When news broke of the death of the extremely conservative-minded English politician Ann Widdecombe on July 10, reaction from many of those on the left of British politics was immediate. She was going straight to Hell—because she was a Catholic. “Hell has gained another demon,” gloried one social media user.
In Ann’s case, such reactions were not limited to random private individuals. One full-blown national newspaper, the far-Left Socialist Worker, went with the online headline “Hurrah! Ann Widdecombe Is Strictly Dead,” referencing her prior appearance on the popular reality TV contest Strictly Come Dancing (the original UK version of Dancing with the Stars).
Ann-atomy of a Murder
The main reasons advanced by the Socialist Worker for celebrating Widdecombe’s death, besides her being a one-time MP for the (formerly) right-wing Conservative/Tory Party, were that, being a good Catholic, she was against abortion and “opposed granting LGBT+ people’s basic rights” like same-sex pseudo-marriage.
Former Sky News TV presenter Adam Boulton, when asked to comment on her death in a live interview, simply used the opportunity to make jokes about her private sex life. Imagine if he’d done that about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Prominent gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell seemed rather pleased by Ann’s demise, announcing it with a cheery exclamation mark via the phrase “Tory ex-MP #AnnWiddecombe is dead!” and calling her a “BIGOT!” in big capital letters.
Transgender former left-wing Scottish Labour Party and Green Party MP candidate Heather Herbert posted this about Ann’s death:
Unfortunately, it probably was extremely painful. Widdecombe was 78 years old when she died, and the logical initial assumption was that it was from natural causes. However, further updates produced the shocking information that Ann had, in fact, been murdered, found bludgeoned to death in a pool of blood in her own home.
At the time of writing, nobody knows who did this or why, but the first guess of many was that it may have been politically motivated terrorism (something early police reports initially denied but now appear to confirm). Widdecombe was employed as Immigration Spokeswoman for the right-wing, anti-migration Reform UK party, with some web users speculating perhaps this was a Charlie Kirk-style assassination performed by a radical, leftist, open-borders fanatic, or a queer-rights campaigner.
If this does indeed prove so, then that would leave many early gloaters about Ann’s death in the awkward position of seeming to have taken part in spreading precisely the kind of rhetoric which contributed to her murder, leading to a sudden about-turn on their behalf. The Socialist Worker took down its relevant article entirely, while Peter Tatchell abruptly pivoted toward expressing public sympathy for the very same “BIGOT!” he had previously denigrated, apologizing for his “insensitive comments” as “Nobody deserves to die, no matter what they believe in,” not even if what they believe in is Jesus Christ.
Violence Begets Violence
Raised an Anglican but educated at a Catholic school, Widdecombe left the Church of England and converted to Rome in 1993, the CofE’s decision to ordain female priests being the final straw. Viewing her old denomination as endlessly bending toward the whims of passing fads and fashions, Widdecombe saw Catholicism (at least prior to Popes Francis and Leo) as being more likely to espouse eternal truths, not temporary falsehoods. She explained:
I thought, “Hang on, the duty of the Church is to lead, not to follow its [i.e., society’s] lead. The great thing about Catholicism is it doesn’t compromise—something is either true or it’s false. It’s right or it’s wrong. It’s a sin or it’s not. There’s none of this endless fudging that you get with the Anglican Church.”
So devout did Widdecombe’s faith become that, in 2010, she was considered for the appointment of UK Ambassador to the Vatican, before ill health intervened. “I believe in things that are unfashionable,” she said, unlike many contemporary politicians who pose as being “conservative” but who, in reality, just go along with the flow of what the liberal media tell them they should believe for the next five minutes. Having genuine religious conviction made her, quite naturally, a genuine conviction politician. But, to the modern left-wing mindset, possessing religious convictions automatically makes you into a “BIGOT!” as expressed in the following social media comment:
What “bigoted” things did Widdecombe actually believe? Just pretty standard things the Bible told her to. Leading UK gay publication Pink News listed her seven deadly secular sins: she disapproved of gay marriage; she voted against the repeal of so-called “Section 28” laws (UK legislation barring the active promotion of homosexuality in schools); she objected to same-sex couples on Strictly Come Dancing; she argued that gay people who don’t want to be gay should be allowed to seek a psychiatric or medical “cure” for it if they really so desired, and such practices not be made illegal; she opposed gay adoption; she was not very trans-friendly; and she thought Christian bakers should not be forced to bake cakes celebrating homosexuality if they preferred not to.
