The Political Uses of Ann Widdecombe

Nigel Farage has used every opportunity to fabricate a persecution complex. Being criticised for pocketing £5m and facing a standards inquiry is the establishment out to get him. Questions about his relationship to a moneyed fraudster and his mother is so much hounding. Having his by-election stunt backfire as all the other parties rightly refused to play his game is an elite conspiracy. The appearance of wounding is central not just to Farage's increasingly unpopular populism, but the politics of the right in general. The murder of Ann Widdecombe which, accordingly to the police, now looks like a targeted killing has become an unseemly Reform jamboree because it plays into the victimhood dynamic they continually set up. A photo opp of leading Reform figures laying wreathes, plenty of buddy-buddy photos of Farage and Richard Tice with Widdecombe flooding Reform-affiliated social media, Farage moaning about the lack of security afforded him even though he declined a state-funded…