that only got a hearing because the accused was already in the ground.
To this day, the seven who came forward have kept their peace behind the protection of the law, and rightly so, for the world can be a cruel place for those who speak truth to power. They have shared their accounts of being picked up in motor cars or the grim reality of being used for sport, but because the man was already in his grave, they were denied the chance to see him answer for it in a court of law. While his defenders grumble that they never saw these souls cross-examined by a barrister, the survivors are left with a different kind of burden—carrying the weight of what happened without the closure of a final verdict. It is a heavy thing to find your courage only to have the law tell you it is too late for a trial, leaving their stories to stand as the only testament to a past that was hidden for far too long.
The ending of the policeman at the centre of this investigation’s career is a tangled tale but we must look at what he said while he was standing in the eye of the storm. Mike Veale was a policeman who found himself holding hot coals but never wavered in his belief that the voices of the vulnerable deserved to be heard. He stated plainly that his job was to “give a voice to the voiceless” and that the police have a duty to investigate without fear or favour no matter how high the station of the accused. He was clear that the seven cases were “credible and had substance” and he refused to let the status of a former Prime Minister act as a shield against the truth.
It is a tragedy for the survivors that the fallout from unrelated matters- a broken mobile phone and other misconduct that saw him barred from the force later on- has been used by the powerful to cast doubt on the work he did for them. By hounding the man who led the inquiry the defenders of the old guard try to bury the stories of those seven souls in a legal limbo that satisfies no one. Even now in 2026 there are Lords in the capital calling for reviews as if a new pile of paper could erase the courage of those who came forward. The cases of Operation Conifer remain a heavy burden for as Veale himself suggested the investigation was about the search for the truth in a system that for too long looked the other way and to dismiss it now as unproven history is to turn our backs once more on those who suffered in the shadows in the same way American Justice is doing what it can to protect billionaire abusers.
