Ann Widdecombe’s smashed skull

Joshua Kerry is 28 years old, comes from Rotherham in Yorkshire, and is accused of murdering Ann Widdecombe, a long-standing member of the British Conservative Party who had sat in the House of Commons since 1987, before joining Nigel Farage in the Brexit Party and later Reform UK. Kerry appeared in court two days ago, where the sequence of events leading up to the murder was reconstructed: on 8 July, the alleged killer drove from Rotherham to Haytor in Devon (a distance of around 400 kilometres), parked outside Widdecombe’s home, entered holding a hammer but concealing it behind his leg, found Widdecombe in the kitchen having lunch, asked her for her credit cards and documents, and she did not have time to reply or react: in two minutes of brutal violence, the alleged killer struck the 78-year-old woman twenty-one times with the hammer, shattering her skull. He then took her documents and credit cards – which were found in a rubbish bin – got back into his car and returned to Rotherham. Not much is known about Joshua Kerry: an office worker, he lived alone with his dog after his father died of cancer in December, and he – already a solitary figure – had become even more isolated. He had signed a petition by a Corbyn-aligned organisation, and thus a left-wing one, which labels him a ‘left-wing activist’, but there are no other confirmed details regarding any of his initiatives or signs of trouble.

The investigations do not rule out a political or terrorist motive, but at present nothing is certain and nothing has been made public – all that is known is that a man travelled 800 kilometres to go to a specific house with a hammer – and the extremely violent murder of a veteran of British politics has been treated with ostentatious caution. We must not jump to conclusions; British society is marked by dangerous divisions and the exploitation of these divisions, but our expressions of grief, at the very least, should be less cautious and less circumspect, and the desire to get to the bottom of this should, too, be made explicit.