Bartholomew's Notes

From The Times:

The former chief constable who led the inquiry into alleged abuse by Sir Edward Heath and who later resigned over allegations of serious misconduct is being paid to advise an elected police and crime commissioner.

Mike Veale, who headed forces in Wiltshire and Cleveland, has been given a contract with Rupert Matthews, who runs the Leicestershire force.

…He was appointed by Matthews, a former MEP, on the recommendation of Andrew Bridgen, the Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire. Bridgen regularly publicly defended Veale during the inquiry into Heath.

As well as being a former MEP, Matthews is the author of works such as UFOs: A History of Alien Activity from Sightings to Abductions to Global Threat and Roswell: Uncovering the Secrets of Area 51 and the Fatal UFO Crash.

As chief constable of Wiltshire Police, Veale infamously squandered £1.4 million in the futile pursuit of child sex abuse allegations against Heath, who had died a decade beforehand. Dramatic leaks to the Mail on Sunday‘s political correspondent Simon Walters claimed that Veale was “120 per cent convinced” that Heath was guilty, although the final report turned out to be a damp squib. Veale denied leaking to the media, although as soon as the report was out he gave interviews to Walters and also to Mark Watts, a journalist heavily invested in the claims of Carl Beech.

A bizarre coda was that Veale was soon afterwards found to have lied about the circumstances in which his work mobile phone had been destroyed, although he was cleared of an anonymous allegation that “he had collaborated with a Conservative MP to leak the details and covered his tracks by destroying his phone”. The IOPC accepted Veale’s account that he had accidentally destroyed the phone in a moment of annoyance while playing golf, and had lied to avoid “media attention”. By coincidence, the phone had come to grief a day after the Mail on Sunday had run a story with the headline “Police: If Ted Heath was alive today we’d quiz him under caution on child abuse claims” – a sensationalisation of routine police procedure with the intention of implying “no smoke without fire”.

Veale failed upwards by then becoming chief constable of Cleveland Police, but as noted by The Times he “later resigned over allegations of serious misconduct”. According to an update at the end of the article, the IOPC has passed a report to Cleveland’s PCC, but says it is “not in a position” to share its findings. Veale’s supporters within the conspiracy theory milieu claim that the Cleveland allegations are the revenge of the establishment; certainly, it’s possible that Veale was ousted improperly, but if so then the context is more likely to be local corruption (Veale was the third Chief Constable of Cleveland Police since Sean Price was dismissed for misconduct in 2012).

It’s not quite clear why Andrew Bridgen, who has no connection with Wiltshire, was such an enthusiast for the Heath investigation – however, he has also written in support of old allegations against Greville Janner in Leicestershire, and it may be that he saw the Heath case as being the some kind of thing. His writings on Janner in turn form part of his campaign against Keith Vaz, who has been accused of having “protected” Janner.

The regular rent-a-quote MP also has links with the conspiracy milieu: earlier this year he was criticised after giving an interview to none other than Anna Brees, and her former associate Jon Wedger previously claimed in 2018 that Bridgen had “made contact” with him.

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