Quotes from Ann Widdecombe

Everybody who talks about 'Strictly' talks psychobabble. They say they're going on a journey, or trying to build their confidence, or getting over a divorce or something. People say there must be a deep reason to do these things. But there isn't! I'm just having fun.

I am not a natural dancer, not even a half way competent dancer.

Men are easier to get on with than women. They tend not to make emotional demands on you.

Not even the severest critics of Jeffrey Archer can deny his style.

Some books are like an hors d'oeuvre - light, tasty and leaving you longing for the main course which is never going to come - and some are like Christmas lunch immediately after a cooked breakfast.

Cats are ideal for politicians. I had two when I arrived at Westminster, Sooty and Sweep, who had come with a flat I had bought six years earlier in Fulham from someone who was about to go abroad. There was a better offer ahead of me but she took mine because I would take the cats.

Mice are everywhere at Westminster but many MPs, including me, did not report them because we were afraid of their possible fate.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged at Westminster that there is life after politics.

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that citizens obey the law or incur whatever penalty applies to its breaking.

I have always believed prison can be very, very good for you but not by the act of deprivation of liberty alone. There has to be more to life inside than that.

It is a huge asset to law and order that serious or persistent criminals should be taken out of the society on which they prey. It makes life safer for the law-abiding and on the whole prisons are pretty good at containing those who have been committed to them.

The state does not belong in bedrooms. So I'm not authoritarian. I don't say: 'You shouldn't do this, you must do that.' What I do say is that the state must have a preferred model, and the model that has served us throughout the millennia is marriage - a man and a woman in a union that is generally open to procreation.

People wanted to protest, and Ukip's a conduit for that.

The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God's creation we have made no effort to tame.

The E.U. is terrified that we might become a competitor on its doorstep and that is exactly what we should be.

On the whole, my disposition is to say yes, unless I've got good reason to say no, and I think that's being in public life.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

I am not an enthusiast when it comes to cities, preferring rolling scenery, wildlife and stars to museums, monuments, architecture and traffic.

Never judge something by whether it is popular or not. You don't have to follow trends. No one thought William Wilberforce was right at first.

After 23 years closeted at Westminster, where often all you can see out of the windows are other parliamentary buildings, I appreciate space, and I retired to Dartmoor to find it.

In the 1990s, while the Maastricht debate was raging, I was a minister in the Major government. Every single piece of legislation we proposed had to be scrutinised for compatibility with E.U. law.

Cats are so wonderful because they're furry, purry and totally independent.

In 1999 my father died and my mother was coming to live with me. So I left my Kennington flat and bought a house with a garden because my mother loved watching the birds.

The child in the womb has no voice but Parliament's. Many MPs who voted for the 1967 Act did not think they were abandoning the unborn because they were fooled by the supposed safeguards. Now we know just how ineffective those safeguards are.