Back in the dark days of the Sunday Sport, if the pair of tits decorating the front cover didn’t catch the eye from the newsstand, the ludicrous headline alongside said mammaries usually did; long before the term Fake News was even coined, the Sport specialised in the silly and patently untrue. I suppose ‘Post-Modern’ could be applied to the Sunday Sport if one was inclined to be kind and view it as a parody of a Fleet Street weekend tabloid in the same way that Viz continues to spoof those trashy mags that clog-up the waiting rooms of GP’s surgeries with uncanny accuracy. These days, it’s often difficult to distinguish between the Real McCoy and the pastiche, particularly when it is the attention-grabbing headline that provokes heated debate, whether or not the causal shopper opts for the paper.
Take yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Emblazoned across its cover was the dramatic announcement – ‘POLICE CHIEF: HEATH WAS A PAEDOPHILE’! Those that see nothing beyond that headline therefore have every suspicion confirmed. They may not even notice the ‘POLICE CHIEF’ prefix; but the headline says a former Prime Minister who never married and was never successfully outed as gay was definitely fond of little boys. There you go, job done. Mr and Mrs Public don’t need to pursue the story any further; everything they need to know is there in those four little words uttered by yet another Chief Constable from a nondescript provincial police force desperate to justify the vast expense devoted to grave-pissing. It’s there in black-and-white, in print; it’s true.
It matters not that the Mail on Sunday has actually exhibited a degree of bravery in its recent efforts at debunking some of the urban myths that have sprouted online wings where the sexual peccadilloes of dead or elderly household names are concerned; with that one crass headline, they would appear to have undone months of hard investigative work that has exposed the stupidity of the police in giving airtime to fantasists from the outer limits of the internet. To most, the word of a Chief Constable means jack shit in 2017; who in possession of half-a-brain would believe anything the police say anymore? They are inherently corrupt and terminally corruptible. Yet, some out there are willing to take the word of Wiltshire Police’s Mike Veale as Gospel. Then again, is this an ingenious ruse by the paper to highlight just how dense the men running our police forces really are?
There have evidently been no lessons learnt from the notorious ‘credible and true’ gaffe when a thick senior officer takes it upon himself to deflect criticisms of police manpower being redirected to fishing parties by making a personal opinion official before the pointless investigation has even been completed. Despite the fantasy of the so-called Westminster Paedophile Ring being utterly trashed, Mike Veale will not let it go; he claims those who have ‘come forward’ in relation to Ted Heath’s alleged hobby have made allegations that are remarkably similar. Fancy that! It’s not as though any of these tired old tales haven’t been doing the rounds in the cyber kangaroo courts for years, with members of various forums sharing their lurid fantasies and upping the satanic angle with every retelling, is it?
Mike Veale declares he has ‘120%’ conviction about the allegations against the dead PM; but even the language used advertises his level of intelligence. ‘120%’ is the language of the dim, the language of the footballer being interviewed after he’s just stepped off the pitch, like saying ‘literally’ when you don’t mean literally. Yet after the Chief Plod issued his ‘120% conviction’ to the press, subsequent PR statements from the Wiltshire Police make a mockery of Veale’s comments.
According to a police spokesman, Veale is determined to ‘ensure the investigation is proportionate, measured and legal’ and the purpose of it all is to ‘impartially investigate allegations without fear of favour and go where the evidence takes us. It is not the role of the police to judge the guilt or innocence of people in our criminal justice system’. How does that square with a Chief Constable making his prejudices public in the midst of an ongoing investigation? And are the deceased included amongst those people ‘in our criminal justice system’?
Mike Veale’s idiocy was apparent from day one, when he launched his force’s foray into time-travelling from outside Ted Heath’s former home and later denied it was a witch-hunt as the cost began to rise towards £1 million. Investigative officers even turned up at the HQ of Private Eye to peruse back issues of the magazine and see if they could uncover any suspicious references to Heath’s unmarried status; yes, I know, this is a development straight out of Private Eye’s satirical middle section, but it really happened. Where next? The home of Eric Idle because he wrote a comedy novel in the mid-70s called ‘Hello Sailor’, which featured a gay Prime Minister? Don’t rule it out.
There have been fewer easier targets than Ted Heath when it comes to this kind of posthumous character assassination; as with Jimmy Savile, he had no wife or children to take the accusers and their allies in the police and law firms to task. Also, like Savile, his sexuality was the subject of much hearsay and gossip during his lifetime; and both were disliked by many. Death and the diminishing ‘outrage’ of homosexuality as a means of ruining a public figure have simply released hounds of an even more malicious nature. And if the prominent can be ripped to shreds with such callous ease it’s no wonder the ordinary are so susceptible to the same treatment.
Come the Revolution, as Wolfie Smith used to say, maybe some of our most detestable misery-mongers will find themselves up against the wall for the bop-bop-bop treatment; added to the likes of past offenders such as Mark Williams-Thomas, Keir Starmer, Tom Watson, Liz Dux, Vera Baird, Mark Watts and ‘Nick’, we may well see the name Mike Veale. I reckon his presence could be justified, judging by his recent behaviour. I’m convinced, anyway…120%.
© The Editor
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