Farage targeted by alleged Widdecombe killer!
The David Vance BriefingRead More
We know that Ann Widdecombe is dead and that a man has been charged with her murder, and now, sensationally, also with preparing acts of terrorism, including against Nigel Farage! Now we must be clear here and say that Joshua Kerry has not been convicted of anything and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the charge sheet alone should end any comfortable talk about how this happened.
A warning that was dismissed
After Widdecombe’s killing, Reform UK called for “full security” for politicians. Plenty of other people in politics and the mainstream commentariat treated this as if it were just opportunism, or at best as a party looking after its own. It was neither. It was a reasonable response to a brutal murder, and the new charge suggests it was nowhere near paranoid enough!
According to police, the alleged conduct ran from 31 May 2024 to 8 July 2026. That is more than two years in which, if the prosecution is right, someone was preparing violence against the leader of a major British political party. Reform has long argued that its people face more hostility than the establishment admits, and this case, if proven, gives that argument terrible weight.
The milkshake years
It is worth remembering how Farage’s critics once treated attacks on him. When a milkshake was thrown at him in Newcastle in 2019, much of the political class just laughed. Farage himself shrugged it off.
But the lesson many took was that humiliating him was fair game, and that the usual rules of civility applied only to people they liked. That’s what I think has happened. A political culture that cheers when one side is targeted, and demands solemn reflection when the other is, has no business lecturing anyone about tone. And that’s what we have now in the UK.
Ann Widdecombe mattered
Widdecombe was no fringe figure. She was a minister under John Major, a Commons heavyweight, and later Reform’s immigration and justice spokesperson. She said unfashionable things plainly and never apologised for it. Her old Westminster colleagues will remember her best for the line she aimed at Michael Howard in 1997, a piece of political theatre that is still quoted decades on. she was 78 and killed at home. The least her party, family and friends deserve is a political class that takes the threat to people like her seriously.
The double standard problem
Imagine the reaction if the alleged target had been the leader of a different party. There would be cross-party statements, urgent reviews, front-page editorials on the poisoning of public discourse. It seems to me that there is a recurring pattern in which threats against the populist right are treated as an occupational hazard.
Farage has been one of the most consequential figures in modern British politics, credited by many with forcing the 2016 referendum. The fact that he was denied adequate security is a damning indictment against the State.
Kerry is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court this coming Wednesday. Reform supporters want answers and let’s hope they get them. The very BEST tribute to Ann Widdecombe’s brutal killing is a proper trial, all security gaps identified and closed, and the FULL FORCE of the law applied if he is convicted.
I know some people don’t approve of the Death Penalty but I most certainly do.
I don’t want to say anything about the alleged killer but you have to wonder if there are other demented people out there, driven by sheer hatred, who might want to kill another Reform politician?
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