Death Comes For Us All

The past week has been a week of deaths. In particular, for the famous.

Four deaths have caught the attention of those who keep up with the news. There wasn’t much in common among our recently departed, other than that they were all getting on in years. Not that “getting on in years” means the same thing, numerically, that it once did.

I speak, of course, of Ann Widdecombe, Derryn Hinch, Sam Neill and Lindsey Graham. Three were political figures – though Hinch’s more famous career was in in media – and the fourth was an actor. You couldn’t get four more diverse figures, whose deaths have meant very different things to different people, and caused very different reactions.

Sam Neill was a great and respected actor and, it seems, a good man. A Kiwi gentleman who escaped the ultimate ignominy of being mistaken for an Australian. He died from various illnesses in a Sydney hospital.

Derryn Hinch was the human headline. He made it his mission in life to hunt PDF files. Hence, he entered the febrile territory of moral panics and me-tooism. I am agnostic about his intent and impact. I confess that I have searched online for Steve Vizard’s hilarious Fast Forward parodies. It spoke to Hinch’s sense of humour that he worked with Vizard on those parodies. Hinch was yet another Kiwi who crossed the ditch.

Lindsey Graham, the American Senator, was the neocon’s neocon. A relic of the Bush 43 era of ill-fated foreign wars intended to plant liberal democracy in places not especially known for their receptivity to same. With awful consequences, mostly.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/12/lindsey-graham-israel-ukraine-foreign-policy-legacy

A Ukraine guy, too.

Israel’s bestie in Washington. As an awake, reformed and remorseful neocon, I don’t especially have sympathy for Graham’s politics. On the other hand, I don’t the share the endless obsession some have with the power of the Zionist lobbying voice stateside.

That is a debate for another time.

The grisly passing of Ann Widdecombe has been most in the news, at least in the mother country. Violent death will do that.

All four will face their Maker, and be asked to account for their actions. You know not the hour …

As you approach old age – I myself am rapidly approaching the allocated three score years and ten – you tend to notice deaths. When you lose a child, as I recently have, especially. Death takes on a whole new meaning and significance.

The fictionalised Thomas More said, famously, in Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons:

Death . . . comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead! So causing their bodies to be buried in a pit and sending them to a judgment . . . whereof at their death their success is uncertain.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/02/01/death-comes-for-us-all/

The martyr was under the pump. He faced his own death, at the hands of the self-serving Henry VIII’s vicious henchmen, with relative calm. Astonishingly. He even offered his executioner a tip so as to make sure he got the strike right. At least in Robert Bolt’s telling.

That is what Christian faith can do.

Ann Widdecombe’s death was the only one of the four that came as the result of violence. Political violence, as we now know, despite the bungling, ideologised performance of the Devon and Cornwall police and their master, the UK Home Office. The only death of the four that was decided by man and not by God. Just like St Thomas’s.

As far as I am aware, Ann’s death was the only one of the four that was celebrated. One could only imagine the reaction if anyone came out in celebration of the deaths of Graham, or Neill, or Hinch. We would all think it beneath contempt. I hope.

Ann’s death was welcomed by some, clearly. And gleefully, in some cases.

Just like St Thomas More’s.

Thomas Cromwell was cheering that one. Ann was another political martyr, then, dispatched by her enemies. Or, at least, on behalf of them. The many celebrating Ann’s assassination might be seen as the descendants of Henry II’s henchmen who did away with St Thomas Beckett, yet another martyr killed by the state’s acolytes. Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest? They took the hint.

Ann was a meddlesome Christian, too. Who will rid me of this meddlesome “old maid” bigot? Bigot is the new, preferred epithet. Bigot = someone who disagrees with ME. And with the direction of ideological travel.

Will the progressivist cheer squad celebrating Ann’s death also experience King Henry II’s remorse? Yeah, nah. The modern, online perps don’t do guilt. Just reputation management.

Willing death upon one’s enemies is a real thing. It isn’t new, of course. As Gavin Ashenden has noted, it goes back to Genesis and Cain and Abel.

Ashenden’s take is both deep and remarkable. Relevant. And expressed with his usual moderation and erudition.

But willing one’s enemies to die, while ancient, is now turbo-charged. And fuelled by the instant hit occasioned by social media, a decidedly mixed modern blessing. Where the ego of the self-styled pundit is given an immediate opportunity for virtue signalling, recognition and “likes”. Certainly, it is in today’s Britain. It has been much remarked. Dan Wootton has noticed it:

Then there is the performative grief. It is one of the less appealing aspects of our age. There are many, of course. But the self-serving, narrative-driven expressions of empathy are pretty sickening. Worse, the sense of being sickened by it is fading, and fast.

For the rest of us, it is merely deep sadness at what we have lost. Letting the deceased rest in peace, at least until their buried, is a thing of the past. If ever anything provided cause for societal self-reflection, surely it must be this. I am guessing that it won’t.

We have lost something precious, in this passing of respect for death. It is a loss of our essential shared humanity. Desacralisation, Gavin Ashenden calls it.

But, of course, that is what they intended. Raw power has replaced grounded morality. The (alleged) leftist Rotherham killer has done Satan’s work. White or not.

Ah, Rotherham. That rings a vague bell …

Paul Collits

15 July 2026