The “old maid” social archetype used to be well-known: the doughty Church Lady or — more colloquially — the Battleaxe. But was Major right about their endurance? The year he made this claim, one of the last of this species left the Anglican Church for Roman Catholicism: the late Ann Widdecombe. And if the sight of the archetypal Church Lady leaving Anglicanism for Rome wasn’t enough to cast doubt on the eternity of that image of the country, the manner of Ann Widdecombe’s recent death must surely do so.

Last week, 33 years on from Major’s invocation of Eternal Britain, Ann Widdecombe was murdered in her Devon home, a bungalow in a small community at the edge of Dartmoor National Park. Just the kind of place, in fact, where Orwell might have pictured old maids hiking to Communion through the mist: and the last on earth where, you’d imagine, something so horrifying might happen (outside an Agatha Christie novel, at least). A few days later, a man was arrested in Rotherham. Subsequent statements from police have been contradictory and confusing: after local bobbies initially played down any suspicion of political motives, today Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that counter-terrorism police were taking over the investigation.

Is anyone particularly surprised? Ann Widdecombe never shied away from controversy. She was a staunch social conservative, and public in other ways, too, as an unlikely, late-blooming TV celebrity. Latterly, having abandoned the Tories, she threw her weight first behind the Brexit Party and finally Reform. Her death is shocking, not just for its brutality or for Widdecombe’s symbolic loss, as the last of kind of Englishwoman that used to run Britain. But also because her murder highlights how much better, kinder, and more trusting a country Ann Widdecombe believed Britain to be, than the place we actually live in.

The Britain Ann Widdecombe seems to have trusted still, somehow, to endure – the Britain of Major’s 1993 statement – has in fact been dying for some decades. It was finally extinguished by her murder. But once upon a time, its civil society was run by people like her. The daughter of a military man, raised between ever-changing military postings and a convent boarding-school in Bath, she embodied a stoical “buck up” attitude that was pervasive in imperial-age Britain, and lingered well into my childhood and youth: one in which private suffering was simply something to be borne. During the Major years she was caricatured as the worst kind of Tory meanie, earning her the nickname “Doris Karloff” for defending the idea that female prisoners might remain manacled while giving birth.

She was also that rarest of things, a conviction politician in the Tory Party. Progressives never quit haranguing her for her views on sex, abortion, and gay marriage; and her indifference to being considered “nice” could rub colleagues up the wrong way, too. She was one of the few Tories who spoke against fox-hunting, and her successful 1988 campaign to lower the abortion term limit from 28 weeks to 24 was a nuisance to liberals on her own side.

Most famously, she quarrelled with then-Home Secretary, Michael Howard, in 1995, over the sacking of then-Director of HM Prisons, Derek Lewis. Her revenge came two years later, as the Tories surveyed the wreckage of their party following New Labour’s landslide win. Widdecombe’s speech opposing Howard’s leadership bid described him as having “something of the night about him”: an instantly memorable line credited with sinking his prospects.

Suggested reading

Don’t shed tears for Keir

By Mary Harrington

All of 19th-century British civic life was dominated by women of Widdecombe’s stripe, from the National Union of Women Workers, the Mothers’ Union, and the Women’s Institute, to church groups, Sunday school classes, schools, charities, and social reform bodies. Unkindly satirized even in her heyday as “Mrs Grundy”, the Battleaxe dedicated her life to improving, organizing, cleaning, educating, and uplifting the world around her, whether or not it wanted to be improved.

But the Britain they ran is no longer the one in which we live. The reasons for its demise are complex, though the end of the British Empire, the arrival of TV and radio, the sexual revolution and, latterly, de-industrialization and the internet all contributed. The inflection-point was also the year that wiped out Ann Widdecombe’s Tories: 1997. That August, Diana, Princess of Wales died, triggering an outpouring of public emotion which marked a watershed in British culture. For millions, Diana stood for something difficult to express in the abstract: a freeing-up of sentiment, and a new permission to feel and, importantly, to show it. Tony Blair, then just entering his pomp, rose to the occasion. She was, he famously declared, the “People’s Princess”.

