by Joseph Shaw, First Things
[…] She had some of the most unfashionable views in mainstream politics. She consistently opposed abortion, and even declared that she could not be health secretary while abortion was being provided by the National Health Service. She opposed same-sex marriage and gender self-identification, supported a zero-tolerance approach to cannabis, backed capital punishment, and was skeptical about attempts to prevent climate change. She left the Church of England over the ordination of women, and she left the Conservative Party to campaign for the proper implementation of the referendum to leave the European Union.
Less predictably, she was deeply concerned about animal cruelty and opposed fox hunting; she was also a supporter of homeopathy. She insisted on thinking each issue through on its merits and sticking to her conclusions. When there was a scandal about the expenses being claimed by members of Parliament, she refused to release the details of her own. When these were leaked, her record turned out to be one of the best in the House; she had refused to publish her expenses because she believed MPs deserved privacy. This mattered more to her than scoring points against her rivals.
The former Conservative member of Parliament Harvey Proctor gave remarkable testimony about Widdecombe in The Times following her death. Proctor’s career ended in 1987 when he pleaded guilty to gross indecency for having sex with male prostitutes aged seventeen and nineteen. (The age of consent for homosexual acts was twenty-one at the time; it was later lowered to sixteen to correspond with the age of consent for heterosexual acts.) Decades later, Proctor was among those caught up in the Operation Midland police investigation, which followed up lurid child abuse and murder accusations that turned out to be complete fabrications—resulting in a £900,000 payout to him from the Metropolitan Police. Proctor summarized his Times article on X: “I denounced Operation Midland as a ‘homosexual witch-hunt.’ Ann Widdecombe stood by me. Not one LGBT charity even dared. Tatchell [the gay rights campaigner] was remarkably silent. Ann stuck her head above the parapet to offer support—privately, publicly & practically.”
Why would she do that? Why take the risk to her own reputation? Why support a public homosexual when she opposed the homosexual agenda? Because opposing injustice was the right thing to do.