She never did learn to be boring, and Westminster is a quieter place for it.
Ann Widdecombe, who died this week at the age of 76, was the kind of politician that parties quietly pray for and publicly struggle to contain. Opinionated, unspinnable, and utterly uninterested in saying the safe thing when the honest thing was right there waiting to be said.
Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, put it well when he noted that she always answered the question. That sounds like a low bar. In modern politics, it’s practically a superpower.
She served as Shadow Home Secretary under William Hague, and her 1997 conference speech, in which she declared Michael Howard had “something of the night about him,” became one of the most quoted lines in British political history. It wasn’t scripted to go viral. She just meant it.
That was Widdecombe’s particular gift. She could be pugnacious, even infuriating if you were on the receiving end, but there was never any real mystery about where she stood. Plenty in Westminster who knew her, whether they agreed with her or not, found her immensely likeable. That combination, conviction without cruelty, is rarer than it should be.
“She had this quality of making you feel like she’d actually thought about it,” one former colleague recalled. “Even when you thought she was completely wrong.”
Her later years took her further into the public eye, not through policy but through personality. Strictly Come Dancing in 2010, at the age of 63, introduced her to an entirely new generation who had no idea who the Home Office minister was but absolutely loved watching her Cha-Cha. She came last, nearly every week, and was brilliant television throughout.
She was a Remainer turned Brexit Party MEP, a Catholic convert who opposed abortion and same-sex marriage, and a woman who managed to earn genuine affection from people who disagreed with her on almost everything. That’s not nothing. In fact, right now, it feels like quite a lot.
The question worth sitting with is whether a figure like Widdecombe could emerge from today’s political culture, or whether the relentless demand for message discipline would sand down exactly the edges that made her worth listening to.
