Ann Widdecombe: Britain's last Battleaxe

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