LONDON — Ann Widdecombe, who has died aged 78, was a prominent and combative former British politician who consistently defended the Catholic faith and the Church’s moral teaching in public life.
She is believed to have died on Wednesday as a result of a fall at her home on Dartmoor, southwest England, but a postmortem examination will likely be conducted to establish the precise nature of her death. Her management agents announced the news “with great sadness” and sent their “deepest condolences to Ann’s family and friends.”
Widdecombe became one of the best-known Conservative politicians of her generation, holding ministerial positions in the 1990s, and briefly returning to elected office in 2019 as a member of the Brexit Party.
Already renowned for her outspoken conservative views, she gained further public recognition when she left the Church of England following its vote to ordain women as priests and was received into the Catholic Church in 1993.
In one of her last interviews, given to EWTN’s Colm Flynn last September, Widdecombe said although the Anglican vote was, for her, the final straw of a “very large bundle,” it was not the theology behind it so much as the attempts by the Church
