On Friday 10 July, news broke that Ann Widdecombe, a former Member of Parliament (MP) for the Conservative Party, then a Member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party, then the justice spokesperson for Reform, had died.

Widdecombe was 78 years old, and probably the most prominent woman in Conservative politics since Margaret Thatcher. The assumption in the hours post the announcement was that her death was age-related, perhaps a sickness or a bad fall at most.

But shortly after lunchtime on the same day, The Telegraph claimed that the police had initiated an investigation, inferring foul play. This was hardly believable: Widdecombe lived alone in Devon, on the fringes of barren Dartmoor – an area that has not recorded a murder for the last twenty years. This change in events was due to the results of an autopsy and soon, the public was confronted with grisly facts: she was murdered, and she was murdered well before her death was announced.

Autopsies usually take weeks. A reliable assumption here was that her wounds were explicitly unnatural, with no space to accommodate ambiguity, so that a police inquiry was initiated.

On Friday evening, police chiefs in Devon, considered to be the worst-performing constabulary in the country, convened a press conference and announced that they had arrested a suspect, deliberately including his race in the statements (he is white).

The media began to speculate. She had interrupted someone trying to steal one of her garden gnomes. She had witnessed stock theft. It was a burglary gone wrong. It finished speculating by asking the public not to speculate.

That may have been for good reason. Even in the early stages of the arrest, it was tricky to separate Widdecombe’s stature as a conservative from her death.

New Suspect

Just before midnight the following day, police updated the media: the suspect from the previous day had been released, and a new suspect had been arrested. Again, it was a white man, 28 years old. On Tuesday, having searched the house of the new suspect, counter-terrorism police were drafted in as “new evidence had come to light”, said to be a litany of communist and Marxist literature.

The picture that now emerges is bleak. On Wednesday 8 July, a young man – reportedly a supporter or paid member of a leading mainstream left-wing political party, got into his car and drove 300 miles southwest to Widdecombe’s address, arriving at around midday, just before Widdecombe was due to appear virtually on a news programme. The attacker is alleged to have beaten Widdecombe with a pole or club that CCTV witnessed him loading into the vehicle that morning, before getting into his red Corsa and driving back, the round trip calculated at around ten hours.

Four days after the second high-profile murder of a Conservative British politician in less than five years (after the stabbing of Sir David Amess in 2021), 66 countries gathered in Washington to listen to American Secretary of State Marco Rubio announce a new counter-terrorism offensive aimed at the extreme left. Even for America this was a remarkable event; when sensible people called for the designation of Antifa as a domestic terror organisation, they were met with howls of contempt from the media and Democrats. Antifa, they were scolded, is not a group, but a way of thinking.

Shortly after his speech Rubio would be accused by The Guardian of using “dehumanising language” in describing the extremists. This would be the view in London, and probably that of the South African mainstream media too. But Rubio would survive any fact-checking – his remarks were accurate and timely – and necessarily substantive. For too long the left have excused the extreme violence that is becoming increasingly brazen on their fringes – to say nothing of embracing it.

A few days after Widdecombe’s murder, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, the leftist eco-terrorist group, was invited onto BBC 2’s Question Time. Daze Aghaji claims to be a queer brown woman of immigrant heritage; how anyone could ask someone of this profile to comment in the aftermath of a defenceless, conservative – white – elderly lady being slaughtered to death is probably adjacent to a line of inquiry that asks why this same organisation covered up allegations of sexual abuse against its oversupply of in-house paedophiles for years.

Aghaji did not let the activist producers down, claiming that there would be no regret at Widdecombe’s departure from the world, as she had made remarks – congruent with the devout Catholic she was – about same-sex marriage. The Conservative MP Nigel Huddleston, seated next to Aghaji, couldn’t contain his shock at this disgusting but not unsurprising comment; sadly, Huddleston’s party, in an effort to be appear with-it and trendy, is one of the reasons why people like Aghaji assume such prominence in modern British society.

Dishonest

The official view is wildly dishonest. Because countries such as Germany and Australia pander to Islamic extremists by emphasising the threat of the far right, the fixture of far-left terrorism is a wilful blind spot. The majority of the security apparatus is thus resourced against the right, which explains the absence of any condemnation of socialist worker-arranged protests in which violence against political opposition is frequently expressed.

So bad is this problem that it has seeped into the mainstream. Universities are especially guilty of considering violence; within academia more generally, the overwhelming view appears to be settling on the side of violent revolution in pursuit of stated goals. In Great Britain, the statement “deport foreign criminals” is more policed than “no justice, no peace” – an explicit threat from racial agitators.

Since the revelations about Widdecombe’s death and the discovery of the paraphernalia, the media diverted into an attack on Rubio’s initiative, claiming that certain countries refused to participate on the basis the objective appeared obscure. This position should be enough for Rubio to widen the scope to measure the level of complicity of English-speaking news in fomenting hatred against those possessed of different views to the reporters they employ.

Of all the left’s accomplishments, masking evil with a veneer of academic compassion, anti-racism, and reparations must rank as one of its finest. Bolstered by an overqualified, angry, and indescribably dumb media, the illusion of good intentions survives… until an old woman is smashed to pieces.