On a road in the West Bank in the spring of 2014, a convoy heading for a mobile veterinary clinic in Hebron came to an unscheduled halt. One of the passengers had spotted something the rest of the party had driven straight past: an injured donkey at the roadside. She insisted they stop and treat it.
That passenger was Ann Widdecombe.
Yet behind Widdecombe’s famously tough public exterior was a sustained commitment to animal welfare that relatively few people knew about. Across four decades in public life, she campaigned against fox hunting and the use of wild animals in circuses, lent her name and her time to sanctuaries at home in Britain, and travelled to Egypt, Mauritania and the Palestinian Territories to see working animals for herself.
Yet remarkably little of it attracted sustained attention while she was alive.
Twenty-four years, £80,000 and no fuss
Widdecombe became the first patron of Safe Haven for Donkeys in 2002, two years after the charity was founded, and remained closely involved until her death this month. Over those 24 years she helped raise more than £80,000 for vulnerable donkeys.
Around £75,000 of that came through television. She put her considerable general knowledge to work on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Celebrity Chase and All Star Family Fortunes, playing for the donkeys each time. A further £7,000 or so came the slower way: speaking to clubs and Women’s Institutes up and down the country and asking, instead of a fee, that they simply make a donation.
It is the sort of fundraising that never troubles a news desk. Nobody photographs a village hall in February.
“Her support was never superficial”
Wendy Ahl, the charity’s UK Operating Director, knew Widdecombe for more than twenty years and travelled with her to see the work first-hand. She says the commitment went well beyond lending a name and a profile.
“Ann’s support was never superficial. She genuinely cared about the animals and the people whose livelihoods depended on them. On our way to a mobile clinic in Hebron, she spotted an injured donkey at the roadside that none of the rest of us had seen and immediately insisted that we stop and treat it.
“Later, I looked around and found her completely surrounded by local children. They couldn’t speak English and Ann couldn’t speak Arabic, but they were all smiling and laughing together. She had a warmth and affinity with animals and children that people who knew only her public persona might not have expected.”
Widdecombe visited Safe Haven’s work in the region on two occasions and supported fundraising dinners, appeals and events over many years, including anniversary gatherings at St James’s Palace in 2022 and 2025.
PHOTO: Ann watches as Dr Rakan Salous applies cream beneath the sore eyes of a working donkey receiving treatment at the charity’s clinic in Nablus, alongside farrier Wael Abu Al E’es.
Egypt, Mauritania and the working animals nobody sees
The donkeys of the West Bank were only part of it. Widdecombe was also a long-standing supporter and ambassador for the charity now known as Working Animals International, previously SPANA.
In 2014 she travelled to Egypt as part of its campaign to improve conditions for the working horses at the Pyramids of Giza. In 2018 she went to Mauritania, meeting the donkeys and the owners who use them to haul water across the capital, Nouakchott. Later the same year she backed the charity’s campaign to remember the millions of animals used and killed across a century of war.
Paying tribute this month, Working Animals International described her as a passionate champion of animals and their welfare, and thanked her for a lifetime’s dedication to it.
Elephants, circuses and the fight in Parliament
Widdecombe’s advocacy was not confined to fundraising. She was an outspoken campaigner against the use of wild animals in British circuses, and against the brutal training methods inflicted on young elephants in the tourist trade, supporting the work of Save The Asian Elephants.
In Parliament she broke ranks with a great many of her own colleagues over fox hunting, describing it publicly in 1999 as morally indefensible and voting consistently for a ban. It put her at odds with a good many in her own party, and she held the position anyway.
Closer to home, she was a patron of the Devon animal rescue charity Animals in Distress, and supported Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats in her old Maidstone constituency. Rescue animals, working equines, wildlife and farm animals: her concern extended across them all.
The public woman, and the private one
The contrast with her public image is worth dwelling on. Widdecombe was, by any measure, one of the most combative British politicians of her generation: Conservative MP for Maidstone from 1987, a minister under John Major, Minister of State for Prisons from 1995 to 1997, later Shadow Home Secretary, later still an MEP and then Reform UK’s immigration and justice spokesperson. She was famously blunt, cheerfully unfashionable, and entirely unbothered by ridicule. Millions who never followed a word of her politics knew her instead as the gloriously unbothered contestant on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010.
Almost none of them knew about the donkeys.
She did not appear to use her patronages to soften an image she was perfectly happy with as it was. She simply turned up, year after year, and did the work.
Why this matters to us
Safe Haven for Donkeys is a name Pets Magazine readers will recognise. Earlier this year we published an exclusive interview with Dr Saif Alden, who at the time led the charity’s mobile clinic team for Gaza’s working animals – the only operation of its kind on the ground there. Funded by Safe Haven, his team treated thousands of donkeys, horses, cats and dogs amid destroyed roads, fuel shortages and daily danger.
His team have treated thousands of donkeys, horses, cats and dogs amid destroyed roads, fuel shortages and daily danger, animals carrying food, water, medical supplies and even expectant mothers to hospital because there is no fuel for anything else. Safe Haven funds that work entirely.
It is exactly the sort of unglamorous, urgent, life-saving effort Widdecombe backed for more than two decades without seeking much credit for it.
Her death
Widdecombe was found dead at her home in Haytor, on the edge of Dartmoor, on 9 July. She was 78. A murder investigation followed, later taken over by counter-terrorism officers, and Joshua Kerry, 28, from Rotherham, has since been charged with her murder. He appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday and later at the Old Bailey, where he was remanded in custody. A case-management hearing is scheduled for 9 October, with a provisional trial date of 8 June 2027. Detectives say they are still working to establish a motive. Out of respect for the legal process and for her family, we will not be reporting the details of the case here.
What she leaves behind
Tributes to Ann Widdecombe will, understandably, be argued over. She spent forty years in public life inviting disagreement and rarely apologising for it.
But there is a version of her that no political obituary will capture: the woman who noticed a donkey nobody else had seen, who spent an afternoon laughing with children she could not exchange a word with, who stood up for foxes and elephants even when it placed her at odds with political colleagues, and who quietly asked the Women’s Institute for a donation rather than a cheque.
For twenty-four years, working animals thousands of miles away had a champion in her. Most of the country never had the faintest idea.
Safe Haven for Donkeys’ work in Gaza and the West Bank continues.