Naturally, in today’s moral and political climate, some thought that the mere fact of Widdecombe adhering to actual Catholic orthodoxy meant that, paradoxically, she was just too Catholic to actually be a Catholic at all anymore.
Being a Catholic in this interpretation seems to be reduced to meaning little more than being kind. Where, precisely, does “the love of Jesus” dictate that He once encouraged homosexual adoption or infant mastectomies? Stubbornly refusing to bow before the pieties of liberal orthodoxy on such matters allowed Widdecombe to be easily portrayed as a baby-eating ogre figure, dubbed “Doris Karloff” by enemies. In this climate, myths about her legendary (in the literal sense of “non-existent”) cruelty, like the one referenced below, spread easily:
This allegation is unambiguously untrue on several counts. For one thing, Ann was never Home Secretary (the senior UK politician with ultimate responsibility for law and order); she was merely Prisons Minister. And, in this role, far from ordering female prisoners to be handcuffed while giving birth, she gave explicit instructions for this practice not to take place. Not that it ever had.
In 1995, a TV documentary had misleadingly implied this was the case, causing Widdecombe to be questioned in the House of Commons. Here, she clarified prisoners were not manacled during labor, merely while being transported to and from the hospital for examination during earlier stages of pregnancy. Ann explained there had been prior examples of unsecured women using the opportunity to escape custody, including one inmate who had jumped from a high window in a prenatal clinic, endangering not only her own life but that of her unborn baby; being a longtime opponent of abortion, no doubt Widdecombe didn’t wish to see the fetus endangered in that way, even if her more “humane” political opponents did.
The Great Reform-ation
Given the incessantly negative manner in which she was presented by the UK media, it was pretty easy for the casual viewer or reader to automatically imbibe the slander that “Doris Karloff” really was a lumbering monster. One prominent UK “anti-fascist” organization even went so far as to maintain a whole special page about her on its website, thereby implying she was some kind of Nazi. The “anti-fascist” organization responsible is called Hope Not Hate (HNH), and their definition of what counts as being a Nazi in the United Kingdom these days is often very broad. Here is an illustrative example of the sort of shocking political extremism HNH devote themselves to exposing:
Several millions of dead Poles, Jews, and Slavs must wish that Hitler’s own fascism had once limited itself to making mildly off-color observations about the alleged innate genetic capacity of females to operate the dials on washing machines back in the 1930s and ’40s. The “extremist” councilor pictured above is, like Ann Widdecombe herself in the years leading up to her death, a member of the anti-immigration Reform UK party led by famous anti-woke English politician Nigel Farage, a body HNH now view as a vehicle for the so-called “far-right.”
In political terms, Widdecombe’s 2020s “conversion” to Reform from the Conservative Party parallels her religious conversion from Canterbury to Rome 20 years earlier. Just as she saw the CofE blowing with the wind and adopting all kinds of non-Christian but socially fashionable causes, like ordaining women priests, so she came to see the Conservative Party she once represented as an MP as doing likewise by pushing through 21st-century legislation legalizing gay marriage or failing to close the country’s borders. Hysterically viewing anyone even vaguely to the right of center as an extremist, this “conversion” made Ann look like a dangerous radical to HNH, who profiled her as part of their ongoing “anti-fascist” crusade against Reform.
What “Nazi” acts had Widdecombe performed? In a speech celebrating Brexit, she had “made a risible comparison of Britain’s departure from the EU to the emancipation of slaves,” which made her a racist. In an interview, she complained that the #MeToo movement had “given rise to a lot of very trivial whinging” from women, which made her a sexist. She supported hanging, which made her a murderer. She didn’t believe in the existence of man-made climate change, which made her ecocidal. She had occasionally appeared as a guest on the radio shows of other people who had said anti-Semitic things, which made her an anti-Semite. And, worst of all, she was a Catholic, which made her utterly beyond the pale.
