'Who is Ann Widdecombe?'

How the men behind Hope Not Hate smear inconvenient women

Ann Widdecombe was found dead at her home in Haytor on the edge of Dartmoor on 9 July. She had missed a television interview the previous afternoon. Police described serious injuries and a brutal attack on a 78-year-old woman in her own house. By 13 July, counter-terrorism officers had taken over the investigation, and a 28-year-old man from Rotherham was in custody under a warrant of further detention.

At some point in the days that followed, Hope Not Hate deleted its page about her.

The page was called “Who is Ann Widdecombe?” and it set out what the organisation described as her “long history of homophobic and sexist remarks”, and her embrace of what it called “dangerous and divisive politics”. Their statement about the deletion said the removal reflected no change in their approach, and that scrutinising the public records of politicians is legitimate and essential work which will continue.

Nothing has changed. What they mean is that nothing has changed about them, which is true. Ann Widdecombe, on the other hand, has changed a good deal, having moved from the column marked ‘living’ to the other one, and the whole of the UK changed upon hearing the news, as they immediately realised what the country had suddenly lost.

The State of Hate

Hope Not Hate’s annual report, State of Hate 2026, came out in March, and she’s on page 115 of it. Not her own entry this time. She appears in the profile of Richie Allen, a Salford broadcaster whose show grew out of David Icke’s channel and who still has Icke on to explain that reality was built by vampires. She’s present as one of the mainstream politicians Allen has platformed, in a list that also holds two Holocaust deniers, the neo-Nazi Mark Collett, the hate preacher Anjem Choudary, and Sir Desmond Swayne.

Swayne is the one who tells you how this works. He has been the Conservative MP for New Forest West since 1997, and in November 2020 he went on Allen’s show to say that Covid was serious but that people needed a sense of proportion. Hope Not Hate revealed it that January and wrote publicly to the Chief Whip demanding he be suspended. Their own article conceded there was no evidence Swayne knew anything about Allen’s views or his previous guests.

So that’s the list. Two Holocaust deniers, a neo-Nazi, an Islamist hate preacher, a backbencher who took a booking about lockdown, and a 78-year-old woman who was just killed in her home. It was published in March and it’s still up, on a website run by people who understand perfectly well what a list of names does, because assembling lists of names is their entire business.

The milieu

Section 8 of State of Hate 2026 is headed ANTI-LGBTQ+, and it runs alongside sections on Patriotic Alternative and the fascist Homeland Party. Inside it you’ll find the Scottish Family Party, the Family Education Trust, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, and Fair Cop.

Fair Cop is Harry Miller’s organisation. It was “established to protect police officers who face disciplinary issues for expressing anti-trans, misogynistic and other anti-LGBTQ+ views”, they write, and Miller started it in 2019 “after he was investigated for posting anti-trans content on social media”. That’s a striking way to describe a group founded by a man who in February 2020 won a High Court ruling that Humberside Police had acted unlawfully in recording a non-crime hate incident against him for tweeting about the Gender Recognition Act, and who won again at the Court of Appeal against the College of Policing in December 2021.

He is not mentioned in the document as having won. In an earlier version, published three months after his Court of Appeal victory, they called him “a police officer critiqued for transphobic tweets” and left it there. They’ve since corrected the ‘former’. They have not found room for the judgments.

But we do get a little glimpse of how the sausage is made. Fair Cop, they write, has “strong links to the far right and the broader ‘gender critical’ milieu”.

It’s one sentence with two halves, far right on one side, gender critical on the other. Holding them together is the phrase “and the broader”, which does no logical work at all and all of the dirty work. It never asserts that gender-critical women are far right, it just puts them in the same clause and lets grammar do what an accusation would have to prove. And the scare quotes around ‘gender critical’ tell the reader that the term itself is a costume, that the women wearing it are pretending to be something.

The same care went into ‘milieu’. Not movement, not campaign, and certainly not the several hundred thousand British women who don’t want men in their changing rooms, prisons, shelters and sports. It’s a word that lets you avoid saying who, or how many, or what a single one of them actually thinks.

Kellie-Jay gets her own entry in all three reports, and in the 2023 wording you can watch the method set. She is, they write, “a leading voice in the anti-trans movement in the UK”, and she has “increasingly found support from and an overlap in views with the far right”. Not that she is far right, mind you. That she overlaps with it. It’s built to dodge litigation and it’s built to be quoted without the qualifiers, and by 2025 that’s exactly what had happened. A peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Gender Studies told its readers that Keen-Minshull “was identified in the 2023 report by the UK anti-racist advocacy group ‘Hope Not Hate’ as a key British figure within far-right agitation”. The hedge evaporated between the report and the footnote, as it was designed to. And peer review caught none of it, because peer review in gender studies means being waved through by people who look like Batman villains. “An overlap in views with” does not turn into “a key figure within” by accident. Somebody preferred the stronger sentence, and Hope Not Hate had built them a citation to hang it on.

