Who Decides Who Is Protected?
The killing of Ann Widdecombe has forced a difficult and poorly understood question back into public view. Not who deserves protection, but who decides, and on what basis.
On Thursday 10 July, the former Member of Parliament Ann Widdecombe was found dead at her home in Haytor, on the edge of Dartmoor. Police believe she had been attacked the previous day and had sustained serious injuries. A 28-year-old man was arrested roughly two hundred miles away in South Yorkshire, and on Monday 13 July Counter Terrorism Policing took over the investigation, saying new information and evidence had come to light. The suspect was re-arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. He has not been charged, and the investigation is live, so I will say nothing here about motive, about the suspect, or about why this happened, because those are questions for the courts and not for speculation.
What I want to write about is the question this killing has forced back into public view, because it is one I am asked about often and one that is very widely misunderstood. When a public figure is harmed, the immediate response is usually to ask whether they should have had protection. It is the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. The better question, and the one that actually matters, is who decides who receives protection in this country, on what basis, and why almost none of that process is visible to the people it is meant to serve.
How protection for political figures actually works
Most people assume that prominent politicians simply have security, in the way they might imagine it from film or television. The reality is more fragmented and considerably less reassuring.
Since the murders of Jo Cox in 2016 and Sir David Amess in 2021, both of them sitting MPs killed in their constituencies, all Members of Parliament are covered by a scheme known as Operation Bridger, which provides security advice, liaison with a local police contact, and funded protective measures for their homes and offices. That is guidance and hardware, it is not a bodyguard. Where a Member requires physical close protection, that has often been delivered not by police officers but by a private contractor, using operatives who are trained but unarmed. I have worked on the contracted side of this industry, and I will tell you plainly that the quality of what gets delivered varies enormously, because the person standing between a principal and a threat is only as good as their training, their vetting and their tasking. Some contracts get all three right. Some do not, and you would struggle to tell the difference from the outside until the day it matters.
Armed protection is a different system entirely. The decision to provide armed police protection to any individual sits with a body called the Royalty and VIP Executive Committee, known as RAVEC, which draws on assessments from the police and the security service and decides who receives what level of state protection. RAVEC is deliberately opaque. Its reasoning is not published, its decisions are not explained, and the public dispute between the Duke of Sussex and the Home Office, which reached the Court of Appeal, gave the clearest glimpse most of us will ever get of how contested and how hidden that process is. There are sound reasons for some of that secrecy, but there are also obvious costs to it, and we will come to those.
The intelligence picture
Here is the principle that sits underneath all of this, and it is the same principle whether the person being protected is a head of state, a chief executive or a former minister.
Protection should follow the threat. Not the profile, not the volume of the person's public complaints, not their politics, but a sober assessment of the intelligence picture, the risk to that specific individual at that specific time. When I co-wrote a piece about the killing of the healthcare executive Brian Thompson in From Boardroom to Battleground, the central point was that effective protective security is built on accurate risk assessment and diligent advance work, on understanding the threat before it arrives rather than reacting once it has. That has been true in every protective role I have held.
The uncomfortable truth is that a proper threat assessment is something the public can almost never see, and for good reason. It draws on intelligence, on sources and methods that cannot be exposed without endangering them, and on information about named individuals that cannot be made public. This is where the difficulty lies. The very secrecy that makes a threat assessment possible also makes it impossible for anyone outside the system to judge whether a given decision was sound. When protection is granted, we cannot see why. When it is declined or reduced, we cannot see why either. We are asked, in effect, to trust the process precisely at the moments when trust is hardest to give.
That is not an argument for opening the books. Exposing intelligence assessments would put people in danger and would help exactly the individuals these systems exist to guard against. But it is an argument for understanding, honestly, that public certainty about these decisions is almost always misplaced, in either direction. The people confidently declaring that protection was wrongly denied, and the people confidently declaring it was rightly withheld, are usually working from the same position, which is the outside, without sight of the one thing that would actually settle the matter.
The current debate
This point is being tested in real time in the argument over Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who has said publicly that he now believes he will require security for the rest of his life and has been sharply critical of the police and the Home Secretary.
