It was fitting that when, following her murder at her Dartmoor hamlet home, the BBC ran some library footage of Ann Widdecombe she chose to be seen flipping through the Catholic Herald magazine. As a former editor, I only knew her from her eagle-sharp but life-affirming columns and as a longstanding parliamentarian and Catholic convert who never wavered in her faith in her religion or her belief in British sovereignty. 

But I did not know her personally as her association with the Herald was before my time. But then, last November, I got a call from a friend saying that Ann Widdecombe had agreed to travel to Shropshire from Devon –not an easy journey by train or car – to address the Christmas dinner of a West Midlands branch of Reform. She would be ‘touring’ the area for two days, combining some sightseeing with some political talks, and would I like to host a lunch for her at my house? 

Of course, I said “yes’, as we had plenty in common, not the least Catholic faith and a sense of despair with such “life issues” as assisted dying, and ever-increasing secularisation, although I didn’t share her fanaticism in regards to being anti-hunting. 

So I invited around some guests and Ann came to lunch in early December. In person Ann was very different from the slightly headmistress-like and bossy arch-Conservative figure that matriarch figure that I expected from her TV appearances and debating clips in the Commons (I did not watch her on Strictly).  She was warm, slightly shy, funny and, for a politician who had considerable “popular” appeal, clearly was a well read intellectual. She was entirely at ease whether discussing the new Pope Leo, repealing the ECHR, Nigel Farage and – naturally – her unswerving views on immigration. 

I later looked up her education which gave some clues as to her intellectual confidence. She attended the Royal Naval School in Singapore and La Sainte Union Convent School in Bath, before reading Latin at the University of Birmingham. She later studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

It seems almost impossible to imagine that this kind, warm-hearted conviction politician of the convent old-school was killed in her own home in an idyllic Dartmoor hamlet. The Devon and Cornwall police reported serious head injuries. The episode seemed straight out of Midsomer Murders with no clear motive being established at first and the police stressing that there was no indication of a political motive, which is the progressive equivalent of saying ‘no foul play’.

But even when reports – discovered by journalists not police – emerged (backed by CCTV footage) that a 28 year old man from Rotherham had driven nearly 300 miles to Widdecombe’s house with a large ‘stick’ or bar in his car, police seemed unwilling to admit that her killing could have had a political motive. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, who had visited her home to lay flowers, quickly said it looked as if the murder was ‘premeditated’, although he didn’t expressly say it was because of being an outspoken Reform spokesperson. He was vilified in some quarters for remarks that turned out to be prescient and true.

The police’s initial refusal to acknowledge that her death was an act of political terror is both shaming and embarrassing. As I wrote in The Mace within a day that Widdecombe’s badly battered 78 year body, covered in blood, was discovered by her carer: “the fact that Ann was Reform’s immigration spokesman cannot simply be swotted away.”

The strangely guilty way that the media, and politicians from all parties, have reacted to Widdecombe’s shocking and brutal death – going from some polite tributes from the right when people first thought she had died of natural causes, to her being heralded across the political spectrum as a national saint at Starmer’s last PMQ’s – shows the double-standards that can operate when a politician of the right, or left, is murdered in a targeted attack.

Douglas Murray has written a scathing piece on this subject in his Spectator column this week whose headline hits the mark: “The hijacking of Ann Widdecombe’s death” He notes that “there is the rule that a death must not be ‘politicised’ if it occurs on the political right”. In the case of Labour MP Jo Cox, “I do not recall the Labour party, the Remain campaign or her closest friends in parliament avoiding the politicisation of her appalling murder. Indeed, there was a moment when everybody intending to vote Brexit was made to feel almost personally responsible for her death at the hands of a lone madman.”

There is another reason, not written about, that also partly explains the way Ann’s tragic and shocking death has become such a political melodrama with all sides collectively championing her as the very model of a principled politician, somebody who died as a political martyr, battered to death for her convictions.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith was quick to say that Ann’s death was ‘not an Agatha Christie’ mystery. Yes, the police seem to have their suspect behind bars so it is not a Whodunnit. But the way that Widdecombe’s death has been reported is very much as a ‘Whydunnit”.

