Agencies/London

Allegations linking former prime minister Edward Heath to child sex abuse threatened fresh disgrace for Britain’s political establishment yesterday as claims of high-level historic paedophilia pile up.
Heath led Britain between 1970 and 1974, taking it into the European Economic Community in 1973, and was known as a dour bachelor who loved sailing and classical music. He died in 2005 at the age of 89.
Now he has become the most senior figure to join the ranks of prominent Westminster politicians accused, many of them posthumously, of sexually abusing children.
The story comes as Britain enters a crucial stage in its efforts to investigate claims that people in social elites repeatedly carried out and concealed child sex abuse in the second half of the 20th century.
“I’m in absolutely no doubt that there were a significant number of politicians and many others in high society... who were committing child sexual abuse and probably continue to do so,” Simon Danczuk, an MP with the main opposition Labour party and a leading campaigner on the issue, told Sky News television.
Whether Heath was among them is now the subject of fierce debate.
Heath was drawn into the scandal Monday when police watchdog the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it would investigate a retired policeman’s claim that a prosecution was dropped in the 1990s when the accused threatened to expose the ex-premier.
Yesterday’s Daily Mirror newspaper carried an allegation from a man who said he was raped by Heath in 1961, aged 12.
Heath is being directly investigated by Scotland Yard over child sex abuse claims, the BBC reported yesterday.
Police on the Channel Island of Jersey also confirmed he features in Operation Whistle, their probe into alleged historic abuse.
Heath, who led the Conservative party now headed by Prime Minister David Cameron, is not the first politician accused of abuse.
Others include the late Leon Brittan, interior minister under prime minister Margaret Thatcher and then a European commissioner; Cyril Smith, a Liberal MP who died in 2010; and Greville Janner, an ex-Labour MP and member of the House of Lords.
Last month, it emerged that in 1986, the MI5 intelligence service had urged a cover-up of claims that an unidentified MP “has a penchant for small boys”.
There are suggestions that children were abused at London’s exclusive Dolphin Square apartment complex near parliament, popular with MPs.
And police are investigating allegations that abusers including politicians frequented the Elm Guest House in southwest London in the 1970s and 1980s.
Politicians make up just one element of the overall picture.
A vast judge-led inquiry was opened last month into child sexual abuse at a whole range of British institutions from parliament to the BBC, children’s homes to churches.
It cited estimates that around one British child in every 20 has been sexually abused.
The number of abuse allegations being made has surged since one of the BBC’s top presenters, Jimmy Savile, was exposed as a paedophile after his 2011 death.
Friends of Heath have leapt to his defence.
Brian Binley, a Conservative ex-MP, told BBC radio he found the allegations hard to believe, describing Heath as “a very private person” with a “very controlled” personal life.
“People say there’s no smoke without fire — well, there is sometimes smoke without fire, as we all know,” Binley said.
Robert Vaudry, Heath’s former private secretary, told The Times newspaper that when he worked for him from 1988 to 1992, he had a constant police accompaniment, as do all former premiers.
“It feels like a cheap shot and the fact is that he cannot defend himself because he is deceased,” Vaudry added.
Heath rarely spoke about his private life despite years of media insinuations that he was gay at a time when any public declaration of homosexuality would have impeded a top-flight political career.
Danczuk said it was important that the abuse allegations should be looked into.
“However high someone has reached in society, even to the level of prime minister, if there are allegations, serious allegations of awful abuse, they need to be investigated,” he said.
A US journalist has revealed that she was expelled from Britain in 2011 while researching claims that Heath and other prominent figures were involved in the sexual abuse of children in a care home on the island of Jersey, the LBC broadcaster reported yesterday.
Newsweek journalist Leah McGrath Goodman had been investigating the island’s function as a tax haven when she began following the growing scandal over child sexual abuse.
She returned to Britain in September 2011 carrying a valid visa in her passport, but border officials stopped her at London’s Heathrow airport.
After questioning, McGrath Goodman was expelled from the country and banned for 500 days.
“You wonder why they would take so much trouble with you unless they really wanted to scare you off, McGrath Goodman told LBC. “I felt like the attempt was to intimidate me.”
Border officials later claimed she was expelled because they believed she planned to stay in Britain longer than her visa allowed.
McGrath Goodman, who was given a new visa in 2013, said she was aware of “widespread” rumours that Heath, on his yacht Morning Cloud, “would come to the island frequently”.
“From what I understand from people on the island and off the island, he would take the children from care homes for a ride on the yacht,” she said. “And it was reported that some of those children never came back.”
Jersey police confirmed yesterday that they are investigating the allegations against Heath.
Following a four-year police investigation of child sexual abuse at care homes, Jersey authorities launched the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry in March 2011.
The ongoing public inquiry aims to “establish what went wrong in the island’s care system over many years and to find answers for people who suffered abuse as children”.