Bartholomew's Notes

Last Sunday, the Sunday Times revealed that the Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police, Mike Veale, has been in contact with one Robert Green about allegations of child sex abuse against former Prime Minister Edward Heath:

Mike Veale… emailed Robert Green, of Warrington, two weeks ago in response to an email Green had sent him. Veale wrote: “As ever thank you Robert.”

The words suggest the pair had communicated previously and will cast fresh doubt on the evidence that Veale’s force has gathered.

…Green is an activist closely involved with fraudulence [sic] allegations in Scotland in the so-called Hollie Greig case, in which claims that a girl with Down’s syndrome had been abused were found to be false. He was jailed for 12 months in 2012 for harassment.

I quoted this section a few days ago, as part of a more general discussion of recent coverage about “Operation Conifer”. Green’s campaign and conviction were covered by the Sunday Herald at the time.

Although the ST did not go into detail, Veale was thanking Green for an email in which he expressed his glee at the Mail on Sunday‘s front-page splash (discussed by me here) about how Operation Conifer’s findings were to be passed on to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Green’s email and Veale’s reply were published on a Hollie Greig conspiracy website (1).

Green has now responded to the ST article, complaining that it has “defamed” him and stating that he expects “both clarification and suitable retractions to appear in the next edition of the Sunday Times”. However, he has also confirmed that he has been in “regular contact” with Veale, and although he has declined to go into specific details he has indicated that he believes claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse against Heath.

Green’s responses appear in an email to the ST‘s James Gillispie which has now been published on David Icke’s website (oddly, the post is dated 26 May 2017, but it definitely refers to the ST‘s 24 September article [2]), and in an interview given to Richie Allen, whose online radio show is produced in association with Icke (the “regular contact” detail is at 8.42) . Green writes:

The information that I forwarded to Chief Constable Veale was not researched by me at all, but I was merely relaying matters pertinent to the investigation produced by an expert of impeccable reputation, which, I’m sure you will agree, changes the whole perspective of the article. I have never had any contact with any of those who have complained about Sir Edward.

Speaking to Allen, he provided the detail that this person is someone who is “perhaps a little old and frail and can’t deal with these things as well as she might have done”.

Green seems to genuinely believe that his unverifiable assertion about someone he refuses to name and who for some unknown reason is unable to contact Veale for herself “completely undermines the thrust” of the article – despite his conviction and continuing obsession with the Greig allegations.

Allen went on to refer to allegations against Heath that were reported by David Icke in 1998, and then raised the subject of  why the media discounts “ritual abuse by Heath or others”. Green confirmed his belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse, and stated that sceptics are “SRA enablers” who “try to protect” perpetrators (naming Barbara Hewson in particular) (3). This would tend to support Richard Hoskins’s claim that the SRA claims are not just an outlier but the “core strand” of the Heath investigation.

Greens’s email to Gillespie has also been highlighted on Icke’s Twitter feed, in a Tweet stating that “The Sunday Times seeking to undermine Edward Heath investigation by misrepresenting abuse campaigner Robert Green”. There is also a graphic posted with the Tweet, bearing the following words:

Prime Minister Edward Heath was a monumental paedophile and a child sacrificing Satanist. I said it in The Biggest Secret in 1998 – made known to him in the week of publication – and I stand by that today

One of Icke’s informants in that opus also claimed that she saw Heath shape-shift into a giant reptile, while Icke himself has famously claimed that he saw Heath’s eyes go completely black on one occasion.

Footnotes

(1) Green wrote to Veale:

I was generally pleased to see the lead article in today’s Mail on Sunday and the message of support for you and your team by Andrew Bridgen MP, to whom I have just written.

It would have been even more helpful had readers been reminded of the crucial Tim Fortescue interview, about which I have correspondence with Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre.

In itself, this would have the effect of quietening those who have tried to undermine and threaten you. Hopefully, it worked with James Gray, although the House of Lords have so far refused to discipline Lord Armstrong.

It will be interesting to see if the Daily Telegraph decides to publish my letter on this particular issue.

Fortescue (who died in 2008) was a party whip under Edward Heath; in a 1995 TV interview he stated that whips would try to assist MP involved in scandals, because “if we can get a chap out of trouble, then he will do as we ask for ever more”. He gave as possible examples “debt” or a “scandal involving small boys”. This has been since been cited as evidence that MPs were able to engage in sex abuse with impunity, and thus in support of the most extravagant allegations.

James Gray MP and Lord Armstrong have both been critical of the police investigation. Armstrong has expressed the view that the investigation should be reviewed by a judge-led inquiry.

(2) The email was published on Icke’s site by Andrew Cheetham. It seems that Green forwarded it to a supporter named Julie Hills, who in turn forwarded it to her local MP along with her own endorsement.

(3) It is perhaps worth noting that the Greig case has come to be framed in SRA terms, as I discussed here.

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From the Surrey Mirror, last month:

An anguished pensioner who says he was repeatedly raped, beaten and humiliated at a children’s home now being investigated by the police is still tortured by the horrific memories six decades later.

James Reeves has been scarred by the abuse he says he endured during his time at Beechholme, the former Banstead “children’s village”, when he was just six years old.

…The pained pensioner is taking comfort from the current investigation by Surrey Police into alleged historic child abuse at Beechholme, where he claims there was “humiliation and violence all the time”.

Another Surrey Mirror article noted similar testimony from Graeme Sergeant, who runs a survivors’ group.

The article about Reeves also explains what happened after he left the care system:

Desperate to escape the care system which he feared so much, James began life on the streets at the age of 14.

To survive the teenager was forced to engage in sex work across London, preyed upon, he says, by exploitative older men.

…He eventually managed to work jobs driving mini-cabs and taxis, and took steps toward a normal life with his first marriage in 1973.

Without commenting in too much detail while a police investigation is under way, it certainly appears that Reeves’s life has been blighted by abuse and exploitation. We can only hope that he at least gets some justice in his latter years.

However, it cannot be ignored that Reeves is also a prolific accuser of VIPs and celebrities; on Twitter, he claims to have encountered various household names while engaging in sex work in London in the 1960s, and he also extrapolates allegations from details in news reports.

In particular, he claims that Edward Heath was known as “Uncle Eddie” to underage rent-boys on Hampstead Heath, and he has given an account to Wiltshire Police, which has been investigating historic sex abuse allegations against the former prime minister.