Continually, HNH depicted Widdecombe as a rabid Catholic homophobe. Yet, in actuality, she pursued the more forgiving Catholic approach of hating the sin but not the sinner. This is how HNH themselves quote Widdecombe describing gay marriage:
I do not care tuppence what consenting adults do. It’s not my business […] What I do say is that the state must have a preferred model, and the model that has served us throughout the millennia is marriage—a man and a woman in a union that is generally open to procreation. Marriage isn’t about two people; it is the basis for the family. That’s why it’s unique, and therefore I think society can say we’re keeping marriage for a man and a woman.
And this is how HNH quote Ann on the topic of having homosexual friends:
I have never understood why supposedly intelligent interviewers express surprise that I have gay male friends. As I point out, if I chose my friends on the basis that I must first agree with all their views and choices then I would have to exclude not only homosexuals but all those who are divorced, living in sin, having children out of wedlock, having abortions (that one is quite difficult), known to have taken drugs, holding strong left-wing views and certainly unbelievers.
And yet she didn’t reject such people from being her associates. I wonder how many “tolerant” members of HNH could say the same about being friends with Christians or right-wingers?
Political Graveyard
One of the reasons HNH is so obsessively opposed to Reform UK politicians like Ann and Washing-Machine Hitler is that they are supposedly Islamophobic for objecting to the ongoing Great Replacement of the traditional, native, white Christian people of the West.
Before her death, Widdecombe was reportedly in talks to develop a documentary highlighting the plight of Pakistani Christian and other religious minority girls who were kidnapped, forced to marry a Muslim, and then convert to their new husband’s faith, which makes her sound like much less of a “BIGOT!” than members of certain other faiths out there today.
Yet, oddly, while being highly pro-Islam and pro-immigration themselves, HNH currently have no pages on their website devoted toward exposing the religiously-influenced attitudes of Britain’s increasing number of Muslim MPs about the very same issues Catholic Ann cared so much about.
Ayoub Khan, for example, is a devout Muslim barrister elected as a so-called “Gaza Independent” MP in a Muslim-dominated area of the English city of Birmingham in 2024—largely by voters angry about the UK government’s support for Israel. Many of these voters were clearly Muslims, but others were anti-Israel non-religious left-wingers. When asked if he supported gay marriage himself, Khan was thus in an awkward electoral position: say yes and he would alienate his Muslim supporters, say no and he would alienate his left-wing ones. So, he said the following: “My personal opinion as a Muslim is well-known. You only have to look at what other Muslims believe, what’s taught.”
In other words, no, of course he doesn’t support gay marriage because the Koran doesn’t tell him to, any more than the Bible told Ann Widdecombe to do so. However, Khan did add that he “would not dictate what people do in their personal lives.” That was literally Ann Widdecombe’s own position on the matter, too, as quoted directly by HNH; so where is Ayoub Khan’s equally prominent online profile as an alleged “Islamofascist” on HNH’s website to go with Ann’s? Nowhere.
Another “Gaza Independent” MP, Shockat Adam, seems equally unkeen on gay marriage (or, indeed, on most forms of abortion). When asked if he supported same-sex marriage and would vote for it in Parliament, all he was prepared to say was that, if it came down to it, he would vote “with my constituents” because he believed in “consultative democracy.” But as Adam was elected on a single-issue platform of support for Gaza, it seems pretty certain most of his voter-base were Muslims, too, whose religion naturally tells them to be against the pseudo-sacrament. But again, Mr. Adam doesn’t get a special HNH webpage devoted to him being a “Nazi” because he is a Muslim not a Catholic. Instead, Adam seems rather on board with the basic message of Hope Not Hate, to judge by the following tweet of his condemning anti-immigrant riots a few years back:
Unlike the mealy-mouthed Islamo-leftist Muslim MPs mentioned above, Ann Widdecombe’s main “flaw” was simply that she actually had the courage to openly voice her own religiously-derived political convictions rather than disingenuously disguising and talking around them for political gain or to avoid criticism by the media—or maybe even simply to avoid being physically attacked.
Given the relentless demonization of her by the “anti-fascist” Left, you can certainly see why Widdecombe’s party leader, Nigel Farage, has suggested her killing may have been a Charlie Kirk-style act of terror, perhaps motivated by some sort of political grudge. Many of the people discussed above certainly sound as if they wanted Widdecombe dead because of her beliefs, religious or otherwise.
It may be, in the end, that Ann Widdecombe turns out not to have been murdered purely for being a Catholic. But she has certainly been falsely condemned by the court of polite public opinion to burn in Hell because of it.
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