A week on, although a 28 year old white suspect has been arrested on counter terrorism charges, we still don’t know what the reasons are. There have been leaks that the suspect may have wanted to kill Widdecombe for her right-wing views, or those on homosexuality. Counter-terrorist officers are also examining whether extreme hostility to the Reform UK party played a role as well as well as considering whether “leftwing, anarchist and single-issue terrorism (LASIT) played a role in the suspect’s alleged motivation”, according to the Guardian.

Against all these swirling rumours and speculative motives is the fact that one reason Widdecombe’s death has been so shocking is that it took place around midday in a sleepy and idyllic Dartmoor hamlet that detective mystery script writers would call a “closed community”. That’s why Morse’s mysteries take place around the university town of Oxford and Miss Marple is usually called in when the natural order of an English village is suddenly violated by a brutal murder and a member of the community is found battered to death by a bloodied candlestick in the old vicarage.

The Devon village of Haytor Vale is exactly the sort of village that an Agatha Christie murder would take place. It is the sort of village – population 200 – where people feel so safe they leave their doors unlocked. Indeed, asked in 2013 if she was ever afraid of being attacked because she could easily be found, Widdecombe said: “I am never scared, or lonely. I’m content.”

Part of the nation’s shock and grief is because we cannot believe, or understand, why a man would drive all the way from the urban city of Rotherham – the second most dangerous town in South Yorkshire – to carry out Anne’s murder at Widdecombe’s Rest – the name she gave to her Dartmoor home. We not only want the suspect charged and put behind bars for life but, most of all in this shocking political whydunnit, we want to know his motivations. We need an explanation. Only then can the natural order that the sleepy village of Haytor Vale seemed to symbolise, be seen to be restored.

It’s fair to say that WH Auden would have been fascinated by the media response to Widdecombe’s brutal death. In his 1948 essay, The Guilty Vicarage, Auden set out why he was addicted to reading murder mysteries, which had a formula. It starts with the “peaceful state before the murder”, followed by the killing, leading to denials and ‘false clues” (such as in the original arrest of a 26 year old tradesman from Newton Abbot, later discharged); then a motive is revealed, the murderer arrested and a return to the peaceful village state with justice restored and a form of catharsis for all.

Ann Widecombe was a formidable force in British politics and media for many decades. Her vibrant, colourful and uncompromising career was characterized by her deeply held conservative and Catholic convictions. From the Commons benches to the BBC’s Strictly studio ballroom, she remained an unforgettable figure of the modern age where celebrity and politics often become bedfellows. 

Writing in the Herald, our former leader writer Melanie McDonagh, who had reviewed Anne’s autobiography, wrote that one paragraph in the book had stood out. Ann wrote that as a single woman, she was always happy when she returned home at the end of the day and closed her door, and could do what she liked – “She felt safe.” 

“To be killed in her own home in an idyllic Dartmoor hamlet seems straight out of Midsomer Murders with no clear motive being established”

Melanie also corrected a common misconception about Ann, namely that she had no domestic personal life other than her cats. As Melanie said: “She was not, in fact, necessarily single by choice – she had a boyfriend at Oxford, Colin, whom she had hoped to marry. But the issue is: if an elderly, highly respected single woman is not safe in her own home, then the country is gone to hell.” 

It is a strange reflection on the merry-go-round of modern public life that the same classical scholar and formidable politician – first elected as an MP in the Thatcher years – who once lectured her parliamentary colleagues on the stern virtues of moral rectitude should, in her twilight years, find herself becoming a household name among the sequins of a BBC Saturday night entertainment programme. One can almost imagine the late Queen Elizabeth raising a quizzical eyebrow, yet, as she watched on the sofa, nodding in silent, awed approval at so brazen a display of political self-parody.