This involvement in a matter of public interest is why, reluctantly, I am obliged to write a little more about a man who is clearly vulnerable: Reeves is a significant figure in a social media milieu that promotes allegations against Heath and others (often with a sense of glee), and his engagement with Wiltshire Police (including a Twitter exchange with Chief Constable Mike Veale) raises concerns about how a major police inquiry has been conducted.

The main point is that his accounts of VIP abuse are not just extensive (Frank Carson and David Frost are also accused, along with people still living), but that they have grown over time. For example, here are some innocuous comments he made about the former Labour leader Michael Foot in 2015:

michael foot regular walker on hampstead heath? [link]

saw michael foot on hampstead heath too he was walking his dog [link]

i often saw michael foot mp walking his dog on hamstead heath,nothing wrong with that,yet heath sex abusing boys on the heath.UPROAR,WHY? [link]

In response to a query about whether Foot is “implicated” in child abuse, he responded “not sure so far he hasnt”.

Now, however, he writes:

i saw edward heath,and michael foot,at southend green one night [Link] they were together [Link]

Southend Green on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north London has a reputation for gay cruising; the gent’s toilets in particular is “infamous” – Joe Orton used the facility, and it was where George Michael was arrested in 2008.

Reeves’s statement may be slightly ambiguous, but he followed up by RTing a reply from someone else, that “may they rot in the bowels of hell the lot of them”. Thus we can be confident that Reeves wants us to infer that Edward Heath and Michael Foot were out cottaging together on Hampstead Heath, and in particular seeking to exploit underage sex workers. It is an astonishing claim – both men were already famous at the time, and they espoused very different politics. There is no indication that they socialised.

Tellingly, despite Reeves’s social media following, his supporters have not chosen to denounce Foot. Instead, the allegation has been passed over, and when I referred to the Tweets one of his associates asked me to provide “evidence” that Reeves had made such a claim. Well, the links are above.

His supporters, though, have stated that they in general believe whatever Reeves says, and they express the view that it is a moral imperative for anyone “decent” to do likewise; and given Reeves’s account of Beechholme, it is natural to want to be sympathetic.

However, the claim that Edward Heath and Michael Foot were roaming Hampstead Heath in the 1960s together looking for rent-boys is fantastical, and the way it has been introduced highly problematic. His claims against other VIPs are similarly either implausible or so vague as to be impossible to assess.

People can believe what they like; but that does not make factual difficulties disappear.

UPDATE: I’ve been reminded that Reeves very specifically claimed that:

heath,had a flat in the barbican london,where,underage,rent boys stayed,in the flat ,at nights,heath was a,a kerb craller,picking up boys [Link] heath had a flat in the barbican,where rent boys and runaways from care slept there,heath sex abused those boys,regulary [Link]

Heath did not in fact have a flat at the Barbican, and there were no residents there until 1968, when Reeves was in his 20s.

Reeves also states that “heath picked up boys from jackstraws castle public house,car park,i witnessed it i was in the car park”.  The original Jack Straw’s Castle pub was destroyed in the Second World War; a new pub was built on the site in 1964, although it was made to look older (it superficially appears Victorian). Reeves would have been 18 years old at that time.

UPDATE 2: In November 2017, Reeves claimed to have seen photos of members of the Paedophile Information Exchange, and that among them was one of the late Robin Cook MP. Alluding to Cook’s death from a fall after suffering a heart attack in 2005, Reeves writes “robin cook mp mudered he was a member off,P I E”. Asked for further information, he replied that “i was told by a credible person i saw the photo myself where i wont say”.

Footnote

(1) The Surrey Mirror website since been reorganised as Get Surrey.

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Incident is the second time this year Ames has promoted untrue claims by a law student with a grudge

From Jonathan Ames, legal affairs reporter at The Times, 5 September:

Edinburgh University is investigating a law student over claims that he mocked Islamic State on social media and put “minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear”.

An official at the university who conducted a preliminary investigation allegedly accused the third-year law student of having committed a “hate crime” even though there has been no criminal investigation by the police.

The law student says that the complaint against him came in retaliation after he highlighted that a former leader of an ethnic minority student group at the university had referred to black men as “trash”.

A follow-up a few days later announced that the student – one Robbie Travers – had been “cleared”.

Many derivative articles appeared on other media sites in the wake of the Times articles; however, a couple of outlets (Scotland’s National newspaper and Buzzfeed) noted that Edinburgh University was disputing the basis for the investigation, while Ivo Vock at the New Statesman cautioned that “the story is almost completely bollocks”. Vock also used a Twitter thread to present a chronicle of Travers’s “lies over the years”.

Edinburgh University’s student newspaper, The Tab, also ran a piece explaining that the story was untrue, while the Student newspaper published an interview with Esme Allman, the woman who had complainted about Travers. Allman also wrote up her own account on a media site called Black Ballad.

The Student interview was highlighted by J. K. Rowling, and a comprehensive corrective to Ames’s reports has now been produced by Nick Cohen at the Guardian. Cohen’s account makes it clear that the whole thing was a vicious concoction by an attention seeker who was engaging in self-publicity by hawking a bogus “exposé” around the media.

It transpires that the reference to black men as “trash” had been taken out of context: it was aimed specifically at black men who were abusing Serena Williams for marrying a white man. Further, Travers also taunted Allman with his scheme, telling her that “multiple news agencies have been delivered [sic] your comments” and threatening to report her for extremism.

The media declined to bite, but Allman made a harassment complaint about it to the university. Travers therefore decided to make this the basis for a new scandal, for which purpose he introduced the fake “ISIS” element. Cohen explains:

The Mail, the Sun, Trump’s propaganda network Fox News, Putin’s propaganda network Russia Today, the Express, the Times, which broke the “story”, and the far-right US sites Infowars and Breitbart assured their gullible readers that Travers was the victim of the latest politically correct insanity. It wasn’t just the rightwing press. The Independent, the Mirror, and papers across Europe loved the story.

…Allman told me she never mentioned Isis and the transcript of her complaint bears this out.

Ames must have known this last detail, as he quotes directly from the complaint.

