Ann Noreen Widdecombe (4 October 1947 – ) was a British politician and media personality. As a member of the Conservative Party, she was the member of Parliament (MP) for Maidstone and The Weald, previously Maidstone, from 1987 to 2010. She joined the Brexit Party – later Reform UK – in 2019. She was their member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South West England from 2019 to 2020 and served as immigration and justice spokesperson from 2023 until 2026.
Born in Bath, Somerset, Widdecombe read Latin at the University of Birmingham, then philosophy, politics and economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. A convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, she was a member of the Conservative Christian Fellowship. She served as Minister of State for Employment from 1994 to 1995 and Minister of State for Prisons from 1995 to 1997. Under William Hague, she sat in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Health from 1998 to 1999 and Shadow Home Secretary from 1999 to 2001. She was appointed to the Privy Council in 1997.
Widdecombe stood down from the House of Commons at the 2010 general election. From 2002 she made numerous television and radio appearances, including as a presenter. She competed in the eighth series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2010 and was runner-up in the twenty-first series of Celebrity Big Brother in 2018. A prominent Eurosceptic, she supported the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union (EU). She returned to politics as the Brexit Party's lead candidate in South West England at the 2019 European Parliament election, winning a seat in line with national results and serving until the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. At the 2019 general election, she contested Plymouth Sutton and Devonport for the Brexit Party, finishing third and retaining her deposit.
Ideologically, Widdecombe identified as a social conservative and emphasised traditional values. During her time in the House of Commons, she opposed the legality of abortion, opposed granting LGBT people legal rights such as equalisation of the age of consent and opposed the repeal of Section 28. She supported the reintroduction of the death penalty for murder and opposed all forms of assisted dying. She supported rigorous animal protection laws and opposed fox hunting.
On 9 July 2026, Widdecombe was found dead in her home in Devon; it is believed she was attacked the previous day and her provisional cause of death was recorded as blunt-force trauma. A 28-year-old British man was charged with murder on 20 July.
Early life Ann Noreen Widdecombe was born on 4 October 1947 in Bath, Somerset, the second child and only daughter of Rita Noreen (née Plummer; 1911–2007) and Ministry of Defence civil servant James Murray Widdecombe (1910–1999). Both parents were from the West Country: her father was born in Saltash and her mother in Plymouth. As a child, she often visited the area to see relatives and would walk on Dartmoor with her father.
Widdecombe attended the Royal Naval School in Singapore and La Sainte Union Convent School in Bath; she then spent three years reading Latin at the University of Birmingham. She went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She served one term as the secretary of the Oxford Union in 1971 and one term as its treasurer in 1972.
While at Oxford, Widdecombe lived next door to Mary Archer, Edwina Currie and Michèle Brown, the wife of Gyles Brandreth. She worked for Unilever from 1973 to 1975 and then as an administrator at the University of London from 1975 to 1987 before entering Parliament.
Political career In 1974, Widdecombe served as personal assistant to Michael Ancram during the February and October general elections. From 1976 to 1978 she was a councillor on Runnymede District Council in Surrey.
Widdecombe contested Burnley in the 1979 general election and in 1983 stood against David Owen in Plymouth Devonport. In 1983, she co-founded Women and Families for Defence with Lady Olga Maitland and Virginia Bottomley, a group formed in opposition to the anti-nuclear Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp.
Widdecombe was first elected to the House of Commons for the Conservatives at the 1987 general election, representing Maidstone (renamed Maidstone and The Weald in 1997), which she won with a majority of 10,364 over the SDP–Liberal Alliance's Christopher Sutton-Mattocks.
In government
Widdecombe joined Prime Minister John Major's government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security in 1990. In 1993, she moved to the Department of Employment and was promoted to Minister of State the following year. In 1995, she entered the Home Office as Minister of State for Prisons and visited every prison in the UK.
In 1996, as prisons minister, she defended the Government's policy of shackling pregnant prisoners while they were in hospital receiving prenatal care. She told the Commons that the restrictions were necessary to prevent escapes: "Some MPs may like to think that a pregnant woman would not or could not escape. Unfortunately this is not true. The fact is that hospitals are not secure places in which to keep prisoners, and since 1990, 20 women have escaped from hospitals." Jack Straw, then Labour's Shadow Home Secretary, described the practice as "degrading and unnecessary".
In opposition Major's government was voted out in the general election of 1 May 1997. Later that month, during an inquiry into a series of prison escapes, Widdecombe remarked of former Home Secretary Michael Howard that there was "something of the night about him". The comment became widely quoted and is thought to have contributed to the failure of Howard's 1997 Conservative leadership campaign, a view shared by both Howard and Widdecombe. It led to caricatures portraying him as a vampire, partly referring to his Romanian ancestry. Extract from Crick's book In search of Michael Howard. Howard became party leader in 2003, after which Widdecombe said that she did not retract any of her words about him from 1997, stating: "But that was '97; this is 2003. That was a quarrel; this is not going to be a feud."
