The sunshine was beating down, but doughty Reform UK members still queued for more than an hour in the humid heat to get to catch a glimpse of the political rally’s star turn.This wasn’t during one of this summer’s relentless English heatwaves. Rather, it was shortly before the election of 2024. And the star turn wasn’t Reform leader Nigel Farage. It was Ann Widdecombe, then the party’s justice spokesperson, now its murdered matriarchal figure. Her brutal killing last week has rocked Westminster to the core.The late June 2024 rally was held at a county showgrounds in rolling countryside in Staffordshire, roughly halfway between Birmingham and Stoke. These days the area is a solid Reform heartland, but two years ago it was still only a prospect.Few, including the indefatigable Widdecombe, would have dared to predict the scale of the party’s subsequent spike in popularity. Yet in hindsight, there were clear portents of it in the room that day, not least when Widdecombe made her entrance.I had been standing at the bar trying to placate a hostile Welsh man with pints of Guinness. The Reform member had been crisp and chippy with me at first because, I think, he simply disliked journalists, and I was about the only one who had showed up.The only remedy I could think of was to try to drown his enmity in lashings of free stout, which he sunk like espressos. Soon his visage brightened. Not because my strategy had worked, but because he spotted Widdecombe walking through the door just behind me.With Farage unable to attend, she was the Staffordshire Reform crowd’s clear favourite. There was a genuine frisson as this ageing woman, then 76, shuffled into the hall. Security escorted her across the floor – not necessarily, you felt, because she was in any danger, but in case one of her fans knocked her over as they strained to get close.Widdecombe gave a tub-thumping if well-worn speech, hitting all the right notes for her rapturous Reform audience. She lambasted the political establishment for its alleged failure to deal with illegal immigration. She lamented the “indoctrination” of children with liberal values at school. She criticised the international organisations that are seen as bogeymen within the populist right-wing fraternity – “why the hell should we be told what to do by the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation,” she said.The Q&A afterwards turned into something of a Widdecombe Adoration. One man, bafflingly, asked if she might become Reform’s Peter Crouch, which he appeared to mean as a compliment about a veteran making a comeback. Widdecombe didn’t have a clue who the retired English footballer was, but she grinned in appreciation anyway.Another man was in the process of saying she was a “really powerful speaker” when Widdecombe, quick as a flash, interjected with a wry “hear hear”. She could be a genuinely funny woman. He compared her oratorical skills with Margaret Thatcher’s.Widdecombe was only ever a junior minister for a few years in John Major’s government and she never served in a UK cabinet, but comparisons with the former prime minister Thatcher were frequently directed her way, in life and after her recent death.Perhaps it was her voice, not dissimilar to Thatcher’s in its haughty, over-confident tones. Or maybe it was because they both cultivated similar no-nonsense personas. Most likely, it was because of her political celebrity status, even if Thatcher’s was gained through her policy achievements and Widdecombe’s was garnered mostly through her post-politics appearances on reality television shows such as Strictly Come Dancing.Widdecombe is the third British MP or former MP to be murdered in a decade, after Labour’s Jo Cox in 2016 and the Tory David Amess in 2021. While each of their deaths were shocking, Widdecombe was by far the best known of the three.As well as being stunned by her killing, many MPs in Westminster also say they are weighed down by a feeling of dread that her violent end won’t be the last of its ilk, as Britain’s ongoing political instability continues to play out in unpredictable ways.Counter terror police are now leading the investigation and a man is still being questioned. He is suspected of having driven 300 miles to the area where Widdecombe was killed at her home last week. CCTV showed him leaving his Yorkshire home that morning with what seemed to be a stick of some sort sticking out of his pocket.MPs paid tribute to Widdecombe during a debate in the House of Commons on Monday about their own safety. UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood acknowledged fears expressed by Farage and Reform that its representatives, in particular, may need better protection.She also quoted a line from an interview Widdecombe gave to Graham Norton that captured the murdered politician’s oeuvre: “We get one go this side of eternity. One go. Life is not a dress rehearsal. You take opportunities that you like and you go for it.”