Murder of Catholic pro-life politician is now being investigated as terrorism: UK police

[Stone]

Murder of Catholic pro-life politician is now being investigated as terrorism: UK police
Ann Widdecombe, who was known for opposing abortion and pro-LGBT policies, was found dead at her home on Friday with ‘serious injuries.’



Ann Widdecombe speaks during a Brexit Party campaign rally at Mill Farm, home of A.F.C Flyde on May 4, 2019 in Wesham, United Kingdom.
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Jul 13, 2026
(LifeSiteNews [adapted - not all hyperlinks included from original]) — The murder of prominent English Catholic politician Ann Widdecombe, who was known for opposing abortion and pro-LGBT policies, is being investigated as terrorism, UK police announced on Monday.

“We now have new information and evidence that means Counter Terrorism Policing is now leading the investigation,” the head of the UK’s National Counter Terrorism Policing, Laurence Taylor, said. “We are pursuing multiple lines of inquiry to establish the motivation for this attack.”

“New information and evidence has come to light during what has been a dynamic and complex investigation,” Counter Terrorism Policing South East (CTPSE) said.

Police rearrested a 28-year-old man on suspicion of “commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism,” the CTPSE added.

Local police in Devon, where Widdecombe was killed, had initially stated that there was “no information to suggest that this is a terrorism related incident.”

Police first arrested the suspect on Saturday evening in South Yorkshire, more than 200 miles from Widdecombe’s village, on suspicion of murder.

They had arrested a previous, 26-year-old suspect on Friday but released him hours later.

Widdecombe, 78, was found dead at her rural home on Thursday with “serious injuries,” according to police.

They said that they believe the attack occurred on Wednesday, almost 24 hours before the discovery of her body.

Widdecombe was a Conservative member of Parliament from 1987 to 2010 and a member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party from 2019 until 2020, when the UK left the EU. In 2023, she joined the Reform Party, serving as the party’s immigration and justice spokesperson.


Widdecombe’s opposition to abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality

Widdecombe was well-known for defending the right to life and the traditional family.

As Right to Life UK noted, she repeatedly opposed pro-abortion policies and supported pro-life measures, including legislation to require parental notification for underage abortions and to lower the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 12.

She also stressed that she “would never license an abortion clinic” if she became health secretary.

Widdecombe likewise opposed assisted suicide, fighting multiple attempts to legalize it during her time in Parliament. More recently, she denounced assisted suicide legislation that failed in the UK this year as “riddled with horrors.”

“It is impossible to introduce adequate safeguards to protect the mentally ill, disabled and the frail elderly,” she said.

Widdecombe was a member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), the UK’s oldest pro-life organization, from her time in university. SPUC Executive Director Michael Robinson told LifeSiteNews: “In an age when many public figures shifted with the political winds, she stood firm on matters of principle, often at considerable personal cost.”

“Her Catholic faith was not something she kept private; it shaped her public life,” he added. “She was an unashamed defender of the dignity of every human life, speaking up for the unborn, the elderly, the disabled, and the vulnerable. Her belief that every human life matters — from conception until natural death — never wavered.”

Widdecombe strongly pushed back on the LGBT movement as well, consistently voting against pro-LGBT measures, including efforts to lower the age of consent for homosexual activity from 21 to 18 and from 18 to 16.

“One of the sundry horrors for which this Government is likely to be remembered will be that it gave its imprimatur to sodomy at 16,” she said in 1998, slamming Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour government.

“They will clothe the whole revolting business with the politically correct jargon of equal rights and the need to respect the sexual orientation of the individual,” she said.

Widdecombe additionally opposed homosexual “marriage,” gender self-identification, and the promotion of homosexuality in schools and defended reparative therapy for homosexuals.

“Anybody can get help for anything from psychotherapists in this country except apparently gays who do not want to be gay,” she said in a 2012 column. “A man who wants to be a woman will receive not only the necessary operations but also a huge amount of psychological support and counselling.”


Catholic convert

Widdecombe was raised in an evangelical family and became Anglican after falling into agnosticism in her youth. She later converted to the Catholic Church in 1993 after the Church of England decided to “ordain” women.

She remarked that the “ordination” of women “was the last straw” that led her to leave the Church of England, “but it was only one of many.”

“For years I’ve been disillusioned by the Church of England compromising on everything,” she said.

Widdecombe “became the first person since the Reformation to be received into the Catholic Church in the crypt of the Commons,” according to The Guardian.

Pope Benedict XVI named her a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 2013 for her services to politics and public life.

Catholic historian Henry von Blumenthal told LifeSite: “Ann Widdecombe gave a voice to those of us who left the Church of England in the 1990s because we saw that the ordination of women formally set aside the Catholic understanding of clerical ordination and therefore of the sacraments of confession and Holy Communion.”

He noted that she wrote a pamphlet in 2004, The Mass is a Mess, that “denounced the banality of the English vernacular translation of the new Mass, but went on also to point out its defective theology.”

“This placed her adjacent to those who went further still; for as is now much more widely recognised, liturgy is doctrine in motion and the modern doctrinal collapse goes hand in hand with the introduction of the new Mass,” von Blumenthal continued.

He also said that Widdecombe was “a prominent supporter” of the Anglican Ordinariate created by Pope Benedict XVI, and “it commonly supposed that she may have added impetus to its creation.”

“If so it is hardly surprising that Benedict made her a dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great only weeks before his abdication,” he said.

The murder of Widdecombe is the latest of numerous killings or attempted assassinations of conservative political and cultural figures in recent years, including U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Charlie Kirk, and others.

In 2021, a Muslim terrorist murdered British MP David Amess, another conservative, pro-life Catholic.