Years ago, my wife took our two little girls into the Oxford Union to show them her picture as an undergraduate.
They feigned polite interest until they saw the photograph of a young Ann Widdecombe. It set them squealing with delight.
They reminisced excitedly for the rest of the morning about her performances on Strictly Come Dancing.
Ann had that effect on people. Yes, her public persona was severe. She leaned into being the nation’s disapproving maiden aunt. But her natural warmth and playfulness shone through despite her best efforts.
She was a traditionalist in every sense – she never really accepted the idea of divorce, for example – but it never had the slightest effect on her friendships.
While she was one of the last figures in public life to reject same-sex partnerships, the gay people who knew her were devastated by her death. The Daily Mail’s Andrew Pierce and the broadcaster Iain Dale were among those who gave public voice to their grief, and many others without platforms expressed similar feelings.
Ann was a traditionalist in every sense – she never really accepted the idea of divorce, for example – but it never had the slightest effect on her friendships.
Peter Tatchell, the long-standing equality agitator, was not among them. His immediate response to the news of her death – for which he later apologised – was to list various LGBT causes she had voted against and to call her a ‘BIGOT!’
It was a bizarre way to respond to the sudden death of a 78-year-old lady, even if, at the time, he was not aware that she had died violently.
Yet he was far from alone.
‘Good riddance’, declared the Socialist Worker, claiming that Ms Widdecombe had ‘dedicated her career to attacking migrants, LGBT+ people and the working class’.
Even in its own terms, it was an odd line of attack.
The former Home Office minister had argued that trans convicts who had undergone operations should go to the prisons of their new gender. Even if she had been the politician that the Trotskyists imagined, though, who celebrates a sudden death?
Quite a few people, it turns out. Bluesky, a haven for the self-proclaimed #BeKind crowd after Elon Musk bought Twitter, became a cesspit of hatred. ‘No tears here’, ‘Irredeemable monster’, ‘Rest in piss’, ‘The only good Tory…’ etc.
An employee of Aberdeen University is being investigated for posting that she hoped Ms Widdecombe had suffered ‘an extremely painful death’, adding: ‘I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony.’
(For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that she should face disciplinary action. Coming under pressure from your employer for doing or saying something unrelated to your job is the definition of cancel culture.)
What, though, prompted her to react in such an inhuman way? I don’t use the word ‘inhuman’ lightly. There are moments that prompt us, as social primates, to react in natural ways. We smile at contented babies. We feel a warm glow when people get married. We respond with due solemnity to news of a death. ‘Send not to know for whom the bell tolls’ and all that.
What makes some people respond so differently to the rest of us? And why does it tend to come from one side of the political spectrum?
Yes, you can find unpleasant people espousing all manner of views, but the glorying in the death of opponents is asymmetric.
Police outside the home of former minister Ann Widdecombe on July 11, 2026
Reform MP Lee Anderson, home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf and deputy leader Richard Tice pay their respects to Ann Widdecombe near her home
Recall the delirium with which the hard-Left greeted the death of Margaret Thatcher. Trade unions organised festivals. Leftist agitators sold T-shirts declaring ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!’
Or glance across the Atlantic at grisly celebrations of the sudden death of the Trumpian Senator Lindsey Graham. I was not on Senator Graham’s page politically, but it would not occur to me to explain why, let alone disparage his character. ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum,’ said the Ancients. If you can’t find nice things to say about the deceased, say nothing.
Why the political one-sidedness? Why is it unimaginable – literally unimaginable – that Rightists will respond to the eventual and (I hope) distant deaths of, say, Gordon Brown or Sir Keir Starmer, as Leftists did to that of Margaret Thatcher?
The short answer was given by the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. Conservatives could be friends with socialists, he said, because they simply thought they were mistaken. But socialists struggled to reciprocate, because they thought conservatives were evil.
Most of us know from experience that Scruton was right. But where does this difference originate?
To find an answer, we must plunge into the field of behavioural psychology. Are Leftist brains wired differently from Rightist brains? Does their wiring enable the paradox whereby people who think of themselves as empathetic and inclusive struggle to extend those feelings to their political opponents?
In short, yes. Your political opinions are a lot more emotional than you like to imagine. Two people can look at the same event in very different ways because they are unconsciously primed to see what they want.
Person A sees a brave policeman defending himself from a criminal; person B sees a racist copper abusing his powers.
If I know enough about where you stand on a series of apparently unrelated issues – tax, immigration, abortion – I can make a pretty accurate guess as to whether you will be A or B. Psychologists call it social intuitionism.
What makes Left and Right-wing brains different is that, while conservatives let a series of different intuitions inform their views – concerns for freedom, fairness, sanctity, loyalty and so on – Leftists are driven overwhelmingly by just one, namely sympathy with the underdog.
For them, society is a hierarchical pyramid, and all that matters is backing the group designated as oppressed.
It leads them into all sorts of apparent contradictions. They might favour indigenous rights in Canada or New Zealand while recoiling at the suggestion that ethnic Britons have an equivalent prior claim to the UK. And it causes them real difficulties in understanding the other side.
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt ran a series of political questionnaires which people were invited to fill in sincerely, and then as they imagined that a typical Leftist and a typical Rightist might. He found that conservatives had no difficulty imagining themselves as socialists, but that the reverse was not true.
Boiled down, the Left-wing take on the world goes something like this: ‘I am a good person. I care about poor people, minorities and underdogs. You disagree with me, so you must dislike all these groups, which makes you a bad person.’
If you have only one moral axis by which to judge things, you struggle to see how someone could want to end poverty and make underdogs better off while disagreeing with you.
If you have read this far, the chances are that you are a conservative. And the chances are also that you will sometimes find your Leftie friends ascribing the blackest of motives to you. Other than giving them Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind, there is not much you can do.
Still, I keep being struck by one thought. Margaret Thatcher won three elections. Ann Widdecombe was the best known and most popular woman in politics in more recent times.
If they really were as terrible as their detractors claim, what would that say about the country as a whole? Answer me that one, comrades.
Daniel Hannan is Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs
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