I want to think through what is going to happen if we discover that Ann Widdecombe was a martyr: both a Christian martyr and a martyr to free speech—and to the society that we have all taken for granted and lived in for a while.
Let me ask to you to accompany me through this journey ?Perhaps you can help me in the comments, and this can be turned into a conversation.
A burglary gone wrong?
First of all, there has to be the thought that this was a burglary gone wrong.
It is extremely unlikely.
It is true that Ann Widdecombe had a swimming pool in her garden, but she bought it out of the proceeds from her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing—or Strictly Pay Me Some Money for Pretending to Be a Sack of Potatoes. She was not a rich woman.
Her dancing was not an obvious talent. In fact, it was no talent at all. But she became a public entertainer for us because she had a great sense of humour.
She did not have much money. There was no security at her house. She had books. She said she had lots and lots and lots of books.
So let us give this some thought.
Maybe a second-hand bookseller visited her, decided he wanted the books, she resisted, and he killed her. It is just not very likely.
Maybe, at some point, a burglar arrived on spec, walked in, looked around, decided there might be things he wanted to take that were not on public display? -and she got in the way, and he killed her.
It is not very likely.
The fact is that when she died, the whole left-of-centre community, it seemed to me, went online to denigrate her and call her the most terrible names. They welcomed her death. They oozed violence. They celebrated her termination.
These ‘nice, kind’ people—I say “nice” and “kind” because that is the way they present themselves; they are the people who think of themselves as doing nice, kind things—used levels of abuse that were obscene.
We should not speculate about what kind of person might have killed her. But if it was somebody from the left rather than the right, it might be somebody who was enraged by her moral stance.
There are people who are enraged. They suffer from gender dysphoria. They are men who want to present themselves as women, and they are ratcheting up a campaign of increasing violence, directed at the moment, as it happens, at MPs. They call themselves, “Trans Bash Back.”
Ann was a retired MP and very vocal about morality.
It could also, of course, have been an immigrant who disliked Ann’s call to deal with immigration. Which is why the police immediately proclaimed this not to be “terror-related.” What more cogent reason could there be for thinking it must have been then?
They represent a section of our society whom we call ‘‘actors of terror.’ In fact, we have coined “terror” for only one group in society.
So here we have two groups, both of whom are known for violence: the terrorist group who will bomb arenas and kill our children, and the gender-dysphoria group, calling themselves ‘Bash Back’ who beat people up and are threatening more violence. Ann was ‘bashed-back’ - on the head - and it killed her. Coincidence? We wait to find out.
It is not for us to point fingers, but those would be the two most obvious groups from which an assassin might come.
Or it could be somebody who wanted her books….
Why trust has broken down
We are going to use our common sense, because one of the problems we face at the moment was foreshadowed by Southport.
When Southport happened, it was almost as if the people of this country had finally had enough. Some of them went online and said things for which they were jailed.
The police told lies to us about who the suspect was. We stopped trusting the police, if we had trusted them before.
I made a small video the other day saying that, with the record of the police at Southport, with their arresting Henry Novak for his own murder, and now with this attempt to arrest, quote, “a white man”, they only ever give us the skin colour if they want to distract us from the skin colour.
It is a form of inverse racism.
So they tried to put the lid on everything by saying: “We have arrested a white man.”
A couple of hours later, they quietly released the white man. Now they have found another white man, and they will not tell us anything about him at all.
They want to keep the lid on the situation, but the lid will come off.
What martyrdom would mean
If the lid comes off and it is not an ideological murder, but something else, I cannot think what—apart from the second-hand book plot, which I am not convinced by—then it will be an ideological murder.
In that case, it will turn Ann Widdecombe into a kind of martyr for us: an unlikely Catholic martyr for the truth, or a political martyr for the old ways.
What will we do if we discover that she was assassinated because she dared to speak out for our way of life?
There is nothing to be gained when human beings express themselves through violence, apart from self-defence.
But we have come to the point where we need self-defence.
I want to suggest, I think, a political way of trying to release some of the pressure, so that perhaps only the threat of violence will be needed, and not violence itself.
A Catholic third way
There has been some Catholic thought about a different way—a third way, you might almost call it, though the phrase has been tainted by Tony Blair.
It is a different way that charts a course between capitalism on one side and socialism on the other.
It was promoted by two Catholic thinkers, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and it is called distributism.
