Everyone now knows who The Tory was. No. Everyone now knows that the idea of The Tory is obsolete, as opposed to an open-ended search for more perpetrators. I think it’s worth flagging up this post that ran in the Daily Beast on the same night the Mirror broke the Ted Heath story.
The first point of note: there are at least three lines of enquiry here. There is an Exaro/BBC story based around the statement from a retired Wiltshire Police officer. There is an Exaro/Daily Mirror story based on statements from a witness. And there is a separate Beastly story, which is neither based on the Wiltshire story, nor on Exaro’s witness, but rather on documentary material. Exaro’s witness “Nick” is, for the absence of doubt, the same person as the Mirror‘s source.
Second point of note. Don Hale, for it is he, is bylined as a co-author on the Beast piece; he has previously said Barbara Castle MP showed him the document. Castle’s papers are mostly in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, except for her diaries which are at Bradford University, but there was apparently some difficulty about getting access to them. According to this Mirror piece from July last year, the famously lost Geoffrey Dickens dossier contained much of the same material as the Castle one.
Third point of note. As the Mirror, Exaro, and the BBC seem to have known the name for some time but to have held onto it for legal or investigative reasons, there was presumably some reason to break it when they did. Does that mean someone got access to the Castle file? Certainly, the Beast piece taken together with the earlier Mirror one lets you have a good guess at the contents. Also, the story is in no way single-sourced.
And then there’s this:
Exaro can reveal: Jimmy Savile’s nephew, Guy Marsden, claims that Sir Edward Heath sexually abused a friend – a 14yo boy in around 1969.
— ExaroNews (@ExaroNews) August 6, 2015
Makes me think of Red Riding and various other pieces of fiction. It seems the establishment of the 70s was in fact just as bad as we imagined…