In her student days, Ann Widdecombe's first Oxford Union presentation was an attack on censorship, even if practicing free speech turned out to be risky or painful.
A half-century later, the former Conservative MP and outspoken Catholic returned to the legendary debate club to address the same subject, at one point explaining why she once agreed to share a speaker's platform with an Irish Republican Army activist.
"So, you wanted to blow me up," Widdecombe said in 2019, referring to the 1984 Grand Hotel bombing in Brighton, England, that killed five people and injured over 30. The target was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the assembled Conservative Party conference.
Widdecombe said the IRA supporter responded: "Well, I didn't want to do it
myself."
Enemies of free speech are "snowflakes and totalitarians," said Widdecombe, in the brash style that made her one of England's most loved, and hated, public figures. "Nobody has the right to live their lives being protected from offense, or from insult, or from hurt feelings. It is an occupational hazard … and if you really can't take it, become a hermit."
Widdecombe, 78, was found dead on July 9after what police first called a burglary that led to murder. The case is now being investigated as terrorism. The accused attacker drove nearly 300 miles to her isolated Devon home, where he struck her in the head 21 times with a hammer during an encounter that appears to have lasted two minutes.
A key question: Was she killed because of her beliefs?
"She was the most prominent British Catholic politician whose faith actually informed her politics," noted philosopher Joseph Shaw of the Catholic Answers organization.
"She spent her long political career defending human life and all sorts of causes that she considered just," he wrote for the journal First Things. "At the same time, she appeared on numerous television programs and never took herself too seriously. This combination of qualities – a sense of fun, a disinterested commitment to justice, and a powerful supernatural faith – is one that her detractors are completely unable to understand."
Widdecombe converted to Catholicism in 1993 and had close ties to Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery. She occasionally served as a lector at Westminster Cathedral, where Archbishop Richard Moth offered a Mass for the repose of her soul.
Reform Party leader Nigel Farage called Widdecombe the "most outstanding female politician in Britain since Margaret Thatcher. … She was a devout Christian and somebody with strong socially conservative views – perhaps not popular in the top circles of modern Britain, but Ann stood up for what she believed, regardless of fashion."
While accounts of Widdecombe's life have stressed politics, it's important to consider the implications of her death, especially if she was killed because of public stands she took defending Catholic teachings, said Gavin Ashenden, another Catholic convert who, as an Anglican priest, served as chaplain for Queen Elizabeth II from 2008-2017.
"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," wrote Ashenden on his "New English Catholic" Substack.
On social media, some of Widdecombe's critics have celebrated her death, he noted. "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."
In Catholic thought, including the work of Pope Benedict XIV, martyrs are defined as persons killed by persecutors who are clearly motivated by "odium fidei (hatred of the faith)." The victims do not seek death but accept it rather than betraying their beliefs.
It's important for British officials to be more candid about the circumstances surrounding Widdecombe's death, argued Ashenden. In political terms, this appears to have been an "ideological murder" and an act of terror.
"If the lid comes off," he wrote, the facts may "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?"
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Did Ann Widdecombe die a political and Catholic martyr? | Mattingly
