Heath was told to stop gay sex activity, Tory claims

Sir Edward Heath, the former prime minister, was warned by police to stop "cottaging" for gay sex in the 1950s because it could harm his political career, a Tory politician has claimed.

Brian Coleman, a senior member of the London Assembly, said: "The late Ted Heath managed to obtain the highest office of state after he was supposedly advised to cease his cottaging activities in the Fifties when he became a Privy Councillor."

Writing for the New Statesman magazine's online edition, Mr Coleman, who is gay, said Britain had "managed for decades with gay men holding a significant number of public offices". He claimed that gay men had in effect run the Conservative Party in London, whether as officials, councillors or volunteers.

Sir Edward, a bachelor who never spoke about his sexuality, was Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974. He died in 2005. Friends had expected him to marry Kay Raven, whom he had known since childhood, but she is said to have become tired of waiting for him to propose to her and married someone else.

Mr Coleman said it was "common knowledge" among Tories that Sir Edward had been given the warning he was being positively vetted for membership of the Privy Council in 1955.

According to his biographer, John Campbell, there was no positive evidence that Sir Edward was gay "except for the faintest unsubstantiated rumour of an incident at the beginning of the war". He wrote while Sir Edward was still alive: "It is not impossible that he is a latent or repressed homosexual. The alternatives are that he is a repressed heterosexual or that he is simply asexual."

Derek Conway, who succeeded Sir Edward as Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, said there had never been any hint of impropriety in the former prime minister's life.

"If there was some secret I'm sure it would have come out by now," Mr Conway said. "Ted was absolutely wedded to politics. He didn't have a great deal of personal companionship in his life but there are people who are capable of getting on without companionship."