The Spectator’s Notes | 6 August 2015

As someone who has rarely written a sentence in praise of the late Sir Edward Heath, I hope I can escape charges of ‘cover-up’: I don’t believe the accusations against him. Even the word ‘accusations’ is an exaggeration, actually, since the story so far seems to be Chinese whispers with nothing amounting to evidence, put out by the frightened police. When this fashion for airing unsupported claims of child abuse has finally run its course, we shall be collectively ashamed of it, and people like Tom Watson MP will be seen for the McCarthys they are. (This is true, by the way, even if some of the things Mr Watson alleges turn out to be the case: the same applied to McCarthy.)

One should explain the culture of the period now under scrutiny. From the 1960s to the 1980s, homosexuality was emerging from criminalisation and concealment. This meant that homosexual men still dissembled and their colleagues usually covered up for them. This was not reprehensible. To do otherwise was to risk your career, particularly in politics, or to betray a friend. Party whips were much more likely to shelter homosexuals from exposure than to persecute them (though they were not above using their knowledge of their activities against them as a means of discipline). It was also true, until the 1990s, that the age of consent for homosexual acts was 21, whereas for heterosexuals it was 16. So people tended to elide homosexuality with what is now called paedophilia, speaking indiscriminately of ‘boys’. I think Heath may be the victim of this unfairness, though even his homosexuality is not proved. Odd though it may sound, if someone said ‘I fear X has a penchant for small boys’, he was probably not saying that the man was a child abuser. He might have meant simply that the man seemed to fancy teenage youths; maybe only that he was, as people then said, ‘queer’.