To view Ann Widdecombe merely as a pantomime political dame, however, is to overlook the granite-like core of her character. Throughout her twenty-three years as the Member for Maidstone, she was a magnificent but shrewd anachronism. In an era of political fluidity and ideological compromise, she stood as a pillar of unwavering certainty. She was kind and funny but also possessed a brisk, unapologetic manner that terrified the faint of heart and delighted those who harboured a quiet nostalgia for a more authoritarian age.

Her conversion to Rome was unsurprising to those who knew her. The appeal was finding an institution that dared to “call a sin a sin,” and her resolute faith – which I sensed at our December lunch – was entirely of a piece with her worldview. She had little time for the creeping moral relativism of the modern world. Where others sought to soften the edges of doctrine, she brandished her newly found faith like a well-tempered halberd, striking out at the progressive and woke political establishment. She would have been appalled to learn that Liberal Democrat Party have now effectively banning any self-professed Christian from standing for parliament as a prospective MP. 

Her faith and convictions are – both political and religious – is what she will be remembered for. One of her career roles that has not had any attention is that she was a former “Mistress of the Keys”, which is Britain’s oldest Catholic literary society. The president is Cardinal Vincent Nichols who was written to members with a personal tribute to Widecombe singling out one particular gift which he regarded as characteristic of this formidable Widdecombe.

“She was a person of great freedom” he wrote. “She was not afraid. Fear, or timidity, is often the enemy of freedom. But in her, freedom won over fear every time. She was ready to say what she held to be true. She was free to grant to others the freedom to say, in their turn, what they thought. She was ready to argue the toss in a measured and thoughtful manner. She was free to change her mind, her allegiance, when she thought it right to do so. She also had that personal freedom to enter into fun and enhance it with her joy in life.”

When recently asked if she feared death her answer was ‘No’. And her reason was firm and unflinching. She had no fear of death because, as she said, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’.

“Ann was a woman of profound Christian faith which found its fullest expression in the Catholic Church” said Nichols. “That was the source of her freedom. That was the foundation upon which she could face all challenges. That was the gift that shone most brightly in her remarkable life.”

Ann regarded the very concept of a permissive society as a regrettable, if temporary, lapse in the natural order of things. As a junior minister at the Home Office under John Major, her tenure was marked by a stern belief in the deterrent effect of penal discipline, a stance that earned her both the admiration of the conservative faithful and the indignation of the progressive chattering classes. She had no time for what she termed the “whingers” of the feminist movement, viewing their grievances as trifling when compared to the eternal verities of church and state.

Yet, it was in the years following her formal retirement from Westminster that her character truly blossomed as an unlikely ‘National Treasure’ celebrity. Exchanging the green benches of the Commons for the glittering studio ballroom of Strictly Come Dancing was a brilliant stroke of re-invention. 

To see this political matron-like moral defender of the traditional moral order being dragged across the floor by a handsome professional dancer, and seemingly enjoying it all, was to witness a spectacle of uniquely British absurdity. She did not dance naturally well; she danced with the same slightly frightening purpose that she brought to her Commons and Brexit MEP speeches in Brussels, where she often sat next to Nigel Farage.

Farage led tributes to her after her death saying he is “deeply, deeply upset” by the former MP’s death, who was also a long term political colleague and friend. “Ann was an extraordinary woman – without doubt, the best-known and most outstanding female politician in Britain since Margaret Thatcher.” He added that Reform UK is “certainly a much worse place without her.”

Indeed, the public, sensing a genuine individual with conviction in a world of manufactured celebrities, have now embraced her as a political saint despite far from all agreeing with her. She may not have been universally loved, but, as the wide range of political tributes across all parties testify – from Starmer to Badenoch – she was acknowledged as a British politician who stood up – uncompromisingly – for what she believed in. In a political world saturated by bland and progressive focus-grouped careerists, there was something undeniably refreshing—and occasionally terrifying—about a woman who would brook no contradiction. She has departed the stage in shocking and mysterious circumstances, leaving a void that no amount of sequins or outspoken right-wing rhetoric will ever quite fill.