Cohen appears to be the only national journalist to have checked Ames’s account of the complaint against the original document; he is also the only one to have looked into Travers’s claim to have been “media manager” at a foreign policy think-tank called the Human Security Centre (they told Cohen: “He was a complete liability. He was never the media manager. He was just junior comms staff, who ran our Twitter account very badly.” [1])

Cohen sees the fiasco as an example of a malaise in current journalism. It’s certainly that, although it’s also an illustration of Jonathan Ames’s willingness to promote vicious untruths when they are presented to him on a plate by a law student.

Back in April (as I blogged here), Ames ran a story about a “22-page report” that had been sent to the Bar Standards Board by a law student at Nottingham University, claiming that the barrister Barbara Hewson had sent him “death deaths”. The “22-page” detail was meant to imply substance, although it ought to have been a warning sign of crankdom: and sure enough, the allegations were not just untrue but bizarre, extravagant and only semi-coherent. Needless to say, his complaint went nowhere – an outcome that Ames was less inclined to tell the world about, or to set down in a “paper of record”. (2)

For Ames to trumpet a falsehood from a male law student targeting a woman once is unfortunate; but twice…

Footnotes

(1) It seems likely that Cohen communicated with Julie Lenarz, the Director of the Human Security Centre; certainly, she has rebuked Travers in similar terms on Twitter.

(2) The student complaining about Barbara also claimed that the death threats had been sent anonymously, by someone calling themselves “Harry Troll” (a detail Ames left out). This indicates that he was being wound up by a third party who knew that these messages would agitate him to further invective against Barbara, and who wanted to provide him with fake “evidence”.

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From the website of Wiltshire Police:

Operation Conifer is a national investigation, led by Wiltshire Police on behalf of the Police Service, into allegations of non-recent child abuse made against [Former Prime Minister] Sir Edward Heath.

The Operation Conifer Summary Closure Report will be published on our website on the afternoon of Tuesday 5 October 2017.

Chief Constable Mike Veale said:… “The operational integrity of the investigation and the anonymity of the victims and witnesses who have come forward remains our priority and is of paramount importance to us. Likewise, it is equally as important for people not to speculate about the veracity of the allegations against Sir Edward Heath.

“It is for that reason that I strongly discourage any media or public speculation concerning any investigation detail and/or outcome until such time as the report is published.”

The investigation was set up after various allegations were reported in the media during 2015 (discussed here); there was a dramatic appeal for “victims” to come forward, even though Heath had died in 2005 aged 89 and any allegations would very likely refer to events that supposedly occurred decades ago. Late last year it was reported that among those who came forward was a woman who alleged that Heath had been involved in Satanic Ritual Abuse, details of which she had “recovered” during therapy.

Veale’s reference to “victims” rather than “complainants” in the statement above already implies guilt, and his caution that we should not “speculate” is difficult to take given that details about the conclusions are apparently being leaked, and a draft of the report has been provided to a sympathetic Member of Parliament, Andrew Bridgen (see below).

A few months ago, it was reported via “sources” that Veale believes the allegations are “120% true”, although he now denies having indicated this [1]; and today’s Mail on Sunday has a new article on the subject by Simon Walters, in which “Whitehall sources” leak information about the investigation outcome:

Child sexual abuse claims made against Sir Edward Heath by seven of his alleged victims are serious enough that police would have questioned him under caution if he were still alive.

That is the astonishing verdict of a controversial two-year investigation into the former Tory Prime Minister, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

According to Whitehall sources, Mr Veale’s report will say seven of the alleged victims are ‘credible’ and describe the same pattern of behaviour by their ‘abuser’.

A Government source said an ‘interview under caution’ is, in effect, the strongest action that Mr Veale could recommend with regard to Sir Edward.

After an ‘interview with caution’ police would send a file to the Crown Prosecution Service, which would decide whether to prosecute. ‘It was never the task of Operation Conifer to decide whether Sir Edward was guilty, and clearly there was never any question of recommending prosecution in this case,’ a Government source said.

A public figure being “questioned under caution” (whether voluntarily or while under arrest) is always likely to be of journalistic interest, although it doesn’t indicate anything more than that a complaint has been made and that the police want to take formal evidence from the person accused. Police may then forward the case to the CPS, but they are not obligated to do so and one wonders how Wiltshire Police can be so sure that this would have been the appropriate course of action when they have no idea what counter-evidence Heath might have provided were he still alive. This reminds me of Sussex Police’s pointless and disturbing speculations about how it would have dealt with an allegation against Bishop George Bell, were it not the fact that that Bell has been dead for nearly 60 years (I discussed my concerns about this here).

Also, according to Walters:

Mr Veale’s report will say testimonies by around a dozen more ‘victims’ cannot be relied on because they may have been ‘damaged’ by their experiences; a further dozen involve so called ‘third party’ allegations, where people have come forward to describe the alleged abuse of others.

A number of claims have been dismissed as bogus or fantasy.

This would appear to discount the most egregious “Satanic Grocer” allegations, although it has been suggested that these were the “core strand” of the investigation. The allegations supposedly relate to a period spanning “five decades”.

The MoS article comes in the wake of a piece in the Daily Telegraph, which reported a few days ago that:

Sources have told The Telegraph that the inquiry, costing between £1.5m and £2m, has fallen far short of establishing that Heath was a paedophile but will insist the investigation was justified.

“The report will not make any conclusion on whether Heath was a paedophile,” said a well-placed source. “It is not going to show serious child abuse. It will not substantiate the claims.”

Some online conspiracy theorists have seized on this as implying that the report will show that some abuse occurred; they also complain that it is wicked to distinguish between “serious” child abuse and apparently “less serious” child-abuse offences.

The details about how Heath would have been interviewed under caution and a file then passed to the CPS also appear in an article by Mark Watts that was published on Byline and his own website yesterday, a day before the MoS article. However, the “sources” apparently went somewhat further in communication with Watts, expressing confidence about what the CPS decision would have been and what a jury would have concluded:

Officers on the investigation believe that Ted Heath would have to go on trial if he were still alive. One source said: “I have seen successful prosecutions on a lot less than Mike Veale has already got.”

…Both sources say that Veale is personally convinced, on the strength of Operation Conifer, that Heath was a paedophile.

The second source said: “The evidence speaks for itself.”

But they stress that it is not for the police to express a view on Heath’s guilt in their report.

