Nothing Strictly off-limits for feisty Ann Widdecombe as she prepares for Shropshire show

She never had any confidence in Theresa May's leadership, and thinks Boris Johnson is 'slippery'. And she has no idea why anybody would want an extramarital affair with John Prescott.

Love her or hate her, the former Home Office minister, turned television personality, turned Euro MP, is nothing if not direct. No-one could ever accuse her of sitting on the fence.

And she will be speaking her mind in the West Midlands next week when she brings her one-woman show to the region.

She is, of course, once more a private civilian, having now retired from politics for a second time when Britain left the EU on Friday, and marked the occasion by joining her Brexit Party colleagues in Parliament Square.

When Miss Widdecombe retired from frontline politics the first time in 2010, she had been planning to spend her days quietly walking her dogs over Dartmoor and writing novels at home.

But those plans went out the window when her accident-prone appearances on Strictly Come Dancing made her see herself in a totally different light.

“Ever since I signed up to do Strictly Come Dancing I’ve discovered just how much I like making people laugh," she says.

“I was approached to do the show in 2010, very soon after I had stepped down as an MP, and I viewed it as a good opportunity to try something completely different.

"It sent my life on an entirely different course, which I have been enjoying ever since.”

Pantomime appearances and a stint in Celebrity Big Brother followed, but her light entertainment career was interrupted last year when she made a shock return to frontline politics, standing for Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party in the European election. An election, which of course was not supposed to have taken place, because Britain had been due to leave the EU on March 31.

She says it was something she never wanted to do.

"I had been a member of the Conservative Party for 55 years," she says. "It was a big decision. I decided to stand because I was frustrated with the length of time Brexit was taking."

She also knew that once she announced she would be standing, there was little doubt that she would be coming out of retirement and heading for Brussels.

"I knew I would be elected because the Brexit Party was leading the opinion polls, and the elections were carried out under proportional representation," she says.

"If you are top of your party's list and your party is leading in the polls, you are going to be elected.

"What we didn't know, was how long we were going to be there for. At first we thought we wouldn't be there for long, but then there was the extension to October.

"I never had any confidence in Theresa May, but once Boris took over we knew we would be out."

Not that she is entirely confident in Boris Johnson's ability to deliver the sort of Brexit the people of Britain voted for.

"Boris can be slippery. He is a leaver, and that is something, but I wouldn't trust everything he says," she says.

"He said we were going to leave on October 31, everyone said 'you don't have the majority to do that', but he said he would rather die in a ditch. And then we have another extension."

One thing the 72-year-old will not miss is sitting in the European Parliament, which she says is a very different beast from the one at Westminster.

"It's not a legislative chamber like Westminster, it's just a talking shop," she says. "And you are only allowed to talk for a minute, so there's really not much point, you don't get your point across. It's also so overwhelmingly dull. People from other countries have said the same."

That may be the case, but Miss Widdecombe still managed to use her one-minute timeslots to ruffle a few feathers. Her maiden speech sparked a furious backlash after she likened Brexit to slaves rising up against their owners.

She is unapologetic.

"There's a large body of people just prepared to be offended by anything, the 'Always Offended Brigade', that's what I call them," she says.

"Slavery is just one of those trigger words. I also spoke about peasants rising up against feudal barons, but nobody said anything about that."

She springs to the defence of the actor Laurence Fox, whose criticism of the politically correct 'woke' culture on BBC Question Time also led to a storm on social media. She says he is guilty of nothing more than speaking his mind.

"Nobody has the right not to be offended," she says. "I don't have the right not to be offended, it's part-and-parcel of living in a free society."

She also has little time for the growing tribalism and polarisation in modern politics. Labour leadership hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey recently said she did not knowingly have any Conservative-voting friends, although if any of her friends were Tory voters, they would not tell her because it would make her angry.

"I'm sad Rebecca has said that," she says. "I have friends of all shades of political opinion, all shades of religious opinion, and those with none.

"I make friends with people because I respect them as individuals. I think it is quite wrong to exclude people because of their view of life. I couldn't write anyone off as a human being because they had a different opinion to me."

She hopes that her new-found talent for making people laugh will be in evidence when she brings her show to Drayton Festival Centre in Market Drayton on Friday.

"First and foremost it's a night of comedy, it's entertainment," she says, adding that people will be free to ask her anything they want during the show, although she gives no guarantees that she will answer them.

"I will never take offence. If it's too personal I will just refuse to answer it," she says.

"At one of the shows this lady, with a completely straight face, asked me why anyone would want to have an affair with John Prescott. I didn't really have an answer to that."

One of the funniest memories from her time at Westminster came during the state opening of Parliament, which is always an occasion of great pomp and ceremony.

"As the procession goes through the public lobby the policeman on duty shouts out 'hats off', and it goes entirely quiet as the procession starts to make its way to the chamber," she says.

"Well on this one occasion, there was this Labour member, who had come from the members' lobby, looking for Neil Kinnock. He called out 'Neil!', and everybody fell to their knees."

Strictly Ann Widdecombe will be at Festival Drayton Centre on February 14.