Three years after becoming an MP, she got a foot on the ministerial ladder as a junior social security minister and was then promoted to the employment brief.
In 1995, she was promoted to prisons minister, where she got into a row after defending a policy of chaining pregnant prisoners to prevent them from escaping.
Following the 1997 Labour landslide, she served under William Hague as shadow health secretary between 1998-1999 and shadow home secretary between 1999 – 2001.
When she retired from politics in 2010, she was disappointed not to have been offered a place in the House of Lords by David Cameron.
Widdecombe continued writing, publishing four fiction novels and an autobiography, and made many broadcast appearances, including as a guest host of news quiz Have I Got News for You.
In 2013, she was awarded a papal honour, as Dame of the Order of St Gregory, for her services to politics and public life, particularly her opposition to abortion and assisted dying.
She had converted to Catholicism in the 1990s, telling The Times: “To have a church which calls a sin a sin and has done with it is a blessed relief.”
She returned to politics as a prominent Brexit campaigner, winning a seat as a Brexit Party MEP for South West England in the 2019 European Parliament election, until the UK left the EU at the end of January 2020.
Widdecombe re-joined the party, which had been renamed Reform UK, in 2023 as their immigration and justice spokesperson.
She shared her home in London with her widowed mother, Rita, until her death in 2007.
Speaking to the BBC’s Woman’s Hour in 2010, she said that being an MP could be lonely but that she was able to cope with it.
“I like my own company very much indeed, just as well because I might be the only one who does,” she joked.