Further, while Walters refers to “seven” credible victims, Watts has “more than 30” supposedly credible witnesses. The “sources” also apparently provided Watts with some broader commentary:

Officers on Operation Conifer see the report as a “game-changer” on the issue of “VIP paedophiles”.

…Veale believes that the investigation raises “national security” concerns – historically and currently.

Evidence that Heath was a compromised prime minister would raise obvious issues about national security.

But Veale is also concerned about those who helped cover up for him and remain vulnerable to being compromised.

Veale also believes that there has been a desperate attempt to continue the cover-up in the face of Operation Conifer, to stop his investigation and to have him sacked.

Watts is notorious for a series of sensationalising articles about alleged “VIP paedophiles” operating in Westminster – he described Operation Midland as a police investigation “the establishment fears”, although it turned out to be a fiasco [2]. The above serves several purposes: (a) to revive Watts’s own reputation; (b) to justify the great expense involved, by suggesting that the allegations have contemporary relevance [3]; and (c) to preempt criticism of Veale when the Summary Report (finally) comes out next month.

Meanwhile, a new Sunday Times article (by Jame Gillespie, Rosie Waterhouse, and Tom Harper) notes Andrew Bridgen MP’s [4] assessment:

…the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who has seen an early draft of Wiltshire police’s report on Heath, described its finding as “credible and disturbing”.

The MP for North West Leicestershire said: “I have never known any other police investigation that has got as much media attention and where such efforts have been made to discredit it before publication.

“I have utmost confidence in his [Veale’s] integrity and the professionalism of his team, and I would urge people to reserve judgment until they have read the report.“

Bridgen thus passes judgement based on special access, while exhorting the public not to do likewise. And “people” will not be able to read the report – just the “Summary Closure Report” promised by the Wiltshire Police website.

The Sunday Times also notes that Veale has been in communication with conspiracy theorists:

Mike Veale… emailed Robert Green, of Warrington, two weeks ago in response to an email Green had sent him. Veale wrote: “As ever thank you Robert.”

The words suggest the pair had communicated previously and will cast fresh doubt on the evidence that Veale’s force has gathered.

…Green is an activist closely involved with fraudulence allegations in Scotland in the so-called Hollie Greig case, in which claims that a girl with Down’s syndrome had been abused were found to be false. He was jailed for 12 months in 2012 for harassment.

…Other “witnesses”… include those who believe in satanic ritual abuse, a convicted sex offender and internet conspiracy theorists – but officers have not spoken to one of Heath’s closest aides.

Background to Green and the “Hollie Greig” case was reported here; the “other witnesses” were discussed by the Sunday Times in February. And there are also concerns about who hasn’t been interviewed:

Sir Timothy Kitson, who knew Heath for 35 years and was his parliamentary private secretary during his time at No 10 from 1970-74, said he had not been questioned by the police despite being one of the people closest to him. The inquiry was “bullshit”, he said.

In contrast, a prolific internet conspiracy theorist who has named many people in public life as paedophiles without any evidence, was interviewed twice by Wiltshire officers for a total of seven hours.

UPDATE: A short follow-up in The Times again states that “an interview under caution would lead to a file being sent to the Crown Prosecution Service”, when this is not necessarily the case at all. The article also draws attention to a detail in the Daily Telegraph, which reports that “a well-placed source” has said that one accuser “faces possible charges for making false allegations” about Heath.

Footnotes

[1] Veale has told the Daily Telegraph that

“I wish to make it very clear, at no time have I confidentially or publicly, directly or indirectly stated my opinion of the guilt or innocence of Sir Edward Heath or any other person subject to this investigation…”

[2] Operation Midland’s “Nick” said that Heath had been present at a paedophile orgy, and had saved him from being castrated by Harvey Proctor. Ironically, however, this particular detail was not reported by Watts, and my guess is that Exaro suppressed it as being too fantastical to credit and thus likely to undermine their star accuser. Proctor himself revealed that the story had been put to him by police [UPDATE 2019: Nick can now be named as Carl Beech, and his claims have been found to have been fraudulent. More details here].

[3] Two people were arrested at one point, but released without charge. Is it likely that these were relatives of the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” accuser. Wiltshire Police announced the arrests “some time” after they had occurred, and the information was presumably released as a defence against criticism.

[4] Bridgen has no particular connection to the case: he is not a minister, and his constituency is outside Wiltshire. As such, it is puzzling why he was given access to the draft. However, he can be relied upon to provide a media quote on any subject that is put before him.

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Hoaxtead Research has followed up on my post about Rainer Kurz, the chartered psychologist whose conference abstract on “The Satanist Cult of Ted Heath” was published by European Psychiatry, the official organ of the European Psychiatric Association.

One new detail noted by the Hoaxtead author is an upcoming conference on “Satanic Ritual & Extreme Abuse” that will be taking place in London this weekend. Kurz will be speaking on “Family Court Child Smuggling”, based on “5 years of investigating Organised Ritual Crime Abuse Network”.

And if that seems to be a bit off the wall, top billing is given to Sandra Fecht, a Canadian counsellor who claims to have “developed techniques to help people unlock unconscious secrets that are buried deep within their memories”. Fecht will speak on how “the same forces that are capable of these extreme abuses control, dictate & limit our daily lives in subtle ways we have been trained to accept as normal.”

Other speakers include Wilfred Wong (previously blogged here), an evangelical Christian who “has investigated SRA in the UK since 1990’s”, and Anne Redelfs, a retired psychiatrist and “Listener”, on how doctors “are unaware that they compulsively recreate trauma through patterns embedded in the system”. Also appearing, according to the conference leaflet, are two of Fecht’s clients,  Fran Toews and Dave Staffen. The point of contact for the event is Jo Lomax, a Hull-based hypnotherapist who has a number of YouTube videos in which she holds Skype interviews with figures who are part of the conspiracy milieu. Her material also forms part of a website called the “Conscious Consumer Network”, which is also where the conference leaflet has been published.

The event comes a week after Redelfs, Fecht, Toews and Staffen were participants at a conference in Dublin titled “Ireland Awakens“, held under the auspices of The Bases Project (described as “derived from the early pioneering Irish UFO Research Centre”). Topics on the agenda were listed as “Sacred Ancient Sites if Ireland”, “Extraterrestrial Life”, “UFO Sightings in Ireland”, “Mind Control & Project MK Ultra”, “Life After Death” and “Ritual Abuse of Children”. The lineup also included none other than Michael Shrimpton (previously discussed on this blog here).

