As after the violent death of Charlie Kirk a year ago, a great deal is being made in right-wing online discourse of the rare outbursts of Schadenfreude which the violent death of Ann Widdecombe has elicited from certain extreme-leftists and certain homosexual activists mindful of Widdicombe’s long, unbending opposition to their cause. But no rational or sensible observer could possibly see these occasional excesses of critical vigour – invariably backtracked on as soon as any moral counter-pressure was exerted – as the principal fault of the current discourse on Widdecombe’s death. What has rendered most Britons’ X feeds unreadable and TV screens unwatchable these past two days has been, besides the tide of maudlin sentimentality reminiscent of the “Kirk slop” wave of the autumn of 2025, the absurd hyperbole with which Widdecombe’s intellectual and moral qualities are being spoken of. Podcasters and daytime TV anchorpersons will speak, in X posts, of Widdecombe’s “profound wisdom, dazzling wit and incomparable personal charm” and then post, as purported proof and illustration of these claims, a video of a conversation of theirs with Widdecombe in which the old parliamentarian delivers nothing but a stream of platitudes and Tory talking points that she might as well have been reading directly out of that morning’s copy of the Daily Mail.
The problem here might be read, of course, as part of the much wider problem of the lack of intellectual and moral conscience of modern journalism and perhaps indeed – since a similar ugliness was noted and documented in detail by Karl Kraus over a hundred years ago – of journalism generally more or less since its inception. Violent death in particular seems to bring out this tendency to conscienceless hyperbole in journalists. For years before the present season of Widdecombian hagiography I’ve had to strangle down my annoyance with the reports I’ve received, through my internet browser and other channels, of the almost daily knifing deaths in my native city of London, wherein not just the victim but very often also the perpetrator tend to be described as “uniquely precious, extraordinarily gifted people” who “brought joy into the lives of all who encountered them” etc.
But as in the case of another violent death in Britain which dominated the headlines a few weeks ago – namely, that of Henry Nowak, who was stabbed to death in Southampton at the end of 2025 but whose murder was adjudicated only last month – the sanctification of the victim here is also, in large part, a function of the demonization of other parties. Not indeed, we must say, initially of the perpetrator. As in Nowak’s case, the principal object of dislike and mistrust also in Widdecombe’s case is, presently at least, the police force entrusted with investigating the killing and apprehending its culprit.
We have to do here, of course, in part with the emotional and political inertia of the recent Nowak incident, as well as that of many similar incidents in Britain in recent months and years. But here too, inarguably, the police force in question – that of Devon and Cornwall – has itself largely contributed to awakening the ire and suspicion of the watching British public. The announcements made by Devon and Cornwall police in the sixty hours since Widdecombe’s body was discovered are, indisputably, somewhat baffling to common sense. The police have stated that the killing was likely not a targeted assassination. Yet they have justified their refusal to make available the video footage of events around Widdecombe’s house at the time of her murder – footage which certainly exists, since Widdecombe had several CCTV cameras installed around her property and it has been possible, thanks to the almost constant contact with journalists in which Widdecombe stood that day, to pinpoint the time of the crime’s commission almost to the minute – with an assurance that, although Widdicombe’s killer had not been apprehended, other residents of the area were not likely to be in any danger from him. Yet more anger and suspicion have been awoken by the opaque sequence of detentions, and releases without charge, over the last sixty hours of individuals about whom the public has been told nothing except their sex, age and race. Both – separately and successively – detained parties have been, we are told, white, male and in their late twenties.
This persisting unclarity about the circumstances, the motive and the perpetrator of the killing has led, of course, not just to anger and suspicion but to the advancing of more or less fully developed narratives to fill the space left vacant by the authorities. Building on the Assistant Chief Constable of Devon’s statement that his force did not believe there to “exist a wider risk for the public”, the internet is now filled with more or less fully elaborated arguments to the effect that Widdecombe’s murder was in fact a targeted political assassination, carried out either as a general symbolic protest against her socially and sexually conservative ideas and political actions or as a “hit” contracted out by the Deep State to some (likely politically indifferent) contract killer so as to prevent some damning revelation that Widdecombe was about to make regarding this Deep State’s machinations. The former of these two accounts, it must be conceded, does not, in the politically overheated climate of the mid-2020s, lie entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. The second, however, even in said overheated political climate most certainly does. The idea that so clownish and so grievously mentally and spiritually limited an individual as the reality-TV star Widdecombe could ever represent a threat that the globalist-internationalist governmental system would find it necessary to eliminate in order to achieve its ends is clearly an absurd one.
