Letter: MPs dispute losses at Lloyd's

YOUR front-page story on 20 March brandished the title 'Tory losses at Lloyd's revealed'. This was not printed as a quotation but as your own declaration. Beneath it were photographs of 14 Conservative MPs, including my own, together with the subheads 'Fears that some MPs could be made bankrupt. Potential bills kept secret from Parliament. Major's majority under threat'.

All these statements are false, as are many of those in the story by your political correspondent, Paul Routledge. Nothing was 'revealed' in your article. What you published was a guesstimate in which the total invested in a syndicate was divided by the number of its members and the result attributed to each of them, regardless of the fact that an individual holding may vary from pounds 10,000 to more than pounds 1m. In my own case, the figure you quote bears no relationship whatever to my obligation. Furthermore, your figures take no account of the provisions properly made against loss by a member of a syndicate. I have always made such provision.

You state that likely losses were kept secret from Parliament. That is not so because Parliament has never asked about a Member's gains or losses. Nor should it. Your correspondent goes on to state that any MP 'judged' bankrupt has to resign his seat. For this to happen, an MP has to be 'declared' bankrupt by the proper judicial processes, not 'judged' bankrupt by the press or his opponents in the House of Commons. Nor is there any threat to John Major's majority in Parliament.

What this operation by a Labour MP, blocked by the Speaker but eagerly accepted by your paper, was intended to do was to cast doubt on the financial position of those he attacked, to create discord in their constituencies, to raise questions as to whether other candidates should be sought and to damage their other business interests or any possible future ones. All this based on the allegations of a Labour MP, based on the statements of a retired underwriter 'who wished not to be named'. No wonder.

All the allegations are false. I made this plain to the public and to my constituents in a full statement, which I issued as soon as I read your article.

This was a sleazy political operation and I am appalled that an allegedly serious and respectable paper and its political correspondent should have lent themselves to it.

Edward Heath MP

House of Commons

London SW1