Thus it is not a surprise that the London event will include fantastical claims, with explicitly supernatural elements. According to the conference leaflet, Fecht has “extra sensory abilities”, and Staffen was “mystically guided” into becoming her client. A video of a presentation by Toews given at a “From Illusion to Reality” conference in Prague last year (1) has the alarming title on YouTube “Frances Toews Bred With A Species We Think Is Mythological. Organized Satanic Ritual Abuse, MK-Ultra”. The general tone is New Age, and one wonders how Wong reconciles his alignment with individuals whose beliefs from an evangelical perspective are usually characterised as “occultic”.

This sort of event may appear marginal, but in a world in which David Icke fills large venues and “recovered memories” form the basis for high-profile police investigations, the significance of this kind of thinking should not be underestimated. And the case of Carol Felstead shows the tragedies that can occur when “counsellors” impose their fantasies on vulnerable adults by persuading them to imagine “recovered memories”.

Footnote

(1) The website and a YouTube video show that David Icke was also present – he was in Prague as part of his “World Wide Wake Up Tour”. The conference is an ongoing series organised by “Alexandra JB”, described on a YouTube blurb as a “swedish/czech medical doctor”. One particular theme at the conferences is that there will be a “NIBIRU-Planet X System Flyby in the second half of 2017”, which will cause a “pole shift” in December. Something to look forward to if we get past 23 September.

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After an extensive build-up, Jonathan Cahn’s Christian book The Paradigm has at last been published. According to a promotional website, the work promises to answer the following questions (emphasis added):

Is it possible that this ancient paradigm has determined and is determining not only the American presidency but also the timing of current events, in some cases even down to the exact dates?

Could a mystery from the ancient Middle East have foretold the course of current events more accurately than any poll or pundit?

Could the ancient paradigm have pinpointed the exact date of the 9/11 attacks before anyone had any idea? Could the paradigm have determined the exact years of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Osama bin Laden, Donald Trump, and others?

As I noted a few days ago, the book’s premise is that American politics is mystically re-playing the history of ancient Israel as described in the Bible’s two-part Book of Kings, and that various figures relating to American politics have Biblical counterparts. Thus Bill and Hillary Clinton are the modern-day equivalents of the Biblical villains Ahab and Jezebel, while Donald Trump is the warrior king Jehu, a Biblical hero – this reflects a broader trend within American evangelicalism to interpret Trump as being an instrument of God’s purposes.

On the claim that the Bible “pinpointed” 9/11, publication means that we can now see his reasoning for ourselves, such as it is – the book can be browsed on Google Books and Amazon.

Cahn draws attention to the following words from the Bible (plucked from 1 Kings 21 and 22; punctuation and gaps as presented by Cahn on page 95):

“‘See how Ahab has humbled himself before Me?’ Because he has humbled himself before Me’ …Now three years passed without war between Syria and Israel. Then it came to pass, in the third year…” (1)

The reason that Ahab had “humbled himself” was because he had just been rebuked and warned by the Prophet Elijah over the murder of Naboth and the theft of his vineyard:

Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite: “Go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, who rules in Samaria. He is now in Naboth’s vineyard, where he has gone to take possession of it. Say to him, ‘This is what the Lord says: Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?’ Then say to him, ‘This is what the Lord says: In the place where dogs licked up Naboth’s blood, dogs will lick up your blood—yes, yours!'”

Ahab said to Elijah, “So you have found me, my enemy!”

“I have found you,” he answered, “because you have sold yourself to do evil in the eyes of the Lord. He says, ‘I am going to bring disaster on you. I will wipe out your descendants and cut off from Ahab every last male in Israel—slave or free…” (2)

However, because of Ahab’s repentance, God explained to Elijah that he had decided to put off his plans:

“Have you noticed how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself, I will not bring this disaster in his day, but I will bring it on his house in the days of his son.”

The war with Syria comes about because God allows a spirit in heaven to “entice” Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead across the Jordan, where he is killed in battle; but the plain reading of the Biblical text is that this is different from the postponed promised disaster that God has transferred from Ahab to his son. (3)

What does this have to do with American politics? Cahn fixates on the supposed significance of the three years between Ahab’s repentance and the battle:

In the paradigm the day of repentance is separated from the day of calamity by a space of three years. Thus starting with the day of the president’s repentance, we must add three year and see where it brings us. (p. 95)

Cahn draws attention to the fact that Bill Clinton had spoken publicly of his “repentance” over the Monica Lewinsky scandal at a White House prayer breakfast on… 11 September 1998! For those too dense to work out what this means, Cahn explains what happens if you add three years to this date:

It brings us to September 11, 2001. (p. 96)

Cahn thus expands on how Ramoth Gilead supposedly foreshadowed 9/11:

It was the day that the king’s reign came to an end. But it was also a day of calamity for Israel on several counts, a day of military defeat, a day of bloodshed, and a day of lives lost. (p. 97)

In fact, though, the Biblical text does not refer to a general bloodshed at Ramoth Gilead, and it specifically states that the king of Aram ordered his charioteers to target Ahab personally rather than engage in general combat. The death of Ahab was followed by a rebellion in Moab, but that there is no indication in the Bible that Ramoth Gilead was a great disaster that damaged Israel’s military capacity (indeed, by removing a dud commander it may have improved it).

Clearly, Cahn is interpreting the Bible idiosyncratically, and choosing whatever details from American politics he thinks he can make fit to his “paradigm”. So what about the rest? Bill Clinton was gone from office by 9/11; he was not killed on 9/11; and 9/11 was not a military attack by the US that went wrong. Such massive divergences from the Bible perhaps can be addressed via convoluted allegorical interpretations, but such an approach seems arbitrary when the “three years passed” detail is presented as a striking literal parallel.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment on what the popularity of such a book means for the state of American Christianity (and Cahn’s previous works have sold millions). God seems to be an impersonal force whose actions can be predicted (maybe even manipulated?) according to some rigid “template”, while human beings are pawns in a bizarre and pre-destined cosmic drama.

