Ann Widdecombe was never one to hide from an argument. And she wasn’t afraid for her safety either. She scoffed at friends’ suggestions that she should get electric gates, as an elderly woman with a public profile living alone on Dartmoor, just as she dismissed concerns about her health at 78.

Having lost friends in the Brighton hotel bombing that almost killed Margaret Thatcher, she wasn’t naive about security. But she was forged in a different era: one before Jo Cox was murdered, when the greatest risk was to politicians identified as symbols of the state, rather than as the embodiment of an idea. She posed happily for press photographs inside her retirement bungalow, including one available to anyone casually Googling that included the house’s distinctive name: Widdecombe’s Rest. She would have been so easy to find, had anyone gone looking. Perhaps she never really believed that anyone would.

It is depressing beyond words to have to spell this out, but nobody deserves to die like Ann did. She should be alive today, pottering around her kitchen, pouncing on the occasional summons from Jeremy Vine to say something I’d probably have disagreed with wildly. The hallmark of a civilised country is that political differences are settled through votes not violence, and though her killer’s motives remain unclear, the third killing of a British politician in a decade feels ominously like the crossing of a Rubicon.

When Jo Cox was murdered in the street at the height of a polarising referendum, the shock brought politicians across the spectrum together in soul-searching about the culture in which such horrors could happen. When Widdecombe’s good friend David Amess was killed five years later by........

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