'She would like to give me a hard time, but she doesn't succeed. Everybody would agree she is a strange woman. I think that John Maples (her predecessor) wasn't very aggressive, but he was actually trying to do what (William) Hague claims he's

trying to do, which is to break away from the Thatcherite past... Ann Widdecombe is more aggressive, more oppositional, but

she has lashed and cleated herself to the previous position so she now says that everything they did was right... I think she is living in the past.'