- Born
- Died
- Birth nameAnn Noreen Widdecombe
- Nicknames
- Widdy
- Doris Karloff
- Height5′ 1½″ (1.56 m)
- Ann Widdecombe's father was a senior civil servant with the Ministry of Defence, and as he moved around the world she attended several schools, including the Royal Naval School Singapore and La Sainte Union Convent, Bath, before going up to Birmingham University (BA Latin 1969), then Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (BA philosophy, politics and economics 1972, MA) She began her working life with Unilever in marketing 1973-75, before moving to London University in 1975, where she became the senior administrator. She left the University to enter Parliament in 1987. In 1997 she famously accused Michael Howard, her political boss, of having "something of the night" about him, following a departmental dispute for which she took the rap. It seemed to have blocked any rise in his career--until he was elected leader of the Conservative Party and of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in November 2003. In 2001 she resigned from the shadow cabinet and decided not to run in the leadership election.
- IMDb mini biography by: anon
- Voted the 94th worst Briton in Channel Four's poll of the 100 Worst Britons.
- In 2019, she received backlash after suggesting science might one day "produce an answer" to being gay.
- Her political career spanned decades; she served as MP for Maidstone in Kent for 23 years, then went on to join Reform UK.
- Former Tory minister.
- Mr Right never came along. And it was never a sufficient priority to go out looking for him.
- [on the the 1990s Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard] He has something of the night about him.
- Television turns out a diet of swearing, drunkenness, drug-taking, shouting and screaming, abuse of authority, sex, criminality and provocative humor, delivered in Estuary English. That is before the watershed; after which it merely gets worse.
- For years there's been an assumption that as society gets more civilised and doesn't have a death penalty, it's going to be a much gentler, kinder, more decent society to live in. Now look at the society we do live in as a result of all that thinking. It's a society in which children kill each other, the murder rate has absolutely shot up, you've got rampant paedophilia. That's the society which all this so-called enlightened thinking has created and it's because we've lost sight of one very fundamental fact. There is such a thing as evil and if you do not fight it, it will eventually triumph.
- The only way you can interest people in politics is when they're faced with a real choice. When I had my first vote the world was divided into two conflicting political ideologies - capitalism versus communism. There was an enormous difference in this country between the Conservative Party and a socialist party. Young people today have never seen a socialist party. Blair (Tony Blair) and Brown (Gordon Brown) weren't about socialism, Foot (Michael Foot) and Kinnock (Neil Kinnock) were. It mattered to people who ran the country. Now they don't see that difference. They're not making decisions about political philosophy.
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