If she’d been losing out since the war, the British Battleaxe was eclipsed by the death of Diana. As a public figure, she held on in the Tories in the person of Ann Widdecombe, until David Cameron — the man who arguably Dianafied the Tories — forced her disgusted departure, with her calling him “big-headed” and “dismissive of everything that had gone before”. After this, Widdecombe stood more or less alone: the last British Battleaxe in a world grown simpering, sentimental, and mandatorily progressive.

She could have slid quietly off into retirement at that point. Instead, she turned herself into a meme, before anyone else could, with an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010. There, she earned the audience’s affection by merrily sending up her own performances, and reached the semi-final as a fan-favorite despite dances Widdecombe herself described, with some justice, as “elephantine”. She became a regular on the airwaves, known for her sharp wit and self-deprecating humor: the People’s Battleaxe. But just because she could send herself up as a pantomime dame, that didn’t mean the political views were all pretend. In 2019 her convictions drove her back into politics – this time as MEP for the Brexit Party and then as Reform’s spokesperson on immigration.

Suggested reading

The conservative case for Strictly

By Mary Harrington

In keeping with her status as the People’s Battleaxe, as well as conviction politician, her murder has prompted an outpouring of memories. Friends and sparring-partners alike all recall her as funny, warm, and courteous even to those with whom she disagreed. This is all in keeping with the culture of pre-Diana Britain: one that saw public service as a duty, and private life and conscience as inviolably private. But this outlook has grown less common. Especially among 21st-century progressives, it has come to seem just as self-evident that private conscience ought always to conform to public duty, while the presence of any boundary between the two is cause for suspicion.

In tandem, Britain itself has grown more fractured, skint, alienated, and online. And it’s grown increasingly common for parasocial fixations on public figures to turn sour, and translate into real-world harassment or even violence. BBC Scotland presenter Ann McAlpine, Loose Women star Denise Welch, and broadcaster Myleene Klass have all been plagued by stalkers. But political figures are particularly vulnerable. JK Rowling had her home address leaked by trans activists, following her support for women’s rights. The far-Left group Just Stop Oil has advocated picketing MPs at their homes. Nigel Farage has been attacked with eggs, milkshakes, and other weaponry. MPs Jo Cox and David Amess were both murdered by extremists self-radicalized online.

This is a very different Britain from the one in which Widdecombe was born. Her comparatively homogeneous, less hyper-mediated Britain broadly assumed that private conscience and private lives were to be respected. The Britain in which she was murdered is one where this distinction has collapsed. In Diana’s image, refracted through innumerable screens, we’ve grown both more alienated and more lachrymose, volatile, and entranced by our own suffering. The perpetual, watery-eyed therapeutic emanations of Diana’s son Harry are only one of the many cases in point.

But it’s not just about blubbing in TV interviews, or on the Labour front bench, or when resigning as Prime Minister like Keir Starmer. In this inside-out culture, everything must be surfaced, posted, externalized, or it isn’t real. And the corollary is that “private” no longer exists — which means that public figures are now treated as public, even when they’re at home.

Five days before her death, her home was featured on TV, in an episode of Celebrity Yorkshire Auction House filmed in 2022. This is the kind of personal information that more savvy or internet-poisoned public figures tend to keep very much out of the public domain – because you never know who is going to see it, online. But Widdecombe clearly didn’t consider opening her home to TV cameras a safety risk.

Suggested reading

Rules are for suckers in two-tier Britain

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps she still believed John Major was right, and the place of long shadows, warm beer, dog-lovers, and Holy Communion was still Britain’s basic reality. She spent a long career publicly espousing challenging views, while trusting that other Britons would continue to respect her private life. But John Major was wrong. This supposedly eternal England was already dying in 1993 — aided, indeed, in some respects, by the Tories themselves. And even as our ever more frenzied media has turned politicians into divisive parasocial celebrities, it’s collapsed the distance between sleepy Devon villages and far more disaffected corners of the country.

