Ann Widdecombe was forthright, intelligent, politically unbending but also kind.
Over a recent dinner – a solid three courses at her insistence – her unmistakable rasp and combative approach to every question was undimmed. In her late 70s, if not as ferocious as she once was, her desire to destroy arguments matched her appetite.
Her attitudes, she said, had hardly changed since her childhood when she was a devout Anglican in a Roman Catholic convent school. She later converted to Catholicism;: her faith was deep and central to her politics.
She was swimming against the tide in the late 80s and 90s. As a Conservative MP, she made her mark as a prominent and – some said fanatical – opponent of abortion, supporting a bill to reduce the permitted time for terminations. As a result of the campaigning she was part of, the time limit was reduced from 28 to 24 weeks.
She was dubbed “Doris Karloff” by the press when, as prisons minister, she stood by the practice of restraining pregnant inmates, even those nearing childbirth, during hospital transfers.
“I don’t mind it, I used to pick up the phone and say, ‘Karloff here,’” she told me.
Widdecombe dismissed modern debates about identity politics. She had no time for positive discrimination for women, regarding herself as an MP who happened to be a woman, rather than a female MP.
She annoyed colleagues with her proposals for instant fines for the possession of illegal drugs. The announcement in 2000 quickly unravelled when those same Tory MPs revealed they had used drugs when young, and complained she was out of step with the new, tolerant movement.
Apart from politics, Widdecombe was a bestselling novelist and a TV celebrity. Not the most polished dancer – she described her moves as “galumphing” – she made it to the semi-final of Strictly Come Dancing before being knocked out.
At our recent dinner, we talked about how late comedian Victoria Wood had mocked her in a 2000 Christmas special. Wood wrote a song which ran: “Ann Widdecombe, Ann Widdecombe, I sing, I dance, I lean to the light. I’m truculent, I’m succulent, I am a star.” But she didn’t mind, telling me how Wood had been in touch to check her feelings would not be hurt. She told the comedian to go ahead but declined to appear on the show itself as a step too far. She took her politics but not herself seriously.
As a Conservative MP she fell out with Michael Howard, the former Conservative leader, when the pair were at the Home Office at the same time. He never managed to shake off her private remark that he had “something of the night about him”.
Over dinner she talked fondly of how her regular spot on Jeremy Vine’s show gave her a reason to leave her remote Dartmoor cottage and come to London. Asked if she was ever frightened at being so isolated, she said she had never even considered the question.
Originally a Tory, Widdecombe later became a member of Reform UK. She supposedly retired from politics in 2010 but returned as a prominent Brexit campaigner, standing for the Brexit Party in the 2019 European Parliament election, and winning a seat in the South West England constituency, which she held until the UK left the EU in 2020.
Widdecombe rejoined the party, which had been renamed Reform UK, in 2023 as their immigration and justice spokesperson.
As an elder statesman for Reform, she enjoyed giving advice, although it was unclear how much notice the party’s leadership took of it. Littering her analysis were phrases from a Britain of former years. Tory councillors defecting to Reform she described as “small fry”.
Despite her forceful politics, there was something of the innocent about Widdecombe. In 1999 she brought her teddy bear Brownie to the House of Commons to promote a charity.
She later promoted her book, An Act of Treachery, by declaring, “No sex, no violence, no swearing”. Unmarried and a self-proclaimed virgin, she praised marriage and family values and was comfortable in her own skin. Her friends speak of her tremendous personal kindness.
Her devotion to animals led to her setting up a section of her website called the Widdyweb, for her adopted goats and cats, and becoming the patron of a donkey sanctuary. She was also one of the few Conservative MPs who opposed fox-hunting.
But it was her faith that drove her politics and attitude to life. She searched for certainty and found it in her conversion to Catholicism. “To have a church which calls a sin a sin and has done with it is a blessed relief,” she once said.
Forceful to the end, Widdecombe appeared on TV the day before her death to defend Nigel Farage’s decision to stand in a by-election. Pugnacious, articulate and arguing her point to the very end.
Ann Widdecombe was born on October 4, 1947 and died of undisclosed causes on July 9, 2026, aged 78.
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