Operation Conifer — House of Lords, 2018-12-11
Topic: Law and Crime
Robert Armstrong (Crossbench, Unknown): 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.