The Unfashionable Faith of Ann Widdecombe

Ann Widdecombe, Reform UK’s immigration and justice spokesperson and a former Conservative member of Parliament, was found dead in her home in Devon on July 9, in what police are treating as murder. She was seventy-eight.

Widdecombe’s murder has been a tremendous shock to British politics. She was the most prominent British Catholic politician whose faith actually informed her politics—unlike former prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, or our presumptive prime minister, Andy Burnham. She converted to Anglicanism in her thirties, and to Catholicism in 1993, and she spent her long political career defending human life and all sorts of causes that she considered just. At the same time, she appeared on numerous television programs and never took herself too seriously. This combination of qualities—a sense of fun, a disinterested commitment to justice, and a powerful supernatural faith—is one that her detractors are completely unable to understand.

Widdecombe was a member of Parliament from 1987 to 2010, a government minister from 1990 to 1997, and a member of the shadow (opposition) cabinet from 1998 to 2001. She appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and Strictly Come Dancing, and in episodes of Doctor Who and Sooty; she hosted an episode of the comedy current affairs program Have I Got News for You and appeared onstage as Snow White’s evil stepmother. In Strictly Come Dancing, she was hammered by the judges but, playing for laughs, won over the audience and finished sixth. Similarly, in Celebrity Big Brother, her fellow contestants kept nominating her for eviction, but she made it to the final round. 

She had some of the most unfashionable views in mainstream politics. She consistently opposed abortion, and even declared that she could not be health secretary while abortion was being provided by the National Health Service. She opposed same-sex marriage and gender self-identification, supported a zero-tolerance approach to cannabis, backed capital punishment, and was skeptical about attempts to prevent climate change. She left the Church of England over the ordination of women, and she left the Conservative Party to campaign for the proper implementation of the referendum to leave the European Union.

Less predictably, she was deeply concerned about animal cruelty and opposed fox hunting; she was also a supporter of homeopathy. She insisted on thinking each issue through on its merits and sticking to her conclusions. When there was a scandal about the expenses being claimed by members of Parliament, she refused to release the details of her own. When these were leaked, her record turned out to be one of the best in the House; she had refused to publish her expenses because she believed MPs deserved privacy. This mattered more to her than scoring points against her rivals. 

The former Conservative member of Parliament Harvey Proctor gave remarkable testimony about Widdecombe in The Times following her death. Proctor’s career ended in 1987 when he pleaded guilty to gross indecency for having sex with male prostitutes aged seventeen and nineteen. (The age of consent for homosexual acts was twenty-one at the time; it was later lowered to sixteen to correspond with the age of consent for heterosexual acts.) Decades later, Proctor was among those caught up in the Operation Midland police investigation, which followed up lurid child abuse and murder accusations that turned out to be complete fabrications—resulting in a £900,000 payout to him from the Metropolitan Police. Proctor summarized his Times article on X: “I denounced Operation Midland as a ‘homosexual witch-hunt.’ Ann Widdecombe stood by me. Not one LGBT charity even dared. Tatchell [the gay rights campaigner] was remarkably silent. Ann stuck her head above the parapet to offer support—privately, publicly & practically.”

Why would she do that? Why take the risk to her own reputation? Why support a public homosexual when she opposed the homosexual agenda? Because opposing injustice was the right thing to do. 

The reaction to her death by her opponents was predictably disedifying; when it became clear that she had been murdered, at least some of them had the humility to retract their statements. Her murder, which at the time of writing is being investigated by counterterrorism police, is a disturbing reminder that living in a quiet village in the rural depths of southwest England is no defense against political violence. The death of any prominent national figure diminishes national life. In the case of Ann Widdecombe, it points to a darker future for us all.

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