Ann Widdecombe: ‘I think maybe if I’d chosen diplomacy before truth I would have gone further’

ANN Widdecombe left Parliament three years ago, yet she is ever with us. When she’s not flying through the air in a get-up like a neon kite on Strictly Come Dancing, she pops up presenting Have I Got News For You or promoting her latest novel.

The former Tory MP for Maidstone and the Weald. now 65, still has a platform for her political views through a weekly tabloid column, and she may now be resident in a house with a swimming pool (paid for by Strictly earnings) looking out on beautiful Dartmoor, but she is still somehow ever-present.

Her forthright opinions are regularly sought out by the media and she started writing the first of her five novels a decade before she left Parliament.

Now, inevitably, comes the autobiography. Capitalising on her new-found celebrity and popularity as the former MP who – against the advice of all her friends – blithely threw all caution and dignity to the wind, she has called the memoir Strictly Ann.

The title draws on her comedy turn on the prime-time show and her stoical, trooper-like cheerfulness in the face of judges describing her variously as a “dancing hippo”, a “dalek in drag” and “the Ark Royal”. It also harks back to her ‘Doris Karloff’ nickname around the Commons at one time – one which she almost gleefully repeated against herself.

“Karloff is still around,” she reassures me with a ready laugh. She famously branded former Tory leader Michael Howard as having “something of the night” about him, and stands by that still. She also worked with Michael Portillo, whom she pronounces to be arrogant in her book.

As political autobiographies go it’s plain spoken and factual, low on the kind of sparkling wit found in the Chris Mullin diaries and even lower on the kind of gossipy titillation we got from the late Alan Clark. You’d expect neither from Widdecombe. This memoir is based not on daily journals but on notes of big events amplified by personal recollections, details from engagement diaries and press cuttings she has collected about herself over more than two decades.

What you get is the famous Ann Widdecombe bluntness which, in a political world that became increasingly set about by obfuscation and spin during her time in the House, her supporters always found loveable.

Growing up partly in Singapore, where her father worked for the British Admiralty, the young Ann enjoyed a rather idyllic childhood, with Enid Blyton-style cycle rides, picnics and unrestricted adventures.

From a young age she says she was determined and ambitious, and her parents seemed quite baffled that it was their daughter, not her late brother Malcolm (a vicar), who imagined a life in politics from as young as 13.

Hers was not a political family, though. “It was my experience of life that drove me into politics,” she says. That experience included seeing Labour governments in the 70s introducing comprehensive schools that were “...suddenly forced on education. I hated socialism. I believed in the individual over the state.

“We had the suppression of the individual and opportunity, an attempt to level everything out into one great amorphous grey, instead of understanding that children would stand out, and catering for an individual’s abilities rather than one size fits all.”

She says she was always a very determined, goal-oriented person. She loved Latin and was no good at science, so it didn’t bother her to do badly at it. She failed the 11-plus then went to a private school, and after rejection by Oxford, gained a good degree in Latin from Birmingham University.

She then tried Oxford again, feeling another undergraduate degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and experience of rubbing shoulders with future movers and shakers in the Oxford Union and Conservative Association were required to get on. She took a third in her degree, but that wasn’t really the point of being there, she says.

Her only love affair, a three-year relationship with “brilliant” fellow Oxford Union officer and physics student Colin Maltby, drifted and ended over dinner in a pub. She was hurt for a few days, then got on with life and never actively sought out attachment again. Her enduring loves have been politics, God and devotion to her mother, who lived with her until she died six years ago at the age of 95.

Setting herself a target of becoming an MP by the time she was 40, it took Ann Widdecombe 10 years, two unsuccessful attempts and a decade learning a lot about jumble sales and relationships with constituency volunteers before she landed her safe seat aged 39 and a half.

The Tories lost to the Labour landslide of 1997, around the time Widdecombe might have been ready for high office, but still, she served at a high level in three departments and went on to be shadow Home Secretary.

She overlapped with Margaret Thatcher by only for three years, by which time the then PM had become “remote”, and Widdecombe doesn’t cite her as a role model.

She had a lot more time for the clubbable John Major and she continues to be a huge fan of William Hague, whom she says she told only the other day: “William, you got it (the leadership of the party) too soon. I think he agreed.” She would like to see him have another go. “But my instinct is that he won’t...once was enough.”

She seriously considered running for the party leadership after Hague’s resignation, but didn’t go ahead when it became clear that she wouldn’t attract enough votes.

Looking back, does she think she might have stood a better chance of going the whole way is she’d been less straight-talking and more machiavellian?

“Perhaps..I think maybe if I’d chosen diplomacy before truth and political correctness before bluntness I could have gone further. I don’t agonise over it because I did what I did and stood for what I stood for, and I have been proved right over a number of things.”

She’s typically withering 
about positive discrimination towards women and the Tory A-list that fast-tracks bright candidates like Louise Mensch. She says she has met most of the women – and men – she knows through politics, and she finds men much easier company than women, whom she describes as “whinging”.

As she puts it in the book: “Men are less prone to focus 
on their emotional state or 
latest grievance, their conversation is less introspective and although I can hear the screech of the sisterhood as I write this, they are sharper, wittier and more entertaining. Oh dear, 
sorry girls.”

She’s no great fan of David Cameron. He also got “too much, too soon” but she shows none of the fondness she feels for Hague.

“He (Cameron) had only been in parliament four years when he stood for the leadership, and he hadn’t had much of a career in the outside world, either. He’s terribly talented and very able, and had the best education this country can give, but he simply didn’t have the experience....or the feel for politics out there on the ground.

“You can’t force things on a party whose gut instinct is in the opposite direction. When I look at what he’s tried to do on gay marriage, it’s as if I’d tried to 
inflict a ban on fox hunting on 
the Tory Party or Ken Clarke had tried to inflict closer ties with Europe.”

She seems to enjoy hearing
 the whispers from Westminster’s back corridors, but luxuriates
in being out walking the moor, and free to be as undignified as she likes as the fancy takes her.

One day she’ll retire properly, says Ann Widdecombe, and will brush up her Latin.Unsurprisingly, free afternoons don’t see her at a tea dance in Newton Abbott. “I never could dance, and Anton would concur,” she quips.

• Ann Widdecombe will discuss her memoir, Strictly Ann, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20) as part of the Raworths Literature and Lecture Series at Harrogate International Festivals, at 6pm on July 14 at the St George’s Hotel, Harrogate. Tickets:01423 562303

A life in and out of politics

Ann Noreen Widdecombe was born in Bath, Somerset, In 1947 and was educated at a convent in Bath and in Singapore.

She worked for Unilever, then as an administrator at London University then became an MP at the third attempt.

She became a minister in three departments and held shadow cabinet roles including shadow home secretary.

She converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1993.

She opposed the legality of abortion and was anti-fox hunting as well as supporting the re-introduction of the death penalty. She’s anti-gay marriage,but insists she’s “not anti-gay”.