Don't quit. Remember Ann for how she lived
They took Aunty Ann. They will not take our voices too.
Since our darling Ann Widdecombe was taken before her time, I have struggled with so many feelings. Like so many of you who have reached out to me since her killing, I will admit I have cried more than once as the details unfolded. Ann was a prominent member of our Reform movement. The Aunty Ann of Reform UK.
I do not claim to have known Ann especially well, but a former producer at GB News showed me his last messages with her, and in them she said she enjoyed the show and looked forward to appearing. And I’ll be honest, it is still mad to me that someone like Ann Widdecombe even knew the name Darren Grimes.
I’ve had many messages too from those concerned for my own welfare. Some may well believe I ought to stop putting myself out there, as it were, be that on social media or in the television studio. But I don’t believe we have the luxury of stopping. Until we even remotely resemble the country my grandfather’s generation fought for and recognised, how can we possibly stop?
And I get it. I had to install CCTV cameras, sew up my letterbox and I’m far more cautious in public than I used to be. I have been threatened in person by Islamists who say they will kill me if I talk about Islam. I have had people turn up to the council building on several occasions asking to see me so they could “knock me out,” and goodness only knows what lies within the thousands of notifications my social media accounts receive every day.
After the murder by an Islamist of the Conservative MP Sir David Amess, Ann said, “I feel very strongly that we must remember David not for how he died, but how he lived.”
The court heard she was struck 21 times about the head, a detail almost too sickening to sit with, but her life should outshine the awful circumstances of her death. She was rejected by Oxford, studied Latin, applied again, got into Oxford, became a Tory MP, then a Minister, and then, as so many knew her, a television superstar.
Ann knew what a gift life was because of her deep-rooted Christian faith. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the earth. For out of it you were taken because you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” She seized every opportunity that came her way, and we will forever be grateful as a party that she used her retirement to fight for our cause.
I was struck by how upset Nigel Farage has been these past days. In interviews about Ann with GB News he spoke candidly about how she had been defending him the very morning she was so brutally taken from us. She cared so deeply about our country and our cause, and for that she deserved a peerage that David Cameron so cruelly denied her, in an act of a now-stereotypical so-called Conservative cowardice.
But because of who she was, I can say with the clarity of one of those overly dramatic dishwasher tablet adverts that Ann would be absolutely aghast at the calls for greater speech regulation in the wake of her death. She would find it utterly flummoxing that nasty, pernicious and obnoxious elements of the political Left and trans activism now face police investigation over their comments on her passing.
She was an unapologetic proponent of freedom of expression. In 2019 she went viral several times for her robust defence of it at the lily-livered lefty Oxford Union, and my friends, sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. The more the public sees of the extreme views of the political Left, who get a free pass where the fringe of the right never would, the more they will be utterly repulsed by their ideas and their values.
We cannot afford to be cowed into silence and a withdrawal from public life by those who use political violence, cancel culture and intimidatory tactics as a political tool. Britain is a project much too precious to leave upon the battlefield with a shrug of the shoulders. What is the point in staying quiet in a country we no longer recognise, led by the very people we rightly view as so thoroughly alien and objectionable to who we were, and who we ought to be again?
May Ann rest in peace and rise in Glory.
Nice one Darren, yiur not the only one to shed a tear, I know for a fact many of us have. Some are still struggling with it now, it’s playing in peoples minds, mine included, but you can’t stop. We can’t stop, I recon we owe Ann that much. She wouldn’t want us to stop either, she would want us to keep fighting , so let’s do this for her, and make sure we win
Beautifully said Darren, she was a rare human being in these desperately dark times in our current lives. She did not deserve such brutality, she was a gentle giant amongst us all and, given her faith and beliefs, I feel she would probably have forgiven her attacker; I still cannot believe she’s gone. Rest in peace Ann, much love and respect. ❤️