To state Cahn’s thesis baldly: all those who died on 9/11 did so because Bill Clinton repented on 11 September 1998; had he not done so, presumably other people would have perished in an earlier disaster of a similar kind. This is in extremely bad taste: the meaning of 9/11 is reduced to a “code” to be understood through an esoteric reading of various timescales in the Bible; the human dimension of the tragedy is thus inevitably diminished.

When Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell appeared on TV on 13 September 2001 to explain that 9/11 was the responsibility of “the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way”, the two men were widely reviled by an America that was not in the mood to indulge such an opportunistic reaction to the terrorist outrage.

Cahn deserves a similar reception; but in an age of conspiracy theories and fake news, in which the likes of David Icke and Alex Jones are increasingly normalized, anyone who claims to have special insight into hidden forces that supposedly explain world affairs has the potential to achieve prominence.

BONUS UPDATE: Cahn’s publisher, Steven Strang, is of the opinion that demonic forces sent Hurricane Irma to hinder the launch of the book. He explains that Irma refers to “the goddess of war, also linked to Jezebel”.

In contrast, Hurricane Harvey’s name means “warrior”, which is the role given to Jehu/Trump. Harvey was thus apparently a good hurricane, and it hit Houston because of the publication of Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened.  Why Houston? Cahn’s own book notes that in 1990s Clinton had an advisor named Jean Houston, who has some New Agey ideas, and as such she embodies the evil that he also attributes to Clinton. Thus, according to Strang:

 As in The Paradigm, the warrior strikes the priests, and the representative is the woman [Jean] Houston, so Hurricane Harvey—the warrior—strikes Houston…

In The Paradigm, the warrior (Jehu) strikes the priests of the pagan gods and goddesses. The modern representation of the priests of the goddess is a woman named Houston. So now Hurricane Irma—the goddess of war, also linked to Jezebel—strikes the publishers of The Paradigm.

Once again, we are presented with interpretation of a tragedy that is both bizarre and callous: people are dead in Houston and the surrounding areas, but apparently it’s all because of the surname of Clinton’s former advisor. Theodicists will be up all night with that one.

Footnotes

(1) Cahn uses Young’s Literal Translation, which was published in the nineteenth century.

(2) New International Version.

(3) Although the disaster has been transferred to Ahab’s son, the Biblical author decides to have dogs licking Ahab’s blood after all – explained as having happened when Ahab’s body was washed in a pool in Samaria prior to his interment.

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Alarming news from WND:

NASA plan to stop supervolcano sparks doomsday fears

Amid a summertime swarm of hundreds of earthquakes underneath Yellowstone National Park, NASA is developing a plan to tame a “supervolcano” that some experts believe is well overdue for a catastrophic eruption.

The scientists’ plan: cool down the volcano.

Volcanoes erupt when a certain heat threshold is built up within the magma, meaning that if enough heat can be let out of the volcano, it will never erupt. NASA’s idea is to pump water into the volcano after opening up a path via drilling. In theory, the plan would extract heat from the volcano and could even provide a new geothermal power plant.

There’s only one problem: The process might trigger an eruption.

The supervolcano under Yellowstone Park is frequently cited as evidence of apocalyptic destruction just around the corner – and in religious terms as evidence of the last days. In 2014 WND ran a piece on claims that animals were in the process of fleeing an imminent eruption; and any variation in the common seismic activity at the site (which has been monitored for the last 30 years) is regularly treated as an ominous sign.

The UK Daily Express tabloid warned that the volcano was “on the brink” in February, and again in June; and just a week ago, the paper reported on warnings that Nibiru will bring about the cataclysm (although the text adds that “There is NO scientific evidence to back up the outlandish claims, and NASA has branded it a hoax”). One recent Christian book I found on Google Books claims that areas of the park are being mysteriously closed off, and seismic data held back for a time before being released to the public.

However, as even the sources linked by WND confirm, the likelihood of an eruption happening within the next few centuries is very low. Thus the attraction of a human causative agent to shorten the odds, and thus the fearmongering around NASA’s idea. To return to WND:

Brian Wilcox of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology told the BBC an attempt to drill from the top of the magma chamber could accidentally cause the very thing the drilling was designed to prevent. To avoid that risk, he suggested drilling from outside the borders of Yellowstone and coming into the supervolcano from the lower side.

In other words, the proposal specially takes into consideration what “might trigger an eruption”, and how to avoid it – the direct opposite of the headline’s implication. In any case, the plan is speculative: it would take decades to implement, and decades after that to see any measurable effect. But for WND, here following up on an Infowars article from last month, the image of scientists dooming the world with an ill-considered intervention is too attractive a trope to pass over.

The WND article continues with some general advice from a number of “end-times” prognosticators, such as Mark Biltz (“Blood Moons“), Joel Richardson (“Islamic Anti-Christ“) and the Sandy Hook truther Carl Gallups. The list consists mostly of evangelical figures, but a rabbi is mentioned first:

Jerusalem Rabbi Rami Levy said science has limits and told Breaking Israel News natural disasters and earthquakes will be an inevitable feature of the end times.

He said the natural disasters are “explicitly described in the Bible,” and the response should be “repentance.”

The Breaking Israel News story adds that Levy is a “kabbalist”, and the source has a more extensive quote:

Rabbi Levy stated that in many cases, science has portrayed itself as the savior while attempting to solve problems it had actually created. In the case of Yellowstone, the rabbi advised the scientists to delve into the prophetic writings of the Bible.

“This earthquake and volcanic eruption were explicitly described in the Bible,” Rabbi Levy said. “Now that scientists are finally realizing that it will happen, wouldn’t it be wise to look into the Bible for the solution?”

The answer, he said, is simple but unscientific: “Tshuva (repentance). According to Jewish tradition, it was created before the world so it can supercede nature.”

One way to reconcile religion and science is to suggest that they offer different but complementary ways of understanding the world; but placed alongside Wilcox’s scientific explanation, Levy’s commentary comes across as intellectually complacent and obscurantist.

Breaking Israel News (previously discussed here) is also mentioned by the Daily Express, which quotes a different end-times rabbi in its June article:

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Right Wing Watch has the latest from Jonathan Cahn:

During a recent appearance on “It’s Supernatural with Sid Roth,” Cahn told guest host Michael Brown that the elections of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump had all been foretold in the Bible, specifically, in a handful of chapters out of 1 & 2 Kings.