An even more widely internet-canvassed account of what happened to Ann Widdecombe last week and why has, of course, been the account that folds Widdecombe’s death into the wider narrative of the Fall of Europe that has become, especially these last two or three years, the central pillar of right-wing discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. The emphasis here is placed on the idea that Widdicombe’s attacker, be he contracted “professional” or amateur perpetrator of a crime of political passion, was in any case almost certainly (to adopt a phrase that has come into complacent and contemptuous currency in online right-wing circles above all these last two or three years) a “non” (i.e. a “non-white”). In other words, whether she was specifically targeted for assassination, as a prospective MP for a nationalist and sovereignist political party, by the powers that are systematically coordinating the importation of third-world populations into the former “first world”, or whether she was just one of the many old British women into whose isolated houses one of these millions of third-world “imports” are daily randomly intruding with intention to rob or to rape, Ann Widdecombe was in either case a victim of “the Great Replacement”. It has been within the framework of such a broader construction that the online “remigrationist” Right has interpreted the indeed very puzzling and confusing arrest by the Devon constabulary of first one individual and now another described as “young white men in their twenties”. The Deep State – so argue the online “remigrationists” – want to lodge as deeply as possible in the minds of the populace the notion “young white man as culprit” before they are finally forced to admit the truth that the culprit was not really white at all.
In my view, however, what is by far most remarkable, and most apt to prompt to serious political reflection, about both online and “mainstream” media discourse regarding Widdecombe’s death in the past two days is the utter absence therein of the articulation, indeed of anything even close to the articulation, of a third possible account of how Ann Widdecombe was killed and why. This third account, however, should not, it seems to me, constitute any especially vast leap of intuition. If one simply alters the gender of the victim, this is certainly the account that springs most readily to mind. If a young white man in his twenties were caught on CCTV entering the house of a wealthy “confirmed bachelor” in his seventies, then the list of possible accounts of what happened drawn up by law enforcement, were the “confirmed bachelor” found dead in this house a few hours later, would certainly include, if not indeed be headed by, an account involving the “confirmed bachelor”’s having brought the young man into his home to provide him with sexual services of some sort.
There is nothing, as I say, except Widdecombe’s gender to prevent such a narrative template as this latter from being applied as a plausible explanation of what occurred in her own large, well-appointed country house in the middle of last week. It’s doubtless true that the services of “rent boys” are employed much more rarely and exceptionally by “confirmed spinsters” than they are by those “confirmed bachelors” that middle-aged homosexual men were called, euphemistically, up until the middle of the last century. Few suggest themselves more strongly as an “exception” here, however, than Ann Widdecombe. Despite her packageability as a harmless and lovable English eccentric for the benumbed and barely sentient audiences of Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Big Brother, no attentive and reflective observer of her antics could fail to recognize that deep-lying sexual compulsions and neuroses were the truly defining forces in Widdecombe’s character and action. It was, it seems to me, the very contrary of mere contingency that she was among the individuals sniffed out by the loathsome Louis Theroux as an apt and inviting subject for one of his “quirky” documentaries at just that period when the whole motor and mechanism of these latter artefacts consisted in Theroux’s deploying his own extremely potent and polymorphous sexuality to irritate and stir the polymorphous perversity of his subjects.[1]
Much more worthy of investigation then, it seems to me, than any of the hypotheses which seem currently to being considered be it by the authorities or by the authority-sceptical internet – i.e. that of a targeted political assassination, or that of a “migrant murder” in a Britain understood to be half-submerged already in a state of deliberately induced “anarcho-tyranny”, or even that of a more traditional “English murder” ensuing perhaps just from a burglary gone wrong – is the hypothesis whereby there played out to its end in Ann Widdecombe’s house last week a familiar sequence of events which did not play out quite to its end in the house of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and her husband some few years ago: a young provider of sexual services was invited into the house by the owner and, either as some sort of aberration during the provision of said services or in the course of a dispute about payment afterward, fatal violence was inflicted.
I cite here, of course, also a decidedly “dissident” account of what occurred in the Pelosis’ home in California in 2022. The “official” account, propounded and defended by the San Francisco Police Department and the Superior Court of San Francisco, involved no reference to sexual services or to Paul Pelosi’s having invited his eventual assailant, as a prospective provider of such services, into his home. On the basis of this account the assailant in question is now serving thirty years in federal prison. The case of Ann Widdicombe’s killing will very likely be resolved in some such manner. A culprit will likely be found and a causality be imputed to his action: perhaps insanity, or perhaps some more prosaic causality, such as his having been discovered by Widdicombe in the course of burgling her home. But just as serious questions remained in the minds of many Americans, even after the San Francisco Superior Court verdict, about what happened in the Pelosis’ house in October 2022 – Charlie Kirk, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump himself expressed the view that the account on whose basis Paul Pelosi’s attacker was convicted was largely fabricated – so too will there persist at least in my mind, even when a culprit for this Devon murder has been found and convicted, serious questions about the narrative on which any such conviction will surely rest.
