Brexit leader Nigel Farage has hailed the life of “force of nature” Ann Widdecombe, the stalwart social conservative who was a Conservative Member of Parliament and Minister, a Brexit Party Member of the European Parliament with Farage, and who came to be known to a whole new generation as a reality television star.
Ann Widdecombe has died aged 78. Born in Bath, England in 1947 and the daughter of an Admiralty official, Widdecombe read Latin, and Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at university and was elected a Conservative Member of Parliament under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987. She held two ministerial roles under Tory Prime Minister John Major and was a major player in conservative politics in the 1990s.
The staunch social conservative fell out with the party under its modernising leader David Cameron in the early 2000s, however, as he dragged the Tories leftwards. A long time Eurosceptic, Widdecombe voted against Cameron to back Brexit in 2016 and defected to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in 2019 and was elected as one of Britain’s final Members of the European Union for the party.
Hailing the life of one of Britain’s best known small-c conservatives, Nigel Farage reflected on Friday that Widdecombe coming to the Brexit Party was a “big moment and a huge boost” to Brexit. He wrote: “She played a decisive role in getting Brexit over the line and will be missed by us all.” In follow-up remarks to Talk Radio, Mr Farage continued: “She is the best-known female politician since Margaret Thatcher and I don’t think anyone else comes close… She was a force of nature, quite a remarkable woman, and quite a sad sudden death”.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, right, greets Ann Widdecombe, left, with Lady Olga Maitland during a reception at No 10 Downing Street for members of the Women and Families for Defence, at which a petition was handed in to “place on record Britain’s appreciation for the achievements of NATO in preserving peace in Europe for 35 years.” (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)
Widdecombe converted to Catholicism in the 1990s after the Church of England that she’d been brought up in pushed ahead with its break with millennia of practice to approve the ordination of women. She worked against the expansion of abortion laws while in Parliament, opposed what is euphemistically known as ‘assisted suicide’, and voted against the liberalisation of gay rights including the repeal of Section 28.
A hardliner on law and order, Widdecombe also backed the very longstanding position of the majority in Britain that the death penalty should be brought back for some crimes. Indeed, her route into politics had been through anti-anti-war activism, in opposition to anti-nuclear weapons campaigners of the late Cold War. To this end, she co-founded and led the pro-nuclear deterrent group Women and Families for Defence.
A common theme in printed obituaries in British newspaper today was observing her implacability, and the Daily Telegraph noted, among others:
What appealed about Widdecombe most was her total frankness and incorruptibility. Columnists might scoff at her self-confessed virginity and her unfashionably robust opinions, but in an era of spin she earned plaudits for saying exactly what she thought.
Widdecombe became known to a new generation with reality television, appearing on widely watched programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing and reaching the 21010 quarter-final, and Celebrity Big Brother.
While she was appointed to be Reform UK’s immigration spokesman, much of her campaigning in her latter years was on undoing the changes to modern Britain that evidently discourage young people from forming families and having children. Speaking to Breitbart News in 2024 in one of her final political interviews, Widdecombe said she’s been agitating against anti-family rules in the British system for years and especially how traditional families are punished by the tax code.
As reported then:
…a family with one high-earning parent in work and another at home doing the important but unpaid work of raising children pays considerably more tax than two working parents earning the same amount between them.
Widdecombe said this system is “wholly wrong because that is penalising the family that says ‘one of us is going to raise the kids, the other is going out to work’, it could be either way. It actually penalises that family which want to bring their children up as once we all took it for granted that we would bring our children up.”
These deficiencies in the system are not quirks or unintended consequences, she said, remarking: “I feel very strongly, I’ve been saying this for a very long time, that the Conservatives have been anti-family for a very long time.”
The purpose of the system is to force women into work, even if given the choice they’d prefer to spend more time with their own young children, rather than farm them out to day-care. Of this obsession in the Conservative party with mothers as economically inactive or a drag on the economy, Widdecombe said: “I got the impression Cameron and Osborne wouldn’t rest easy until every woman was out at work… they’re never going to be happy until every woman is out at work.”