As Cahn explained, Bill and Hillary Clinton are the modern day versions of the ancient king and queen of Israel, Ahab and Jezebel.

…Cahn went on to claim that just as the Clintons are modern day version of Ahab and Jezebel, Donald Trump is a modern day version of Jehu, who was raised up by God to become king and to slay Jezebel.

Jezebel was a Phoenician princess who married into the Omride dynasty ruling over northern Israel in the ninth century BCE; in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 8-10) she is reviled for persuading her husband Ahab to adopt Pheonician religious practices and for persecuting Yahwist prophets. Jehu not only slew Jezebel (by ordering her eunuchs to defenestrate her) – he also massacred the prophets of Baal, although to the dismay of the author of Kings he also adhered to the golden calf images that were part of the Yahwist religion of the time. The Phoenician influence may explain child sacrifice in Israel in the centuries that followed, whether performed as a rite to Baal or as a part of Yahwist worship. (1)

Jezebel is now a synonym for feminine wickedness: in the Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian tradition, there is a horror of a “Jezebel spirit” that is supposedly responsible for dysfunctional behaviour and manipulative relationships, particularly between men and women; it has been suggested that Bill Clinton brought a “Jezebel curse” on America. Further, child sacrifice as condemned in the Hebrew Bible is seen by many Christians today as a relevant rebuke against the practice of abortion: in its strongest form, it is claimed that abortion providers are literal Satanists, performing occult sacrificial rituals under the guise of medical interventions.

Cahn brings these strands together in reference to Hillary Clinton:

Cahn said that just as Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, was “a champion of Baal worship,” so too was Hillary Clinton “an advocate of female power and advocate of abortion.”

Cahn’s belief that America is somehow reliving the history of ancient Israel was apparently inspired by an incident the day after 9/11, when Tom Daschle publicly quoted Isaiah 9:10 in the Senate:

“The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars.”

Daschle thought that the verse referred to perseverance in the face of adversity, when the text is actually cited by Isaiah as an “arrogant” boast by the people of Ephraim and Syria, who have failed to understand that recent military disaster was a punishment from God. Senator Jonathan Edwards committed the same goof three years later.

For Cahn, this was not simply evidence that plucking Biblical verses out of context does violence to the wider meaning of the text – it showed that the USA was literally replaying Israelite history. This was the basis of his 2011 bestseller The Harbinger, and he followed up with a complementary theory that economic cycles are linked to the Jewish calendar. In both instances, God becomes a predictable impersonal force, and the evidence is compiled from extremely selective datasets of incidents from recent history that are interpreted as fitting the theory. Cahn’s new book, The Paradigm, claims that the Bible actually predicted “the exact date of 9/11”, although we will have to wait for the release day to see his reasoning.

It’s worth noting Michael Brown’s role as the guest host of Sid Roth’s programme; Brown is one of the less speculative writers to appear on Charisma News, yet here he is hosting a show that is one of the gateways for conspiracy thinking within Evangelicalism. In the past, It’s Supernatural with Sid Roth has featured Roth in conversation with Tom Horn and Chris Puttnam on the topic of “Aliens in the Vatican” , and with Chuck Missler on “UFOs and the Nephilim” (more on Horn and Missler here).

Footnote

1. On this last point I rely on two academic works, both viewable on Google Books: (1) Patrick D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel (2000), pp. 59-60, and (2) Deeanne Westbrook, Speaking of Gods in Figure and Narrative (2011), p. 97.

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A detail from John Hemming’s statement regarding the allegations made against him by Esther Baker:

It is bad enough to have false allegations made about yourself to the police, but to have a concerted campaign involving your political opponents and many others in public creates an environment in which it is reasonable to be concerned about ill founded vigilante attacks on your family and yourself.

…This sort of situation is inevitably an attack on my family not just myself. I am still in discussion with the police about some of the criminal incidents involving my family and myself during this process. Therefore I do not wish to make further comment on those at the moment.

I looked at the allegations and their context here. Baker accused Hemming, who until May 2015 was a Member of Parliament, of having abused her over an extended period in the late 1980s when she was child in settings that included woodland meetings involving police guards and VIPs. Staffordshire Police has now dropped the case due to lack of evidence.

Hemming was not named in the media until he chose to come forward with his statement last week; however, his name had been informally circulated by Baker and others long before then, and he was denounced at at least one public meeting. As such, his fears of physical attack (from “pitchfork-wavers”, to use his phrase from a follow-up quote in the Daily Mail) were very reasonable.

In particular, Hemming was publicly accused at a rally against child-sex abuse that took place on 27 June 2015 in the open air opposite Downing Street. Bill Maloney, an activist who has made a number of aggressive and accusatory videos on the subject of VIP abuse, asked the crowd:

What can you do when your Prime Minister is protecting 76 MPs that are being investigated? Not have been investigated, they are being investigated. So, I don’t want to name anyone but I fell out with [redacted] and John Hemmings [sic] seriously. You get the message? I’ve fallen out with them. Big time. (1)

Maloney accused David Cameron of being a “paedophile protector”, and he suggested that the refurbishments of Parliament and Buckingham Palace were being undertaken to destroy forensic evidence:

How can you start refurbishing a building that is a crime scene? How? 76 MPs. Then, just down the road, we’ve got Dolphin Square, where one Member of Parliament was having sex with a kid while another one was soaking him to death. Have you heard that one? That’s in the papers. Murder, torture, rituals.

This is a reference to an allegation made by Operation Midland’s “Nick”, who said that he “was raped over a bath-tub while my head was beneath the water” [UPDATE 2019: Nick can now be named as Carl Beech, and his claims have been found to have been fraudulent. More details here].

Maloney then referred to Baker:

Anyone see Esther a few weeks ago, on Sky? Esther yeah? She was being abused, Esther, in the forest. The forest is a very dangerous place to be taken to be abused, because you’re either going to wind up in the ground, but you know it’s going to be ritualistic.

Maloney also suggested that the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi were also part of the cover up, because of what they knew: “A lot of their kids were educated in this country and they mixed with royalty”.

This was all received very enthusiastically by the crowd, and the event’s co-organiser, Chris Tuck, described him afterwards as “brilliant as always”.