The public record here is worth stating carefully, because it is more contested than the headlines suggest. According to reporting in the i Paper, Mr Farage was offered a taxpayer-funded protection package last year, including close protection, a vehicle and a trained driver, following police advice on the threats against him. The package would have put him at a broadly similar level to the leader of the opposition and senior Cabinet ministers. He turned it down. His team dispute the word ‘declined’, and their objection is worth hearing on its own terms. Their position is that the offer represented a reduction of roughly three quarters on the protection he had previously held, that the downgrade followed a review by Parliament's then security director in July 2025, and that it landed within days of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the United States. In their words, no credible assessment could explain a fall of that size in the danger to him over a matter of days, so the party sought independent advice and paid for its own arrangements rather than accept what was offered.
Since Ann Widdecombe's death, the temperature has only risen. Reform's home affairs spokesman has claimed the state is providing no protection whatsoever to the party's MPs, and the party has begun providing its own MPs with round the clock security. The Home Secretary has announced she will look at security guidance for former MPs and for party figures outside Parliament, and has offered Mr Farage a meeting with the chair of RAVEC itself. He has accepted publicly, saying he will use it to raise the security of all Reform politicians, including those who are not MPs. It is worth pausing on what that resolution actually is. The answer to a public argument about an opaque process is a private meeting with the head of the opaque process, which the public will not see inside either. I do not say that as criticism, as realistically it may well be the only workable answer. But it tells you everything about where these decisions live.
I am not going to tell you who is right, because I cannot see what RAVEC and the parliamentary security authorities can see, and neither can anyone else offering you a confident verdict. What I can offer instead is merely a professional observation. A seventy-five per cent reduction in a protection package is either the correct output of a sound reassessment or it is a serious misjudgement, and the honest answer is that nobody outside the assessment process can know which. That is precisely the problem - when the reasoning is hidden, every outcome becomes contestable, every reduction looks like negligence to one side and every complaint looks like grievance to the other, and a question that should be settled by assessment becomes a matter of public argument instead.
The professional problem
There is a reason protecting public figures is among the most difficult work in this field, and it is not mainly about barriers or bodyguards.
People in public life are, by necessity, accessible. They hold surgeries, they attend events, they walk into television studios, they live in named homes in known places. The openness is not incidental to the role, it is the role. A democracy in which representatives are sealed away from the people they serve has lost something essential, and most politicians understand this and guard their accessibility fiercely, sometimes at real cost to their own safety. That is the tension that sits at the centre of all of this. The very quality that makes someone a functioning public servant is the quality that makes them difficult to protect. Anyone who has worked a rope line, a public event or a walkabout knows the feeling of watching a principal step towards the exact environment you would advise them to avoid, because stepping towards it is their job.
There is no clean resolution to that tension. It can only be managed, case by case, through exactly the kind of careful, unglamorous threat assessment that the public never sees and rarely credits. The murders of Jo Cox and David Amess, both attacked while doing the ordinary open work of representing their constituents, are the permanent reminder of what is at stake when the balance goes wrong.
Ann Widdecombe's death, whatever the investigation ultimately concludes, has reopened all of these questions at once. They deserve better than the certainty being offered from every direction. The honest position, the professional position, is that the people best placed to judge these decisions are the ones we can never hear from, and the people we can hear from are almost never the ones best placed to judge. Until that changes, and it may be that it cannot safely change, we are left with a harder question than the one we started with.
When we cannot see how the decision is made, how do we know whether it was made well?
Sources
[1] UK Counter-Terror Police Lead Investigation into Suspected Murder of Former Lawmaker Ann Widdecombe, CNN, July 2026.
[2] Ann Widdecombe Death: UK Counterterrorism Police Leading Probe, NBC News, July 2026.
[3] Exclusive reporting on protection arrangements offered to Nigel Farage, the i Paper, July 2026, with Reform UK's response as reported by LBC.
[4] From Boardroom to Battleground, Black Widow Security, 2026.
I really enjoyed this
A very honest and thought provoking read . Thank you