Wife claims Bridgen has been “radicalised” by “anti-vax cult”

The estranged wife of Andrew Bridgen claims the North West Leicestershire MP has been “radicalised” by the “anti-vax cult”. Navena Bridgen told The Times the “anti-vax conspiracy theorist movement” destroyed her life when Mr Bridgen “became their foot soldier”.

Mr Bridgen has been a vocal critic of the Government’s handling of the pandemic and the rollout of the Covid vaccines. He was suspended from the Conservative Party in January 2023 after posting a tweet saying that vaccines are “biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust” and are causing “serious harm”.

He apologised for the tweet, but denied he is anti-Semitic. He also vowed he would continue to ask questions about the “safety and effectiveness of experimental mRNA vaccines”.

READ MORE: Leicestershire MP Andrew Bridgen tells court he ‘wants to clear name over malicious Hancock tweet’

In an interview with The Times, Ms Bridgen claimed the first “red flag” about her husband’s behaviour came when she heard him speaking on a Zoom call around Christmas 2022. The couple officially separated last month, with The Times reporting Ms Bridgen has filed for a divorce.

She said: “It was crazy, they were talking about crimes against humanity and someone saying that this was all done to eradicate the population. They went on to say something along the lines of ‘You have to do your job now and call out the mainstream media and tell people the truth. This is your mission.’

“The person spoke of a global military alliance. They were basically encouraging insurrection and saying the military should take this into their own hands.”

She also claimed he frequently met with anti-vax “whistleblowers” in the middle of the night. The “scales” fell from her eyes last autumn, she told The Times, when the couple’s five-year-old son became ill and ended up in hospital.

Mr Bridgen was attending a conference in Sweden arranged by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vax group Children’s Health Defense. Ms Bridgen claimed she made repeated attempts to get her husband to return home, but he did not.

She said: “There was no way of pleading with him. The human cost of radicalisation and the devastating impact it can have on individuals and their families, and in this case, our family, was spelled out for me for the first time in bold colours.”

She claimed she challenged him on it and his alleged response was that the whole of humanity “was at stake” and if he succeeded he would be saving the world, the Times reported. Ms Bridgen said: “I felt like I was in that Matrix film and that he was telling me he was the chosen one. Except this is not a blockbuster movie, this is my life.”

She also told The Times she felt the Conservative Party had not done enough to protect her then husband. “There is no system to protect MPs from these kinds of things,” she said.

“They [the Conservative Party] just accelerated his radicalisation and pushed him further down the road. Once he was out of the Conservative Party, he was a free agent, a target of the ‘antivax cult’. And now he’s not just an MP anymore, he’s also the international leader of these groups.”

The Party declined to comment on the allegations set out in The Times. However, “a source questioned what action the party could have taken”, the paper said.

LeicestershireLive has approached Andrew Bridgen for a comment. At the time of publication, we had not received a response. He is understood to deny belonging to or being associated with any “sect” or “cult”, the Times said.