This was not some marginal street-corner protest: Tuck is a member of the the Victims and Survivors’ Consultative Panel at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and she was interviewed in the studio of London Live the day before the rally, which had the formal name “Victims & Survivors Unite – Breaking The Cycle Of Abuse”. The event also very nearly had an MP in attendance: Nadine Dorries, who had just accused a deceased vicar of sex abuse, accepted an invitation from Tuck to speak, although she withdrew ahead of the event.

Footnote

1. A video is available online, but Maloney’s denunciations are so extravagant that I have chosen not to link to it. Hemming is often mistakenly referred to as “John Hemmings”. The Daily Mail article also came up with “John Henning”, although this has since been corrected.

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Today’s Mail on Sunday front-page splash by the paper’s political editor Simon Walters brings on a sense of déjà vu:

Sex abuse probe WILL investigate Ted Heath over paedophile claims: Public inquiry set to look at explosive report by Chief Constable who says allegations against the ex-PM are ‘120 per cent’ genuine

The controversial investigation into allegations that Sir Edward Heath was a paedophile has been dramatically widened, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Officials at Britain’s biggest ever public inquiry confirmed that they are to study the findings of an explosive police report into claims that the former Prime Minister was a child abuser.

A spokesman for the IICSA told The Mail on Sunday last night: ‘In the context of the Westminster investigation, the inquiry will be interested to see and consider the outcome of Wiltshire Police’s investigation into allegations against Sir Edward Heath.’

This apparent revelation comes just five months after the Daily Mail reported that

Wiltshire Police has already briefed the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and has pledged to pass on a confidential report on Operation Conifer when it is wound up in June

…and a whole month since Walters wrote that

The police chief in charge of an investigation into paedophile claims concerning former Prime Minister Edward Heath is to send his findings to the woman leading the national child sex-abuse inquiry.

Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Mike Veale has already had talks with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), chaired by Professor Alexis Jay.

Given this background, it is difficult to see why the bland quote from someone at the IICSA – a quote that merely confirms the earlier reports – is being treated like some shocking revelation requiring the word “WILL” in block capitals, other than to provide a yet another sensationalising headline on the subject. There was never any likelihood that inquiry WOULDN’T look at the material.

However, “see and consider” does not mean the same thing as “investigate”, and the Press Association has a longer version of the same quote that puts a different light on its significance (emphasis added):

A spokesman for the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) said: “In the context of the Westminster investigation, the inquiry will be interested to see and consider the outcome of Wiltshire police’s investigation into allegations against Sir Edward Heath.

“The inquiry’s remit is institutional failure to protect children and the inquiry is unlikely to need to examine whether allegations of abuse made against any particular parliamentarian are true during the course of its work.

“Its job is to examine institutional failures in connection with allegations made, and this will include considering the adequacy and propriety of law enforcement investigations.”

That’s an odd sort of “probe”, and it completely undermines Walters’s claim that Heath will be “investigated” by the IICSA. Given that quote was “told The Mail on Sunday last night”, how is it that Walters has used less of it than the PA?

The Mail on Sunday article goes on to rehash coverage of allegations against Heath; thus we’re told that

A paedophile dossier compiled by Labour peer Baroness Castle, a member of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in the 1970s, said Sir Edward offered young boys trips on his yacht. In a separate incident, one man claimed Sir Edward picked him up in the 1960s when he was a 12-year-old hitchhiking in Kent and lured him to his Mayfair flat.

Heath’s yachts (there were several of them over the years) were small racing vessels which required a crew and lacked private space; it has been said that groups of children were given the opportunity to take a spin on them, but whether or not this is true it hardly amounts to an “incident”.

And there is no evidence that Barbara Castle’s dossier ever existed – nothing has been found in her archive, and we only have the word of a journalist named Don Hale, who says that Castle gave it to him in the 1980s but that it was seized by police before he could make use of it. For some reason, Hale didn’t mention this publicly until July 2014, when he said that it named the late politicians Keith Joseph and Rhodes Boyson. A few days after Leon Brittan’s death in January 2015 Hale said that Brittan had also featured in the document, but he didn’t mention Heath until August 2015, just after the police probe was announced.

According to Hale, the document proved that Heath “was present at more than half a dozen Westminster meetings of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange”. Given the exceptionally sensational nature of such a disclosure, why didn’t Hale mention this a whole year before? And why does Walters gloss over this particular claim in his own report? (1) Hale also claims that Castle told him she had discussed the matter with her former special adviser Jack Straw, but he says he has no records or recollection of such a thing.

I previously wrote about abuse allegations against Heath here (including the “hitchhiker” story) and here, and about claims he was an orgiastic Satanist here. Whatever information Wiltshire Police may have gathered, the material in the public domain does not appear to hold up to scrutiny.

Walters’s article is followed by a short op-ed by rent-a-quote right-wing Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who suggests that criticism of the investigation is “the Establishment” seeking to “shelve” investigations into historic VIP abuse (2).

However, Walters and Bridgen appear to both be completely oblivious to a concern that was raised in the April 2017 Daily Mail article, which was written by a crime correspondent (Rebecca Camber) rather than a politics hack. This was that

 senior officers will seek to bury their report on the late politician by dumping it on the national child abuse inquiry.

Further:

[C]ritics fear that the report, which is expected to conclude that there is not enough evidence to prosecute anyone for any offence, will be swallowed up in the avalanche of evidence being examined by the child abuse inquiry which means it could take years before the truth emerges.

Critics do not want the Wiltshire Police findings to be “shelved”; rather, they want everything out in the open so that we can all see for ourselves the basis for the investigation and make our own informed judgement about it. Instead, though, it looks like the public will get to see only a very partial summary, perhaps supplemented with some strategic leaking for the benefit of Wiltshire Police’s reputation.

Footnotes

(1)  In December 2016 the right-wing anti-Islam activist Stephen Gash suggested on Twitter that there was actually a “video showing Ted Heath talking at PIE” online somewhere, although he had unfortunately lost the link to it. He was assured that “someone on here” must have the link, although it doesn’t seem to have surfaced yet.

(2) It is perhaps worth noting that Heath was the Prime Minister who took Britain into the European Common Market, while Bridgen is a Eurosceptic. Bridgen is also a critic of the BBC, and so his op-ed also weaves in the detail that

For decades, rumours about Jimmy Savile were dismissed by institutions such as the BBC, terrified about the impact of negative publicity on their reputation.

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