www.silverguide.site –

Considering that she only ever held junior ministerial office, the former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, who has died aged 78, had a peculiarly strong hold on the public imagination. This was largely for her non-political, post-parliamentary career as a television personality, with appearances as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010, being hauled good-naturedly like a sack of potatoes around a dancefloor, and in the 21st series of Celebrity Big Brother in 2018, on which she was a runner-up. She played up to the role of British eccentric, part admonitory maiden aunt (which she was), part pantomime dame (which she also was, twice, at Dartford in 2011 and High Wycombe the following year).

Yet Widdecombe was a deeply serious politician, an MP for Maidstone in Kent for 23 years (Maidstone and the Weald from 1997) and a competent minister in the decidedly unglamorous departments of Social Security and Employment, and with responsibility for prisons at the Home Office. If her persona consciously or otherwise mimicked a long line of robustly rightwing, uncompromising Tory women, she was brighter, personally kinder, and more sensitive than her self-confident carapace indicated.

In politics, her intensity and dogmatic shrillness counted against her – the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart suggested that planes coming into Heathrow over Westminster had to be diverted when she rose to speak – as much as Tory sexism. Her lack of promotion annoyed but did not change her: “If somebody wants to turn round and say, Widdecombe, you’re overweight and you’ve got crooked teeth, I say: you’re right, so what?” she told Sue Lawley on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1999.

Those who appeared with her in broadcasts were sometimes taken aback by the personal nervousness and shyness masked by her stridently expressed views. She was opposed to abortion and liberalisation of LGBT rights, both prompted by her religious views, was Eurosceptic – eventually campaigning for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party and being expelled from the Conservatives in 2019 – was a climate change sceptic and supported the reintroduction of the death penalty. Her most notable breach of rightwing orthodoxy was her resolute opposition to fox hunting.

Widdecombe was the daughter of James Widdecombe, a former naval officer and head of naval supplies at the Admiralty, and his wife, Rita (nee Plummer). Her elder brother, Malcolm, 10 years her senior, became an Anglican vicar. Her father’s postings meant a peripatetic childhood, including three years in Singapore, and she was educated, although an Anglican, at a Catholic convent boarding school, La Sainte Union, near Bath. Turned down by Oxford, she studied Latin at Birmingham University, but her father then paid for her to undertake a further undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Lady Margaret Hall, which was then an all-women’s college at Oxford.

With her Conservative views crystallising, she became heavily involved with the Oxford Union debating society – practical trainee politics rather than the kind she was studying for what became a third class degree. She served as the union treasurer and then secretary. It was at Oxford, too, that she had her only boyfriend, Colin Maltby. They were together for three years and he served as union president before going into banking. “There might have been odd men I looked at and thought you’re rather nice, but there were no other relationships,” she told an interviewer many years later.

Now planning a political career, Widdecombe obtained a job marketing Knight’s Castile soap and Persil for Unilever and serving as a local councillor on Runnymede district council in Surrey. She then worked in financial administration at London University for 12 years while seeking a constituency. After initially being turned down as a prospective parliamentary candidate by Conservative Central Office, she wrote to every constituency in the country which had a vacancy and was turned down by dozens.

She had more than 100 interviews before being chosen to fight the safely Labour seat of Burnley at the 1979 general election. After defeat there, she was selected for Plymouth Devonport, a seat held by the SDP leader David Owen, four years later, and lost that too. She was finally chosen, after 10 years of applications, for the safely Tory Maidstone and was elected at the 1987 general election, a few months before her 40th birthday.

At Westminster, preferment was slow, not least because of her vociferous support for a high-profile rearguard campaign led by the Catholic Lib Dem MP David Alton to reduce the time limit for abortion procedures. Widdecombe, for some time an agnostic following her Anglican upbringing, was now turning towards Catholicism and would become a high-profile convert in 1993 following the Church of England synod’s decision in favour of ordaining female priests. In politics she resolutely opposed positive discrimination to favour women’s selection as candidates.

