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Ann Widdecombe was never one to hide from an argument. And she wasn’t afraid for her safety either. She scoffed at friends’ suggestions that she should get electric gates, as an elderly woman with a public profile living alone on Dartmoor, just as she dismissed concerns about her health at 78.
Having lost friends in the Brighton hotel bombing that almost killed Margaret Thatcher, she wasn’t naive about security. But she was forged in a different era: one before Jo Cox was murdered, when the greatest risk was to politicians identified as symbols of the state, rather than as the embodiment of an idea. She posed happily for press photographs inside her retirement bungalow, including one available to anyone casually Googling that included the house’s distinctive name: Widdecombe’s Rest. She would have been so easy to find, had anyone gone looking. Perhaps she never really believed that anyone would.
It is depressing beyond words to have to spell this out, but nobody deserves to die like Ann did. She should be alive today, pottering around her kitchen, pouncing on the occasional summons from Jeremy Vine to say something I’d probably have disagreed with wildly. The hallmark of a civilised country is that political differences are settled through votes not violence, and though her killer’s motives remain unclear, the third killing of a British politician in a decade feels ominously like the crossing of a Rubicon.
When Jo Cox was murdered in the street at the height of a polarising referendum, the shock brought politicians across the spectrum together in soul-searching about the culture in which such horrors could happen. When Widdecombe’s good friend David Amess was killed five years later by a jihadi, again the consensus was that an attack on one politician was an attack on democracy itself. But last weekend, Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch’s now ritual offers of solidarity with Nigel Farage were rebuffed, as senior Reform UK figures accused the authorities of denying them protection. “It’s as though someone in the establishment wants us dead,” said Richard Tice. (For the record, Farage was reportedly offered and rejected arrangements similar to Badenoch’s, on the grounds that his own arrangements were already more comprehensive.) Though feelings will be running high inside Reform, just as they did within Labour after Jo Cox died, the potential impact of those words on unhinged people sensitive to conspiracy theories is frankly alarming.
What distinguishes Reform from other parties, however, is its refusal to believe that words have consequences. Inextricably wedded to unfettered free speech online, its answer isn’t to regulate platforms that algorithmically amplify and normalise hate but simply to build ever higher walls around the targets of that hate. Reform is now promising, if elected, round-the-clock protection for every MP, at a cost of billions and at the risk of further distancing them from the public. But even that wouldn’t have saved someone like Ann, who was a Reform spokesperson but who left parliament 16 years ago. At what point, exactly, does the pool of people potentially at risk because of something they’ve said on TV simply become too large for them all to have bodyguards?
But if policing our way out of this deadly spiral isn’t the answer then the liberal left must be honest about what our preferred option of cultural change requires of us too.
The online reaction to Widdecombe’s death has uncomfortably exposed a handful of ghouls publicly glorying in it, and a much larger group who either haven’t learned that some sentiments are best saved for WhatsApp or seemingly struggle to distinguish between a human being and a cartoon villain. Why, someone asked me this week on Bluesky, is to wrong to celebrate politicians’ deaths, given we cheer when the baddie in the movie has their head smashed in? I was too shocked to give a considered answer but it is, of course, that dehumanising politicians – treating them as abstract forces of evil – is the first step to justifying their elimination. It matters, perhaps more than we know, to keep putting the person back into the picture.
I got to know Ann Widdecombe reasonably well in the late 90s, when she was a media-savvy Tory grassroots darling and I a novice political reporter still confounded by the discovery that some MPs whose beliefs I shared turned out to be hideous human beings, and vice versa. Widdecombe was in the latter category. I couldn’t have agreed less with her on abortion rights, Europe, gay rights or modern feminism. But she was also unusually straightforward: she didn’t lie or dissemble, though she could gossip and plot with the best, or hide her ambition. She relished an argument but when she lost them – and perhaps it’s easier for me to acknowledge her good qualities because she did lose almost every battle against progressives, over everything from gay marriage to restricting IVF to attempts to get more women into politics – she accepted the democratic outcome.
She was formidable but also, much as she would doubtless hate me saying so, in some ways strangely vulnerable. Though she is for ever remembered for destroying Michael Howard’s Tory leadership ambitions by saying he had “something of the night about him”, most have now forgotten how exactly she fell out with Howard, her boss at the Home Office: not just over her objections to his sacking the Prison Service boss Derek Lewis, but over snide briefings – for which, rightly or wrongly, she blamed Howard’s camp – implying she’d sided with Lewis because of a spinsterish crush. Publicly professing to being a middle-aged virgin, in accordance with her strict views on extramarital sex, was a gift to her enemies that was sometimes cruelly exploited. And for all her tolerance of the “Doris Karloff” jokes, deep down she minded.
But the judgment that mattered most to her was that of a higher power. Her beliefs were anchored by an unswerving Catholic faith that made her a surprisingly enlightened proponent of rehabilitation within prisons (as a Christian she believed in redemption), but more often an implacable opponent of LGBTQ+ rights from equal marriage to banning conversion practices. When society moved on, she refused to, and with every passing year the views she had always held began to look more extreme.
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I cannot say that I will miss her politics. But I would miss more than I can say a democratic culture in which every woman has the right to argue her case, to have others argue back just as forcefully – and then to live out their old age in safety, and in peace.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
