The Kindness of Ann Widdecombe

1947 to 2026

Ann Widdecombe was killed at her home on Dartmoor on Thursday. An arrested man has been released from custody but the law will do its work, and that is the first and last this piece will say of the horrifying events of this week. someone has taken her death. They do not get her life. Her life belongs to those who loved her, and to a country that spent forty years discovering, somewhat to its own surprise, that it did.

She was a constant figure in the imagination of the United Kingdom for decades, a rock on the beach as the tide went out, others eddying around her while she stayed exactly where her conscience had planted her. Governments rose and sank. Fashions in opinion came through like weather. Ann remained, immovable and unbiddable, and the country came to love her for the very quality it had once mocked, which was that she could not be moved.

Everybody knows the public woman. One would have to have been living in a hole in the ground not to. Born in Bath in 1947, convent educated, Latin at Birmingham, PPE at Oxford, twenty-three years as Member of Parliament for Maidstone, minister for employment and then for prisons, the verdict on Michael Howard that entered the language, the convictions held without apology through every season in which they were unfashionable, which was most of them. Then the improbable second life, Strictly and the flying entrance, the panto, the national treasure status she accepted with visible suspicion, as if it might be a trick. And then the third life, the one in which I knew her.

We had met a few times before the day she landed at Southampton docks in the spring of 2019, was collected at the quayside and rushed through the entire nomination process in a single day so that she could stand that evening as a Brexit Party candidate and help change history. Most politicians of her seniority arrange their comebacks like state visits. Ann stepped off a boat at seventy-one and went straight to work. From that day she was a colleague. Very quickly she was a friend.

And it is as a friend that she really shone, which is why I want to set down not the record, which is public, but the kindness, which was private, and which I saw at close quarters for seven years.

During that first campaign I found myself driving the country with my son in tow, then twelve years old. We arrived at one rally, at Fylde FC, four hours early, and the poor chap faced an afternoon of terminal boredom in an empty football club. The only speaker already there was Ann. My son was in awe. This was the woman from Strictly. She saw my predicament at a glance and waved him over, and for the next three and a half hours she played with him. She helped him with his homework. I would pop by every now and then to find the two of them engrossed in a book, or laughing uproariously, and at one point playing some strange version of visible hide and seek, the former shadow home secretary and a twelve-year-old boy, in the bowels of a lower league Lancashire football ground.

From that day to her last, the first question she asked me, every single time, was about him. Not politics. Not the news. Not the latest convulsion of the party or the state of the world. My son. My Christmas cards were always addressed to him first. Her kindness was not a gesture. It had follow-through, year upon year, which is the rarest kind.

She was funny in a register entirely her own. On day one in the Strasbourg parliament I stepped out of an office into one of those interminable corridors to see her at a distance, walking in lockstep with Claire Fox, the two of them deep in conversation. Two women of ferocious conviction from utterly different traditions, the convent Tory and the old revolutionary, neither of them over five foot four, moving down the corridor like a single determined engine. She looked up at my somewhat awed face as they passed and twinkled. ‘Two galleons passing through’, she said, and sailed on.

The galleon had a flagship role she relished. On the WhatsApp group of former MEPs she was the slightly terrifying ringmaster who ran an infamous digital swearbox. After one particularly bad performance by the England football team, when the Daubney’s and Patrick O’Flynn’s of this world were finding the defeat hard to bear in the traditional language of the disappointed fan, a message came through.

‘Right gentlemen, it is clearly getting late’.
’Daubney, that is eight pounds fifty. Tennant, seven pounds…’
She reeled off the true cost of England’s defeat to the penny.
’It is obviously past your bedtime. Go to bed’.
And like sheepish schoolboys they responded.
’Yes Ann’.
’Sorry Ann’.
’Will do Ann’.

The group went to bed.

Once, just once, she slipped. A single ‘damn’, and for her a simple damn was a greater faux pas than any quantity of blue-typoed language from the rest of us. Manna from a Devon Heaven.
Everybody piled in, gleeful as children who have caught the headmistress smoking, and she took a self-imposed twenty-pound hit, on account of having maintained the part tongue-in-cheek, part entirely real high ground for so long. The proceeds, totted up over the months, were translated in due course into a fair few bottles of Epernay’s finest. Moral authority, worn that lightly, is a form of art.

But the story I keep returning to is the steaks. During Covid, over Christmas, I was locked down, quarantined and broke, and she knew it. Every week a parcel of steaks would arrive, posted from a Devon farm. No note of ceremony, no acknowledgement sought.

When I thanked her she was appalled, as if I had committed some indiscretion. Her charity had a grammar. It was to be done and never spoken of, and the thanking of her was very nearly a breach of contract. The Gospel she believed in is quite specific on this point, about the left hand and the right, and she practised it to the letter while an industry of public compassion practised the opposite.

Reform branches up and down the country can tell their own versions. She gave full-throated support to people who saw her for what she was, turning up, speaking, encouraging, long past the age when anyone would have begrudged her the armchair and the cats.

And there were the phone calls. I cannot say how many times my phone went when the going was tough, and brief, courteous, deadly serious words were spoken, couched always in wit. I called them ‘backbone stiffeners’.

None were ever strictly necessary. All were appreciated. She had an unerring sense of when a friend was wobbling and a settled view that wobbling was a condition best treated early.

None of this kindness was soft. It came from the same place as the convictions, a belief that people matter absolutely, that duty is not negotiable, and that sentimentality is what you get when feeling is not backed by action. She opposed what I did not oppose and held lines I would not have held, and she would have considered it a poor sort of tribute to pretend otherwise. She did not require agreement. She required seriousness. Grant her that and you had her loyalty for life, and her loyalty was a fortified position.

She once said on a chat show sofa that “we get one go this side of eternity”, and the phrase carries more weight than the setting suggested, because she meant both halves. One go, and she used every hour, the Commons, the Parliament she helped Britain leave, the stage, the page, the donkeys in the Holy Land, the boy in a football club in Lancashire. And this side of eternity, because her faith was the bedrock under the rock, and she was certain that the tide which goes out is not the end of the story. She has gone to the judgement she never doubted, and I would not care to be the advocate opposing her.

The public will remember the voice, the perm, the immovability, the laughter she provoked and then, gradually, the laughter she shared. Those of us who knew her will remember the other ledger, kept in secret, entry after entry of unrepaid kindness. The rock is gone from the beach and the shoreline is strange without her.

My son, who is now old enough to understand what he was given that afternoon at Fylde, mourns her. So do I. May she rest in the peace of the Christ she served, and may perpetual light shine upon her.