Fifty years from now, said John Major in 1993, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and — as George Orwell said — “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist””

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.

“If she’d been losing out since the war, the British Battleaxe was eclipsed by the death of Diana.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 publicly, 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.