When an elderly woman is murdered in her own home, you might expect the people who never tire of telling everyone how good they are to respond as any decent person would: with shock and revulsion, with despair at the state of things, with horror that someone who had lived a long life should end it violently at the hands of a monster.
Your expectations would be wrong, of course. Because the people who endlessly advertise their moral superiority are also the ones gleeful at the news that one of their enemies – a certified bad person – has met her deserved end.
Ann Widdecombe was 78, a former Conservative MP who had defected to Reform. She was from another era, one that produced politicians of a different character from the technocrats and identity merchants who sully the offices of power today. She was what we used to call a conviction politician. When she said something, we believed her, because she was obviously sincere. To the modern eye, accustomed to the human chatbot that is the contemporary politician – smooth, media-trained, platitudinous – she seemed a little bonkers. She was a little bonkers, frankly, and I didn’t warm to her. Her strange, flutey voice was nails on a blackboard, and the direct, abrasive delivery made Thatcher sound like Enya.
Yes, she thought homosexuality was a sin. She also said: “I do not care tuppence what consenting adults do. It’s not my business”. She backed Brexit and held every other unfashionable opinion that made her a villain in the minds of progressives. Yet she was admired by many who were surprised to discover a disarming, genial person and excellent company – an eccentric and an original, someone worth engaging with even in stark disagreement.
A few years ago I watched Christopher Hitchens and Widdecombe debate Catholicism, and they carried on afterwards, each obviously finding the other’s beliefs reprehensible. Neither would have celebrated the other’s death, because neither was wicked, but both agreed on the importance of talking it out. Of course they did; it was why they were in a debate to begin with. This is how grown-ups used to behave in a grown-up society.
Not the #BeKind people.
LGBTQ activist Peter Tatchell marked the occasion with a post that opened “Tory ex-MP Ann Widdecombe is dead!”. He then listed her sins before signing off: “BIGOT!” He deleted it when the signal to his base was outweighed by condemnation from everyone else. He said he was sorry – meaning he was sorry the post hadn’t scored the points he hoped for in this sordid little status game.
The Socialist Worker chimed in with “Hurrah! Ann Widdecombe is strictly dead”, a play on her stint on Strictly Come Dancing – a show that, incidentally, revealed a playful side of her that few had seen. This was someone who didn’t take herself seriously while nevertheless holding political convictions with the seriousness all too absent in our frivolous culture. They deleted the post too, naturally, having made the same miscalculation as Tatchell about the revulsion most people feel at gloating over a death. It won’t surprise you that they greeted the murder of Charlie Kirk in a similar style, with a piece titled “Charlie KKKirk’s chickens come home to roost”. Note the triple K. Consider how moronic that is as satire, then apply the same measure to their moral faculties. That is the sort of socialist we’re talking about – which is to say, all of them.
Then came the Sky News veteran Adam Boulton, who thought a woman’s violent death an opportune moment to appraise her sex life. She was “very much a spinster”, he mused – “an old maid” and, he added, “reportedly” a virgin – before moving on to a “chaste but doomed” university romance with a man “now a banker”. A day after she was found dead in her home, this was the register: the leisured, faintly amused tone of a man enjoying his own worldliness.
What sort of person offers this over a fresh grave, let alone that of a devoted Catholic for whom her private life was nobody’s business? It’s the sort who wouldn’t dream of it if the politician were on the Left – in which case we’d see him moved to tears by his own eulogy. That is the defining trait of the progressive media establishment: everything passes through the sorting filter before reaching a response, which switches between contempt on one side and approval on the other. We already know Boulton’s entire worldview, from trans theology to climate change, because version one of the firmware was uploaded around 1997 and has received regular updates ever since. This is the operating system an entire class runs on, from the education sector to the media and right into Number 10.
Boulton, though, is merely revolting – an opportunist who, in any other era, would be spouting whatever pieties and orthodoxies elevated his position in the hierarchy. He’ll be replaced soon enough by another of the same, drawn from a cohort produced en masse by our worthless universities.
The truly sinister types in this cast of ghouls are the pronoun sociopaths and rainbow bureaucrats who scream about your lack of empathy while fantasising about other people’s gruesome deaths. Admittedly, that requires a kind of empathy the rest of us lack – the most deranged kind, which imagines another’s suffering and revels in it. This is empathy as a sickness of the mind. But it’s a mistake to think it only reveals itself in the anonymous Bluesky account with the anime avatar. A great many of these same people, come Monday morning, put on a lanyard and walk straight into a primary classroom, an NHS ward, or another corridor in the public sector.
These are the worst people in the world, simultaneously sanctimonious and malevolent. What makes them so dangerous is not merely the cruelty, which has always existed and takes many forms – our prisons are full of the evil and wicked. It’s the way it takes the guise of righteousness. Widdecombe was a “bigot”, so her death is a deliverance. Showing sympathy, let alone decency, would signal a lack of resolve. Similarly, Charlie Kirk was a “fascist”, so murder is reimagined as poetic justice. In each instance, the victim is declared a moral outcast and therefore deserving of their fate, which should preferably be grisly and terminal. And while making these calculations, our moral superiors congratulate themselves on their compassion.
Call them socialists or progressives or the woke – the label doesn’t matter. What unites them is the belief that they are morally qualified to redesign society, which is exactly why they are the last people on earth who should be charged with the task. Given unlimited power, they would cheerfully have the rest of us rot in a gulag. It sounds like hyperbole, and I almost wish it were. But the horrors of the twentieth century depended on millions of willing executioners, a good many of them ordinary men and women who put on a uniform and went to work. They didn’t consider themselves monsters. They had simply learned to see their victims as morally defective, or as obstacles to the utopian bliss that was available if only everyone got on board and did what had to be done.
I despise these people – surely anyone with a shred of decency does. But we’re not like them, and neither was Widdecombe. If a socialist demagogue or diversity commissar were found murdered on the floor of their home, she would not have tweeted about it with glee. She would have turned her attention to the crime, to the failures of the police and to the broken society that produced it. She might have detested everything the victim stood for, but she’d have extended to them the humanity they so readily denied her.
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“What unites them is the belief that they are morally qualified to redesign society, which is exactly why they are the last people on earth who should be charged with the task”. And they keep getting clicks and, worse, votes!!!!
Even if a person I loathed had died - especially by alleged murder - I would not celebrate. I would just say nothing. For me, it would be dishonorable - crass, even - to gloat like these grotesques have done.