In this respect I am both at one, and radically at odds, with the thousands of purportedly right-wing commentators posting their views on X, or broadcasting them on “mainstream” or “alternative” media channels, this weekend. There is as little doubt in my mind as there is in the minds of even the most “red-pilled” of these latter that a police “cover-up” is underway. I am sure that I stand almost alone, however, in my understanding of just what it is that is being “covered up”. That the “covered-up” enormity here is a targeted political assassination, the contract for which went out from some underground bunker in Davos, is, as I have said, a hypothesis that I find ludicrously improbable. The more modest and parochial theory of misdirection – namely, that the crime of some “non” here is about to be pinned, for political reasons, on one or the other of a sequence of detained and interrogated “white men”, and the culpable “non” allowed to slip away – is perhaps marginally more believable. But both hypotheses miss, I think, the far more likely – though, it has to be admitted, also much more protean and elusive – political point.
Voltaire’s much-cited words to the effect that “if you want to know who holds power in a society, consider who it is in it that cannot be criticized” were, it appears, never spoken by Voltaire. This need not, indeed, prevent us from considering this proposition on its inherent cognitive merit, regardless of whether it enjoys the warranty of long-standing cultural authority or is rather, as seems in fact more likely, a recent coinage stemming from someone more obscure. So considered, it might appear prima facie indeed to be an enlightening perspective. A case like Widdecombe’s, however, serves precisely to point up the limits of this “Voltairean” proposition’s enlightening effect. What the Widdecombe case directs our attention to is not really any group or set of persons that have been declared immune from prosecution or taboo to critical thought. This indeed, in one form or another, is what the current discourse about the Widdecombe case directs us to – “this matter cannot be honestly thought or spoken about because the culprit here was a non-white”, “this matter cannot be honestly thought or spoken about because the killing here was a commission of the Deep State” – but, as I’ve said above, a number of considerations mark off such direction as most likely misdirection. Many indices point, it’s true, toward something’s being taboo here – but where such indices are soberly and reflectively followed out the pattern emerges that it is not so much a group or class of persons as a certain set of psychical needs or imperatives that enjoys here the protection of a noli me tangere.
If, as seems probable, a “police cover-up” is underway here, what is being covered up, I would suggest, is not the social consequences of the Great Replacement, or the darkest secrets (to which Widdecombe was supposedly privy) of those entrusted with putting this Great Replacement into effect, but rather the sad and complex reality of the condition of human embodiedness, specifically as instanced by the profoundly commiserable figure of Widdecombe herself. Recognizing this, however, should by no means be taken to be tantamount to sweeping aside the idea – which we have seen, above, advanced in various forms – that the British police are obscuring, in obscuring the facts of Widdecombe’s death, the mechanisms of her country’s people’s political oppression. To resolutely channel all thought away from the real misery and ugliness of Widdecombe’s existence as a sexually embodied being, and to preserve at all costs the phantasy of the substitutability of sexuality by the sort of quaint eccentricity and supposed “old English charm” that the ceaselessly televised circus of her life projected, is precisely to obscure the mechanisms of political oppression – and not only, indeed, to obscure the operation of these mechanisms but actually to operate them – in the principal way in which this is done at our present historical juncture. This manichaeistic phantasy of dividing the world into a constituency of bad “sex people” on the one hand and a constituency of good people lying outside of the wicked spell of sex on the other constitutes, phantastical though it is, one of the most really effective factors in the national and international politics of this second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Two aspects of one and the same phenomenon, then, are, it might be argued, the phantasy-figure of “Ann Widdecombe the Eternal Englishwoman”, in whom a pristine pre-pubescent asexuality is imagined to have been carried over intact into extreme old age, and the phantasy-figure of the “victim of the migrant rape-gangs”, in whom the same pristine pre-pubescent asexuality is thrown into imaginary relief by the supposed fact of its having been torn away from her, suddenly and savagely, far too early. It is beyond dispute, in any case, that these two phantasy-figures closely resemble one another in being incomparably realpolitikally effective at the political-historical juncture at which we presently stand. The politics of both the UK and the USA, for example, are – especially if one views, not unreasonably, the current Iran war wherewith Trump is driving his administration and the political movement that birthed it into the ground as, in large part, a consequence of the damage already done to this administration by the mass hysteria around the “Epstein files”- have centrally turned, these last few years, on the skill which various parties have displayed in manipulating and mobilizing this phantastic imago of a pre- and asexual pristinity which exists in necessary symbiosis with that of the invading alien “de-pristinizer” to whom the taking of Ann Widdecombe’s life – and thereby, on a more decisive psycho-social level, her long-preserved virginity – is now being imputed by thousands of “remigrationist” pundits.
[1] Widdecombe was the subject of a Theroux documentary in just that period shortly after the turn of the millennium in which he made documentaries about – or perhaps more correctly “with” – Jimmy Savile and the famously corrupt and immoral Westminster couple Neil and Christine Hamilton. Theroux, then aged between thirty and thirty-two, was at that time an individual of arresting physical beauty and much the same method of titillating intrusiveness and playful seduction is applied in all three documentaries, as it was in many other Theroux productions prior to the onset of middle age.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.