Large parts of the country are now utterly foreign to Major’s sepia-tinged tableau. What will replace his vanishing version of Britain, and its battleaxes? That’s still uncertain, and will grow more bitterly contested as time goes on. Meanwhile, whether you agreed with her worldview or not, no one should remain under the illusion that we know what kind of country Britain really is, at all, any more.

Widdecombe, when asked about it on Monday, was not enormously successful in her attempts to pour oil on those troubled waters. “There was a time when we thought it was quite impossible for men to become women and vice versa,” she said. “The fact that we think it is now quite impossible for people to switch sexuality doesn’t mean that science may not yet produce an answer at some stage.”

One way to tackle this is to write it off with a glib headline: “BREAKING NEWS. 71-year-old Catholic conservative has suspect views on homosexuality. More on this story as we get it.” Widdecombe is fairly advanced in her years, deeply religious and rather mad, so it is not surprising that she has views on LGBT matters that are offensive to younger, more secular, more tolerant people (and you wonder, if the Brexit Party is full of politicians like her, about its survivability as a political force as the older, more homophobic generations die off). But there’s more to it.

First, for all that Widdecombe uses the language of helping unhappy people, as in any other psychotherapy, the history of “gay cures” and “conversion therapy” is troubling. Much of the theory underpinning it comes from really odd post-Freudian psychoanalysis about seeking out an idealised “good penis” because of some trauma involving the patient’s mother; from 1952 to 1973 homosexuality was declared a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Until 1988 it still remained in there in the confusing name of “ego-dystonic homosexuality”.

Suggested reading

It's not very Christian to preach bad news about gay people

By Giles Fraser

And the treatment was often brutal. Some subjects had electric shocks applied to the hands or genitals as aversion therapy while they were shown homoerotic images, for instance. Others underwent electroconvulsive therapy – not the modern, safe and effective treatment for hard-to-treat depression, but the old kind, barely distinguishable from torture. In rare cases, brain surgery – lobotomies – were performed.

This is not ancient history but took place in Widdecombe’s lifetime – in the US, at least as recently as 1951, in West Germany at least as recently as 1969. The more modern “treatments” are less savage and sometimes a bit laughable – “praying the gay away” with a bit of Freudian nonsense thrown in – but still, you can understand why people would be deeply wary of any moralists coming along talking about “helping” “unhappy homosexuals” with therapy.

One reason that gay people might be unhappy is that large parts of society – including but not limited to many members of the Conservative Party and the Catholic Church – insist that they have need of a “cure” or an “answer”. You do wonder whether Widdecombe has, as she might claim, no concerns about “happy” gay people continuing to be gay, or if the language of providing therapeutic options for those who want it just is a mask for bog-standard homophobia.

But, you might ask, does this stuff work? Can you change sexuality? Could I become gay, if I wanted?

There are many difficulties with answering this question. One, how do you define “work”? Some early therapists, the proponents of lobotomies and electroshock therapy, claimed high levels of success – one scientist said that 58% of his patients were “cured”. But as others pointed out, they don’t appear to have changed sexual orientation; the brutal treatment simply made them less capable of sexual arousal of any kind. That doesn’t strike me as a victory worth celebrating.

Suggested reading

Bigotry dressed as victimhood

By James Bloodworth

There have been, as far as I can tell, very few good studies into whether this stuff works. That’s understandable, because most scientists wouldn’t want to start asking whether you can cure something they don’t think needs curing. But in 2001, Robert Spitzer, one of the psychologists who’d campaigned to get homosexuality removed from the DSM in 1973, published a study which suggested that some of the 200 homosexual people he’d interviewed had undergone some change in their sexuality following therapy, albeit not complete change.

