`OH YES HE DID`..

This alarming image shows former MP and Prisons Minister Ann Widdecombe in rehearsal for the upcoming panotmime season at Dartford`s Orchard Theatre.   Widdecombe will play Widdy in Waiting, the long-suffering servant of the Wicked Queen, played by Strictly’s acid-tongued judge Craig Revel Horwood in a camped up version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.   My mind has been duly boggled.

In a statement full of classic irony, Widdecombe is reported as confirming that she believes  Prime Minister David Cameron deliberately denied her a seat in the House of Lords following her retirement as a Member of Parliament.   Miss Widdecombe told the BBC that, as she was an "obvious candidate" for a seat in the House of Lords, it was clear the PM had deliberately decided to exclude her.

Now, it`s one thing to have been a shrieking harridan as a Member of Parliament but quite another to turn to performing cringeworthy `appearances` on things like Strictly Come Dancing and now a pantomime to challenge the antics at Westminster.   In parts of mid Kent, where Widdecombe `represented` the good folk for so many years as their MP, it`s bordering on the sacrilegious to suggest that Widdecombe is anything other than Mother Teresa in disguise, but the reality for the rest of us is that she has become little more than a self-serving caricature, suffering from the delusion that she is popular, admired and talented.

And that delusion is clearly the one which convinces her that she should have been elevated to the peerage, to pick up her £300 a day allowance and sit alongside all the other self-serving caricatures who already form the cast of the Lords very own pantomime - Lord Prescott anyone?

Anyway, David Cameron saw it coming, so he would have nothing to do with Widdy and her wishful thinking.   I think he saw what most of the rest of us now see - a self-appointed national treasure turned into a national embarrassment suffering the advanced stages of delusions of adequacy.   Widdecombe may complain ( yet again) that Cameron didn`t see that she was the `obvious candidate` for a seat in the Lords.   Didn`t he?    Oh yes he did.