Operation Midland: Did Nick Identify Edward Heath’s Home ?

Several months ago I heard a very interesting rumour. It was that Nick had been taken around London by Operation Midland and had identified a house that had once been occupied by Leon Brittan for only a very short period; the rumour went on to suggest that the police felt that this was not easy information to find and that it was one of the reasons why Operation Midland were taking Nick’s allegations so seriously.

We were naturally very curious about this and set about investigating ourselves. Nick had blogged about this on 28th July 2014, just a couple of weeks after the first stories about him on Exaro News

” When I got to the meeting, I was asked if I would be prepared to look at several possible addresses of where I might have been taken as a child to be hurt. I agreed, and I was not told the actual address, we just went for a walk. As we turned into one street, I saw the name of the road and found it quite ironic because it bore the same name as the town where the abuse first started. Apart from that the name meant nothing to me, but as we walked into the street, my anxiety hit so unexpectedly, I had been here before and such vivid pictures started coming into my head, the flashbacks were starting again. My breathing increased dramatically, and I found myself gripping my hands so hard it was starting to take the skin off. I was fighting the flashbacks, but not to stop them from happening, but to work with them and try to remember my feelings and reactions. The tears were starting, but I had someone with me so was trying desperately to hold them back. We stopped the walk and headed to a coffee shop and gradually my anxiety reduced. After a break we headed for the second address”

If we strip away all the narrative there is one interesting clue and that is that the road had “the same name as the town where the abuse first started.”

We’ve made no secret of the fact that we’ve known Nick’s real identity for quite some time. Nobody leaked it to us we were able to discover it ourselves. Once we had Nick’s name we were able to unearth other information, this included the fact that Nick’s step father lived in the town of Wilton, near Salisbury, Wiltshire at the time his mother married him, which is also around the time that Nick first claims he was abused, and so it was extremely likely that Nick was referring to this address.

There are quite a few Wiltons in London, Wilton Street, Wilton Road, Wilton Close;  we began trying to match one of these with Leon Brittan but without success. Perhaps we’d been wrong, perhaps Nick did possess knowledge that was difficult to easily explain away…

Then last Friday,  Martin Walkerdine posted something on twitter that gave  The Needle team a bit of a start;

Was the rumour inaccurate ? Certainly, if we strip away the rumour that set us investigating and look only at the facts, the fact of Nick’s own account, the fact of his step father living in Wilton, and the fact that Edward Heath lived in Wilton Street, Belgravia, it looks likes it.

Unlike the rumour suggested, it looks extremely likely that the property that Nick identified to police, on or around the 28th July 2014, belonged to Edward Heath and not Leon Brittan; unlike the rumour, suggested Edward Heath had lived there for a decade, and unlike the rumour suggested, far from being difficult to search for online it was very easy to find.

As Martin went on to explain to me, Edward Heath’s residence at 25 Wilton Street was book-ended by two quite newsworthy events. In 1974 the IRA attacked his home, and in 1984 there was a burglary there.

Now, I have no way of verifying this, as far as I understand it, Operation Midland has been a very tight ship and the only journalists they’ve talked to I’m aware of are from Exaro News, and perhaps some at the BBC. You can imagine also that supporters of Nick aren’t exactly climbing over themselves to pass information to me.

So, I’m honour bound to be straight with you; this is what I think to be true and not what I know to be true. Nevertheless, I thought I’d share this with you so that you can make your own judgement.

Correction: I’m going to leave the original text up but it has been pointed out to me that Edward Heath lived at 17 Wilton Street and not number 25.