One of the preconditions of being a telephone Samaritan is that you don’t reveal your identity to the unfortunate soul on the other end of the line. And yet if, in your hour of need, you ended up pouring your heart out to this particular Samaritan, it would be hard to mistake those clipped, prescriptive tones for anyone other than Ann Widdecombe. It’s a conflict, she says, that has yet to transpire during her shifts for the charity.
However, that may well change with the arrival this week of Ann Widdecombe to the Rescue, in which the MP for Maidstone and the Weald turns roving agony aunt, dispensing advice to golf widows, tattoo obsessives and hygiene-challenged students.
With that in mind, it’s surprising to find her in a London hotel bar holding forth on the current vogue for filling TV schedules with other people’s problems. She has no time for the purgative declutterings of Life Laundry or the grab-bag approach of Spirituality Shopping. But the worst offenders are the post-Springer shows — Trisha et al — in which scrape-haired single mums in jogging bottoms have to be restrained from attacking surly hod- carriers who may or may not be the father of their newborn child.
But having identified the malaise, isn’t she about to become part of it? Apparently not: “What I rather object to on many of these programmes is the wallowing. We seem to be living under a libertarian dictatorship, which decrees that you shall spill all this out because it’s good for you. How dare anybody tell me that I should seek therapy through talking? Why should they?” There is a subtext to our fascination with Ann Widdecombe and her insistence that she is happy with her life. We find it hard to believe that there’s any such thing as a content spinster. Her eccentricity is the incidental eccentricity that tends to hang around anyone who has never had to sand down their rough edges to fit a relationship.
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Not that she would necessarily thank you for pointing it out to her. Indeed, today she’s spent the entire morning having to fight out of the “two-dimensional cliché created by journalists”. However, when tapes of Ann Widdecombe to the Rescue finally arrive, it’s not altogether clear that the programme will do much to dispel that cliché.
It’s all very entertaining, but doesn’t she leave herself open to the charge that, having never been in a long-term relationship or had children, she is ill-qualified to advise people on matters pertaining to relationships and having children? Certainly, she’s staggeringly unempathetic around the woman who has to spend all weekend alone with her three children while her husband plays golf. But having “once been a child and part of a family”, Widdecombe feels this leaves her more than qualified. “Do you think Ruth Rendell has ever committed a murder? But she writes very convincingly about it, doesn’t she?”