Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a politician. At the last Tory Party conference, she thrilled the delegates

when without notes or autocue she attacked the government's policy on health. It was a speech

to start speculation. Could this redoubtable woman

eventually become leader of her party? Educated in a Royal Naval School in

Singapore and a strict convent boarding school in Bath, she entered Parliament at the age of 40.

Right-wing, anti-abortion, pro-hanging, with a fierceness tempered by jollity.

She says of herself, all I do is what I think is right, and I leave the rest to God Almighty.

She is the newly promoted Shadow Home Secretary Anne Widdichem.

You obviously thought it right and to go on to that party platform last autumn, without notes, as I say, without

autocue, pace up and down, going for the government's jugular.

God was obviously on your side because it worked.

The party loved it didn't

yes they did I mean I'm not going to pretend that I didn't have a quam or two and I left

the notes behind and just walked out onto the stage what made you? I wanted to talk to them rather than standing at

a letter and talking at them. I wanted to very much be myself and talk to them

about things as I saw them about what I wanted us to do, what I thought we should do.

I thought they needed it.

We'd been through a rough time as a party.

I thought they actually needed somebody just coming along and saying it as it was and I took that

risk. But for somebody who purports not to care very much about image it seemed to me

...