Ann Widdecombe (person)

Probably the most right-wing mainstream politician in the UK today, she is vehemently pro-capital punishment (though how she squares this with her very public Catholicism she won't say), utterly anti-abortion under any circumstances, supported a zero tolerance approach to marijuana until it was revealed that the majority of her Shadow Cabinet colleagues had smoked it in the past, and supports an even tougher line on immigration than the current administration. However, she does break with Conservative orthodoxy in that she supports a ban on fox hunting.

She retains some popularity because most of the press coverage about her has concentrated on her ugliness, her virginity and the fact that she refuses to watch TV, rather than on the fact that she is an idiot (that is not a statement that people holding the views above are necessarily idiots, but Miss Widdecombe is less capable of stringing together a coherent argument than any other politician I've seen). In her defence however, she is one of an increasingly small number of politicians who do have principles.

She also wrote a novel, The Clematis Tree (2000) of which the most favourable review I've heard is Ian Hislop's comment that it was 'better than reading a book by Edwina Currie'.