“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.” Matthew 25: 35-36

Ann Widdecombe was a political activist who spent her entire adult life trying to implement the ideas in which she believed. The horrific and untimely nature of her death does not mean that those ideas are exempt from scrutiny. In fact, much of respectable opinion has been praising her robust defence of her inhumane and racist political programme on the basis that she really believed what she said. That is beyond doubt.

Let’s take a detour to talk about her interpretation of her religion. It was important to her and she made it a large part of her public persona.

A few years ago, I was involved in settling a large group of asylum seekers into Tower Hamlets. They were placed by the Home Office in a filthy, cramped building used for student accommodation. It was a soul-destroying, joyless place. The headteacher of a local Catholic primary school got in touch and said she wanted to do as much as possible to help. This ranged from providing food and clothes to letting us use her building to process the families. The faces of the asylum seeker children broke into broad smiles when they walked into the colourful, warm school building. Quite what they made of the life size statue of the Virgin Mary in the reception area, I do not know. This was a practical application of Catholic teaching that Widdecombe spent her entire political life fighting against.

It goes without saying that the utterly godless and people of other religions did great work too, but the Catholic head really impressed me. Contrast that to Widdecombe’s speech on migration to the 2024 Reform conference which you can watch in full here. It is a hideous spectacle of a bunch of migrant haters being confirmed in all their prejudices by a very competent public speaker. She promises to “turn back the boats” and to put migrants who do arrive into prison camps before deporting them. She briefly mentions people seeking political asylum, but her entire speech is devoid of any compassion, empathy or basic understanding of the migrant experience.

Having fed the audience the red meat of migrant bashing she moves onto prisons. The politician who insisted that pregnant women should be handcuffed talks about how proud she was to have reintroduced prison ships. Again, the striking thing about the tone and content of what she says is her desire to punish people who end up in prison. It is nasty stuff.

Anyone who takes pleasure in Widdecombe’s death demeans themselves. In her speech to the Reform conference, she was offering a distillation of all the prejudices of the far right of English conservatism and these are views held by millions. Farage understands this as you can see from his rather cold but politically sharp video tribute to her. In this he is more honest than those who call themselves her political opponents but are happy to gloss over what her ideas really were.