Police launch murder investigation into death of Ann Widdecombe

[muriel_volestrangler]

Source: The Guardian

A murder investigation has been launched after the suspicious death of the former MP Ann Widdecombe at her home on Dartmoor, in Devon, police have said.

Officers were called to an address at Haytor by the ambulance service at around 11.40am on Thursday.

Widdecombe, 78, was found deceased within the property and had “sustained serious injuries”, Devon and Cornwall police said.

Her next-of-kin had been informed and were being supported by specially trained officers, the force added.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/10/police-investigating-death-of-ann-widdecombe

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Yet Widdecombe was a deeply serious politician, an MP for Maidstone in Kent for 23 years (Maidstone and the Weald from 1997) and a competent minister in the decidedly unglamorous departments of Social Security and Employment, and with responsibility for prisons at the Home Office. If her persona consciously or otherwise mimicked a long line of robustly rightwing, uncompromising Tory women, she was brighter, personally kinder, and more sensitive than her self-confident carapace indicated.

In politics, her intensity and dogmatic shrillness counted against her – the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart suggested that planes coming into Heathrow over Westminster had to be diverted when she rose to speak – as much as Tory sexism. Her lack of promotion annoyed but did not change her: “If somebody wants to turn round and say, Widdecombe, you’re overweight and you’ve got crooked teeth, I say: you’re right, so what?” she told Sue Lawley on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1999.

Those who appeared with her in broadcasts were sometimes taken aback by the nervousness and shyness masked by her stridently expressed views. She was opposed to abortion and liberalisation of LGBTQ+ rights, both prompted by her religious views, was Eurosceptic – eventually campaigning for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party and being expelled from the Conservatives in 2019 – was a climate change sceptic and supported the reintroduction of the death penalty. Her most notable breach of rightwing orthodoxy was her resolute opposition to fox hunting.
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In 1990, following the election of John Major as party leader and prime minister, Widdecombe was made a junior minister in the Department of Social Security, dealing with benefits. Three years later she was moved to Employment and in 1995 became prisons minister at the Home Office under Michael Howard, the then home secretary.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/10/ann-widdecombe-obituary

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