Albert Park

State of Hate 2023 was published on 26 February. Four weeks later, on 25 March, Kellie-Jay walked into Albert Park in Auckland to hold a Let Women Speak event. Somewhere between 150 and 200 people had come to hear her. Around 2,000 had come to stop her, among them the co-leader of New Zealand’s Green Party.

She never spoke. She had tomato juice poured over her at the rotunda and was escorted out by police through a crowd that had begun pulling down the barriers, and she abandoned the rest of the tour.

In the same crowd, a 20-year-old man punched a 71-year-old woman named Judith Hobson three times in the head. She was concussed, with bruising to her eye and behind her left ear. He was discharged without conviction, the judge citing, among other things, his neurodiversity.

Hope Not Hate’s work is done long before any particular crowd assembles, whether it contains one or one hundred neurodivergent men, and it goes on working long after. They supply the sentence that says the woman on the stage overlaps in views with fascists, and they supply it with a charity number attached and a research department behind it, which is what makes it quotable. Once a sentence like that exists it’s available to anybody who wants a reason, including a 20-year-old who has given himself permission to punch an elderly woman three times in the head, or a 28-year-old who has given himself permission to kill one.

That is what the word ‘milieu’ is for. It’s a licence to inflict physical harm, drawn up by Hope Not Hate. It says these are not individual women with individual arguments that have to be individually weighed. They are a diffuse contaminating presence, and you may treat any given specimen of it accordingly.

The Missing Women

The most interesting thing about these reports is the names that aren’t in them.

Across all three reports, something over 225,000 words, the following names appear zero times. Maya Forstater. Helen Joyce. Kathleen Stock. J.K. Rowling. Julie Bindel. LGB Alliance. Sex Matters. Woman’s Place UK. For Women Scotland. And no mention of me, which is odd. Am I not the most terrible transphobe who ever lived?

They have written at length about a ‘milieu’ whose most prominent members they never name.

There are two explanations and neither convinces you you’re dealing with people of good character. The first is that they’ve considered these women carefully and concluded they have nothing to do with the far right, in which case the ‘milieu’ is one women’s rights activist and one retired police officer, and they might have said so. The second is that Forstater has already beaten an employer in a tribunal on precisely this ground, For Women Scotland won in the Supreme Court in April last year, and Rowling has the money to make them prove any of it. So you write about the ‘milieu’ instead. Nobody can sue you for describing a contaminating presence, because a contaminating presence has no name to clear.

The lists have never really been findings. Sir William Shawcross’s 2023 review of Prevent revealed that counter-extremism officials had been shown material from a Hope Not Hate dossier on the extreme right wing which named Rod Liddle, Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray as journalists guilty of mainstreaming far-right ideas. Murray has since said that after he criticised the organisation, it approached him and offered to leave his name off the next one if he took his article down.

Please talk about Obama

Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister on Monday. His first significant appointment, briefed to journalists with heavy emphasis on his time working for the Obama campaign, is Matthew McGregor as Director of Political Strategy. McGregor is a former director of Hope Not Hate.

Burnham’s people would rather talk about Obama. Of course they would.

For twenty years, Hope Not Hate have told the country that identifying extremism is their professional competence, that this is why the Home Office should fund them and why counter-terrorism officials should read what they write. And in that decade, their considered professional judgement has been that the danger lies with a woman who wants her local refuge to stay female, and that she belongs in a document with Anjem Choudary, and that the correct word for her and everyone like her is a ‘milieu’.

Meanwhile, the violence has been arriving from the other direction, and it keeps arriving, and it is almost never called what it is.

Maria MacLachlan, assaulted at Speaker’s Corner in 2017. Julie Bindel, ambushed outside an Edinburgh lecture hall in 2019 by a man it took three security men to pull away. Fred Sargeant, 74 and disabled, slapped about the head and doused in coffee at a Vermont Pride parade in 2022, an event that exists because of him. Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern in 2024, told by marchers that one belonged at the bottom of the Rhine and the other on the fire. And Charlie Kirk, of course. And now Ann Widdecombe.

You cannot spend ten years telling the state which of its citizens are a contaminating presence and then act surprised when somebody does something about it. Since Hope Not Hate’s creation, whether they know it or not, they have been working into a tizzy a particular kind of young man. Isolated, obsessive, often autistic or describing himself as neurodivergent, drawn to their work because it offers a moral universe a toddler could understand. Give a man like that a name, the authority of a charity and the word ‘hate’, and he will travel like a bullet until he meets something. Last week one of them travelled the better part of three hundred miles to a farmhouse on Dartmoor.

Who is Ann Widdecombe? It was always a strange question to put at the top of a dossier, because the whole country knew the answer. An MP for 23 years. A minister of the Crown. A woman of a faith she took seriously and defended without embarrassment, who wrote novels, campaigned for prisoners and animals, and let Anton du Beke haul her round a dance floor for the nation’s entertainment because she was never afraid of looking ridiculous. You could disagree with every position she ever held and still see what she was: a person who said what she believed under her own name, to your face. Which is more than can be said for the authors of an anonymous page, deleted in the night, by people who judge themselves fit to judge the rest of us.