In 1990, following the election of John Major as party leader and prime minister, Widdecombe was made a junior minister in the Social Security Department, dealing with benefits. Three years later she was moved to Employment and in 1995 became prisons minister at the Home Office under Michael Howard, the then home secretary.

Despite his hardline reputation, the two did not get on, falling out early over his vendetta against the head of the prison service Derek Lewis following a couple of breakouts. Widdecombe took Lewis’s side as Howard manoeuvred to sack him and was unforgiving of the minister, particularly after his office briefed the Daily Mail that she was having an affair with Lewis. This led to her telling the House of Commons two years later that Howard had “something of the night” about him – a characterisation that undermined his then campaign to become party leader. In her memoirs she went further, describing him as vindictive and gloating.

As prisons minister she came under attack when it was suggested that female prisoners might be handcuffed during childbirth. It was not the case – the existing policy was that the women would be handcuffed on the way to hospital, but not during labour. Her robust defence of the policy however earned her the nickname Doris Karloff, a description that stuck.

Following the party’s crushing defeat at the 1997 election, Widdecombe was promoted first to shadow health minister and then shadow home secretary. Her floated candidacy for the party leadership in 2001 and later for the Commons speakership in 2009, both floundered for lack of support, her colleagues believing that her popularity and electability were less than she herself imagined: “Even those who knew me were concerned about the caricature to which I was prone.” She was much more popular with constituency activists than with her parliamentary colleagues, who forced her to back down after she announced a policy to level instant fines on illegal drug users at the 2000 party conference – too many of them had experimented with drugs in the past.

She retired after 23 years in the Commons at the 2010 general election and was openly disappointed that David Cameron, whom she had not supported when he stood for party leader – he was “big-headed, dismissive of everything that had gone before” – declined to offer her a peerage.

Instead, she embarked on an altogether unlikely broadcasting career, proving at least that she was game to send herself up. There had been a series of documentaries while she was still an MP where, acting as a no-nonsense agony aunt she confronted issues such as prostitution, truancy and girl gangs and she had also been a host on the satirical show Have I Got News For You.

But it was her appearance as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing that really cemented her celebrity and, if it demonstrated her complete lack of dancing talent, her gameness and humour secured audience approval. Instead of being eliminated as expected in the first round, she lasted nine weeks, helped and sometimes physically carried by her professional partner Anton du Beke.

Widdecombe was characteristically unabashed: “I loved the fact that there was no responsibility,” she told the Guardian in 2013. “For years everything I’d done was going to affect people. With Strictly, apart from Anton’s shins, it couldn’t affect anything. If I fell down in a heap on the floor nobody suffered. People said: is this dignified? I said no, why must it be? I am not an MP.” She confided to the Sunday Telegraph: “People were terribly surprised that I had a sense of humour.”

She traded that celebrity into a tour with Du Beke and two pantomimes with the show’s waspish judge Craig Revel Horwood and there was even a non-singing part as the Duchesse de Krakentorp in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment at Covent Garden in 2012. In 2018, she took part in Celebrity Big Brother, another knockout contest, coming second to Shane Jenek, AKA the Australian drag queen Courtney Act, with whom she inevitably had some robust discussions about lifestyle along the way: she declared it a triumph of free speech.

Widdecombe had already written several well-received novels while still an MP and retired to a large bungalow, inevitably called Widdecombe’s Rest, on the edge of Dartmoor, where she also wrote columns for the Daily Express, expressing trenchant views and was even briefly an agony aunt for the Guardian, which she may have taken more seriously than the paper did. Her memoir Strictly Ann was published in 2013.

Despite claiming “I am a Conservative. I am never going to be anything else … I’d rather form my own party than ever join Ukip. We could call it the Widdy Mob,” in April 2019, dissatisfied over the handling of Brexit, she became a candidate for Farage’s Brexit party in the European elections. She was briefly an MEP for the South West, denouncing Britain’s alleged “enslavement” to the EU. Standing as the party’s candidate in Plymouth at the 2019 general election, however, she garnered only 5% of the vote.

• Ann Noreen Widdecombe, politician, born 4 October 1947; died 9 July 2026