That study, however, was heavily critiqued, and in 2012 Spitzer apologised for it, saying that the critiques were largely fair – the study relied on self-reported behavioural change, and for obvious reasons, people who have undergone voluntary conversion therapy will have an interest in saying that it worked. Another study in 2002 found that 88% of subjects saw no change, and just 4% found that it “shift[ed] their sexual orientation”. The remainder became largely asexual.

I am always wary of treating any single study as definitive, so I won’t. But it matches other, less formal evidence. For instance, according to the psychologist Richard Isay in his book Being Homosexual, the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues “for many years attempted to find patients who had been converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality during therapy, and were surprised that they could not find one whose sexual orientation had been changed”. The ones who claimed they had were “simply suppressing homosexual behaviour” and “used homosexual fantasies to maintain potency when they attempted intercourse”. One said that, having been homosexual, he had “cut out all of that and don’t even think of men – except when I masturbate”.

Suggested reading

What hope for a world without religion?

By Douglas Murray

You could also note the large number of prominent anti-gay voices who later turn out to be gay. There’s a website that counts down the number of days since that last happened. At the time of writing, it’s 135 days since, in fact, a Mormon gay conversion therapist came out as wanting to date men, and you’d think that if conversion therapy was going to work on anyone, it would be highly motivated people like that. And yet it consistently doesn’t.

There’s also the point that there is significant evidence that homosexuality is at least partly biologically influenced. For instance, the ratio of the length of your second finger to your fourth finger is linked to your exposure to androgen hormones in the womb, and appears to have a correlation with your sexuality. You can’t pray your fingers longer. You also can’t pray yourself into having fewer older brothers, and yet birth order – and specifically how many older brothers you have – seems to be correlated to your likelihood of being homosexual as well. You certainly can’t pray your DNA into different patterns.

As with most aspects of personality, it appears that the “shared environment” – all the stuff we have in common with our brothers and sisters, our upbringing and schooling – has little to no impact on our sexuality. These are fundamental parts of our lives, and yet they don’t make much difference: sexual preference is all about genes, chemicals in the womb – and sheer randomness.

It is very hard – if not impossible – to alter these deep-rooted aspects of who we are. It would certainly take more than a two-week course of therapy and some willpower.

‘We are not broken, and do not need fixing’

Julie Bindel recalls her experience at a gay-conversion centre in the US

In 2014, while researching a book I went undercover to a fundamentalist Christian counselling service in Colorado. I posed as an unhappy lesbian desperate to become “normal”, yearning to reunite with my family and with the church. My persona, Joanna, was a classic example of the type of lesbian who would have been fed negative messages about her sexuality all of her life.

I told my counsellor that, at the age of 16, I had been discovered kissing a girl in the kitchen of my home, had been thrown out by my parents, and disowned by the church.

But, rather than tell me about the gay-affirming churches that have been opened in both the US and the UK, attended by happy lesbian and gay Christians, my therapist told me that I was damaged, and needed healing. She tried to pick out examples from my childhood to blame for what might have damaged me even though I insisted I had been happy and loved by my parents.

She then suggested that perhaps I had been sexually abused by a male family member, but had buried the memory. By the end of this therapy, despite having been an out lesbian for almost four decades, and being totally “in character” as Joanna during the sessions, I felt depressed and anxious. It reminded me a little of how I felt as a 15-year-old, realising I was in love with my best friend, and being called a freak by the boys who had decided I was a lesbian because I didn’t want to date them.

I do not believe in the gay gene, but I do believe our sexuality and sexual attraction is pretty deep-rooted from early on in life. The reason I am so against conversion therapy, though, is because we are not broken, and therefore do not need fixing.

I love being a lesbian, and my heart breaks for those young women and men in religious communities that are tortured through this so-called therapeutic method. It should be illegal, and those that practice it should pay the price, not the lesbians and gay men who have to endure it.