Police in the UK investigating the murder of former MP and MEP Ann Widdecombe have said they “are not looking for anyone else” after a 28-year-old man was arrested.<\/p>\n
The former Conservative minister, and later Reform UK spokesperson, was found dead at her home in Haytor on Dartmoor at about 11.40am on Thursday after sustaining serious injuries.<\/p>\n
Assistant Chief Constable Matt Longman said a 28-year-old white British man was arrested on suspicion of murder in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, shortly after 9pm yesterday evening.<\/p>\n
He told reporters this morning: “At this point, there is still no information to suggest that this is a terrorism-related incident and at this point we are not looking for anyone else in connection with this murder.<\/p>\n
“At this stage, there is nothing to suggest that it was politically motivated.”<\/p>\n
He added that detectives “remain open-minded about the potential motive” and stressed it is not believed there is any threat to the wider public.<\/p>\n
Ms Widdecombe, who was 78, was first elected a Conservative MP in Kent in 1987, went on to serve as an MEP for the Brexit Party and then a spokeswoman for Reform UK.<\/p>\n
She also found fame outside politics after starring in Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Big Brother.<\/p>\n
She appeared on TalkTV on Wednesday morning, the day before she was found dead and was also due to be a guest on Channel 5’s Matt Allwright show on Wednesday afternoon, but did not appear, as first reported by ITV.<\/p>\n
Ms Widdecombe had exchanged messages with a researcher from the show, but did not respond when they tried to contact her to join a Zoom call from home.<\/p>\n
Calls and texts sent after the programme aired remained unanswered, ITV said, and the team on the Channel 5 show followed up with her agent later on Wednesday and on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Police in the UK investigating the murder of former MP and MEP Ann Widdecombe have said they “are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-546010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}