Today I will be attending Ann Widdecombe’s funeral in south Devon.

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My last event in Edinburgh finished at 9.30pm last night, so the only way to get to Totnes in time was to be driven, given I don’t get my driving licence back until the weekend. My best friend Dan Bryce drove up from Kent yesterday and has driven me through the night so I can be there. He’s an absolute hero. And then there’s the matter of another four hours or so back to Kent afterwards.

In the days after Ann died, I did countless TV interviews trying to explain who she really was, and countering some of the lies and insults that were being thrown her way by people who should know better. The wife of a friend of mine was watching one of these interviews and apparently remarked: “There’s a man who hasn’t had time to grieve.”

She was right. I hadn’t computed the awfulness of what had happened and had to go into commentor mode, otherwise I’d have been too emotional. I don’t normally cry at funerals, but I am fully expecting to be in floods of tears at this one, staring at the coffin which will contain poor Ann’s battered body. I think that’s when it will really hit me.

I first met Ann 29 years ago, when I opened Politico’s Bookshop. On her first visit, she saw we had made some badges saying ‘Doris Karloff for Tory Leader’. She found this hilarious and bought several dozen of them.

One day she came in, and she almost collapsed in a heap when we gave her a pair of lacy, black knickers, emblazoned with “Something of the Night”, the slogan she had invented to derail Michael Howard’s leadership campaign.

“But they’re too small. They won’t fit,” she cried. A vision was forming in my mind… She was just leaving the shop when I noticed she had left the knickers on the counter. So I yelled after her, “Ann, you’ve forgotten your knickers!” And there can’t be many men who have said that to Ann Widdecombe.

Ann’s first novel, The Clematis Tree, was a huge success, but I do sometimes wonder why. She certainly had a unique way of selling it.

At the Tory Party Conference in 2000, I was rather alarmed at her marketing technique. Like a market trader, she would brandish the book and shout out: “No sex, no violence, no swearing! Get your clean novels here!”

Ann, I thought, “You’re at a Tory Party Conference!”, which, let’s face it, usually has its fair share of all three. But she proved me wrong - and we sold all 400 copies.

The next year, she was back and was reprising her market trader act. As she was screeching and signing, a delivery of Edwina Currie’s explosive new diaries arrived. All 200 of them. Edwina had captured the headlines with the revelation that she and John Major had had an affair. I quietly displayed a dozen of the Currie diaries next to Ann and waited for her to notice. She did not have a high opinion of Edwina.

Sure enough, she clocked them and changed her sales patter and pointed to Edwina’s tomes, shouting, “Very dirty diaries, get your clean novels here!”, pointing to her new book ‘An Act of Treachery’. I used to take her to task for this as I had found a passage on page 158 where it was quite clear that the main character had had sex with her Nazi lover. Ann denied this and described it as ‘wooing’. ‘Not in my house, it isn’t,’ I’d reply.

Ann and I did a theatre tour of around 50 provincial theatres with our show ‘A Night with Ann Widdecombe’. I’d interview her for the first half and then I’d host a Q&A. We didn’t have a script as such, but I knew the prompts to give so she could regale the audience with various stories and anecdotes.

The theatre shows produced some hilarious moments, including one in Chelmsford when a militantly gay member of the audience got up and walked out shouting at us to eff off because we were bigots. It was that same evening when two of my favourite moments occurred.

ID: So when ITV ask you to do these programmes, how do you judge whether to do them?

AW: Well, when they asked me to do prostitution, I readily agreed... [cue audience collapsing with laughter]

The theatre was sold out, with more than 500 people packed in. The repartee worked a treat, to the extent that one man said to me afterwards: “You are so easy together. Are you an item?” Miss W was a bit too quick to reply: “We most certainly are not!” He didn’t look convinced...

The only time I saw her stumped was when a member of the audience asked: “Miss Widdecombe, can you please explain why any member of the female sex would ever want to have an affair........

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