Edward Heath, who was prime minister between 1970 and 1974
Claims that a former British prime minister may have molested a young boy have triggered five separate police inquiries.
Rolf Harris, who was jailed last year
Edward Heath is alleged to have assaulted the unnamed 12-year-old in 1961, when he was a senior minister negotiating his country’s entry into the European Economic Area, a precursor to the EU.
No incident was reported to authorities at the time. The claims only surfaced this week, half a century later, when a retired detective claimed police stopped investigating a brothel keeper who threatened to reveal Heath was involved in child sexual abuse.
The former prime minister, who died aged 89 in 2005, was a lifelong bachelor and widely rumoured to be gay, although there have been few previous claims that he sexually abused anyone.
Heath is the latest in a long list of British politicians and entertainers from the 1960s and 70s alleged to have committed sex offences. Some figures have been successfully prosecuted, including the television personality Rolf Harris, 85, jailed for five years in 2014 for indecently assaulting four underage girls.
Other allegations only came to light after the offender died, as with the former Liberal parliamentarian Cyril Smith, who physically and sexually abused dozens of boys in the 1970s and 80s. He died in 2010 and was never prosecuted, despite repeated complaints by victims to police during his lifetime.
This week’s allegations concerning Heath prompted four police forces to launch investigations involving the former prime minister. They include Operation Midland, which is examining reports that a group of powerful men abused boys around London and southern England in the 1970s and 80s.
A fifth inquiry is looking into the claims Wiltshire Police aborted its investigation following the brothel keeper’s apparent threat.
Tom Watson, an opposition politician, said in a blog post for the Huffington Post that Britain needed a new national police unit to deal with child sex abuse cases.
“Only then will the chances of intelligence failures be minimised,” he wrote.
Other sources were less convinced by the claims against Heath.
“There is an unedifying whiff of Salem about all of this” wrote the right-leaning Daily Telegraph in an editorial that referenced the trials of people accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. “On such flimsy evidence the reputation of one of the country’s most prominent public figures is being trashed.”