The late Ann Widdecombe, former Tory member of Parliament and prisons minister, was the politician the left loved to hate. Her views on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and the death penalty earned her the sobriquet “Doris Karloff.” That moniker followed her defense of handcuffing pregnant prisoners on the way to the maternity ward.
The archetypal Anglican spinster, to use an appropriately outdated term, she converted to Catholicism after the Church of England synod voted to allow women to become priests. A Conservative MP for 23 years until 2010, she eventually left the Conservative Party in 2019 when she stood for the Brexit Party in the European elections. She went on to become an immigration and justice spokeswoman for Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK.
Along the way, Widdecombe became an unlikely “national treasure” after appearing on the BBC reality show Strictly Come Dancing in 2010, giving a performance she herself described as “elephantine.” The British people love spirited losers. She happily lampooned herself as a pantomime dame and even performed as such on stage. She was the definition of a good sport.
Now she is dead, murdered in her remote cottage in the Dartmoor National Park. One suspects that she gave as good as she got to the assailant. The term “battleaxe” was almost made for this robust and fearless woman who definitely took no nonsense, not that she would ever have used such a word.
Her murder has revived a simmering debate about how to keep politicians safe in an era in which violent attacks have become, if not exactly commonplace, certainly a disturbing feature of modern politics.
The Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right fanatic in 2016; the Tory MP Sir David Amess was killed in 2021 by a Muslim fanatic; others, like the Liberal Democrat MP Nigel Jones, have had narrow escapes. No one knows who murdered Ann Widdecombe, but the police are now treating her murder as a terrorism-related incident. Devon and Cornwall Police have been criticized for initially insisting that it wasn’t.
A white British man from Rotherham, some three hundred miles from Widdecombe’s Rest (as the former MP’s cottage was jokingly called), has been arrested. That is just about all we can say at the moment about this case until the police complete their investigations.
But Reform UK politicians are having their say about what this atrocity means for their security. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has agreed to meet the Reform leader Farage, who has complained in the past that his security, after he became an MP, was inadequate. One suspects that he may ask for close protection by armed officers 24/7—the kind of security normally accorded only to prime ministers and senior cabinet ministers.
This is because Farage has, as he says himself, been the “most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician of modern times.” He has been the target of frequent threats to his life and actual physical assaults, as he recounted in his resignation statement last week. The former MP claimed that the £5 million he received controversially from a crypto billionaire (and failed to declare to the parliamentary authorities) was to secure his and his family’s safety.
Widdecombe never seemed bothered about security. She famously left her gate unlocked and had no police or security detail guarding her house. She was the ideal target for a murderer since she lived alone and happily splashed about in her swimming pool, leaving her doors open in the heat. In many ways, her independent spirit was her downfall.
Her violent death has led to a deal of soul-searching about how Britain has changed in her lifetime. She was born into a military family, educated in a convent boarding school, and acquired her debating skills at an Oxford women’s college. She never married.
Widdecombe was the kind of character satirized in postwar, black-and-white Ealing comedy films. A pillar of the local church, charity organizer, and Women’s Institute stalwart. A capable busybody who rubbed many people up the wrong way. No whining or whingeing allowed. Keep calm and carry on.
In our therapy-saturated age of personal disclosure and celebration of “neurodiversity”, Widdecombe was—is—an emblem of resilience and fortitude. Even on the left there is a degree of retrospective respect for her can-do and make-do independence, leavened by a genuine kindness and good humour.
We may never see her like again.
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