Following the Conservatives' defeat in the 1997 election, she spent a year on the backbenches before serving under William Hague as Shadow Health Secretary from 1998 to 1999 and Shadow Home Secretary from 1999 to 2001.
During the 2001 Conservative leadership election, she could not find sufficient support amongst Conservative MPs for her leadership candidacy. She first supported Michael Ancram, who was eliminated in the first round, and then Kenneth Clarke, who lost in the final round. She subsequently declined to serve in Iain Duncan Smith's Shadow Cabinet.
In 2001, when Michael Portillo was standing for Conservative Party leadership, Widdecombe described him and his allies as "backbiters" due to his alleged destabilising influence under Hague. She went on to say that, should he be appointed leader, she would never give him her allegiance. This was amidst objections by socially conservative critics of Portillo described as a homophobic campaign by Timothy Heppell.
In the 2005 leadership election, she initially supported Kenneth Clarke again. Once he was eliminated, she switched her support to Liam Fox. Following Fox's subsequent elimination, she took time to reflect before finally declaring for David Davis. She expressed reservations over the eventual winner David Cameron, feeling that he did not, like the other candidates, have a proven track record, and she was later a leading figure in parliamentary opposition to his A-List policy. At the October 2006 Conservative Conference, she was Chief Dragon in a political version of the television programme Dragons' Den, in which A-list candidates were invited to put forward a policy proposal, which was then torn apart by her team of Rachel Elnaugh, Oliver Letwin and Michael Brown.
In an interview with Metro in September 2006 she stated that if Parliament were of a normal length, it was likely she would retire at the next general election. She confirmed her intention to stand down to The Observer Pendennis diary in September 2007, and again in October 2007 after Prime Minister Gordon Brown quashed speculation of an autumn 2007 general election.
In November 2006, she moved into the house of an Islington Labour councillor to experience life on a council estate. In response to the experience, she said: "Five years ago I made a speech in the House of Commons about the forgotten decents. I have spent the last week on estates in the Islington area finding out that they are still forgotten."
In 2007 Widdecombe was one of the 98 MPs who voted to keep their expense details secret. When the expenses claims were leaked, however, Widdecombe was described by The Daily Telegraph as one of the "saints" amongst all MPs.
In May 2009, following the resignation of Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons, it was reported that Widdecombe was gathering support for election as interim Speaker until the next general election. On 11 June 2009, she confirmed her bid to be the Speaker, but came last in the second ballot and was eliminated.
Retirement Widdecombe retired from politics at the 2010 general election. It was rumoured that she would be a Conservative candidate for a Police and Crime Commissioner post in 2012: she said she had been offered Kent and Devon and Cornwall, but had declined. She later spoke about her opposition to the coalition government and her surprise at not being given a peerage by David Cameron.
In 2016, Widdecombe supported Brexit in the EU membership referendum. Following the resignation of David Cameron, she endorsed Andrea Leadsom in her candidacy for election for the leadership of the governing Conservative Party.
Return to politics: Brexit Party and Reform UK In 2019 Widdecombe returned to politics as a candidate for the Brexit Party in the European parliament elections in South West England, which were held on 23 May, though she maintained that she would still vote for the Conservatives in the local elections that were to take place three weeks before. She was immediately expelled by the Conservative Party. Widdecombe had considered joining the Brexit Party in March 2019, but joined later, in May.
Widdecombe said that her decision to stand resulted from the Government's failure to deliver Britain's departure from the EU on schedule. "Both major parties need a seismic shock," she said, "to see the extent of public disgust." She subsequently won her seat.
She entered the European Parliament in 2019 as a Brexit Party MEP for South West England and sat on the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE). On 3 July 2019 she used her maiden speech in Strasbourg to compare Brexit to slaves revolting against their owners and to a colonised country rising up against occupying forces, a stance that was criticised by some members of both the European Parliament and the UK House of Commons. Her tenure as an MEP ended with the UK's withdrawal from the EU on 31 January 2020.
Widdecombe stood as the Brexit Party candidate for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport in the 2019 general election; she came a distant third but narrowly retained her deposit with 5.5% of the vote. Nigel Farage said that she was told by the Conservative Party that she would be part of their Brexit negotiations if she stood down as a candidate.
In 2023, she rejoined the party – now renamed Reform UK – and became their immigration and justice spokesperson.
Political views Social issues