The Political Uses of Ann Widdecombe

Nigel Farage has used every opportunity to fabricate a persecution complex. Being criticised for pocketing £5m and facing a standards inquiry is the establishment out to get him. Questions about his relationship to a moneyed fraudster and his mother is so much hounding. Having his by-election stunt backfire as all the other parties rightly refused to play his game is an elite conspiracy. The appearance of wounding is central not just to Farage's increasingly unpopular populism, but the politics of the right in general.

The murder of Ann Widdecombe which, accordingly to the police, now looks like a targeted killing has become an unseemly Reform jamboree because it plays into the victimhood dynamic they continually set up. A photo opp of leading Reform figures laying wreathes, plenty of buddy-buddy photos of Farage and Richard Tice with Widdecombe flooding Reform-affiliated social media, Farage moaning about the lack of security afforded him even though he declined a state-funded package offered him this year, and his claims to receive "300 threats" a month. Widdecombe was useful in life to the Reform cause as an able media performer who played well with a layer of Tory-Reform voters, and she continues to have crude uses in her demise.

Understandably, how Reform have exploited her death has attracted most attention and criticism. But far less focus has resolved on how politics generally have used Widdecombe's passing. You will have seen the tributes. Every leading politician has given the same one. "I disagreed with her politics", they say, before offering some humanising anecdote, or tribute to her energy, or her formidability, or how, once you got to know her, she was actually quite nice and kind. That all these things might be true are beside the point. Their endless repetition constitutes the received wisdom, the illusio of politics. To put it another way, Widdecombe was being treated as if her views were of no consequence, that her opinions were weightless. This is politics as if it's a dinner party, where everyone chips in with a point and position, and are so much colour that might have made for a memorable evening.

But politics does have weight. It does have consequences. Widdecombe's voting record as an MP out her on the wrong side of every single argument over the 23 years of her parliamentary career. As a social security minister and later as prisons minister, she oversaw attacks on the most vulnerable people and, famously, defended the handcuffing of pregnant prisoners giving birth. As a key Reform spokesperson, this ever-so-kind woman spent her dotage building a political party that exploits and tacitly encourages racist violence, and would threaten the limited democracy we have in this country if they form or become part of the next government. But mentioning all this is the height of rudeness, because politics presents as a public service where politicians are motivated by the noblest of intentions. Where they differ is how best to serve their constituents. It cannot be acknowledged for what it really is - the more or less transparent struggle of interests. The illusio must be maintained, even if the only people who really buy into it these days are the politicians themselves.

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