Ann Widdecombe is no stranger to controversy. She has made the forceful expression of strong views her raison d’être ever since entering Parliament at the general election of 1987. While other issues have come and gone, however, one refuses to slink away, and it has won her more respect among her political foes – and landed her in more trouble with her friends – than any other. It’s an odd kind of Tory MP, many think, who doesn’t like hunting.

The dislike isn’t quite uncompromising. “I’m not at all surprised that fox-hunting has been chosen as an icon of England. It is an image that many people around the world associate with Olde England. I myself have hunting prints on my walls at home, but Olde England is where it firmly belongs. It has no place in the modern world,” she explains.

Like many another opponent of hunting, Ann Widdecombe is unimpressed by the arguments in its favour advanced by the Countryside Alliance and others. “It is a very inefficient form of pesticide, as studies have shown in recent years that only about 6% of fox destruction is accounted for by hunting. The idea that the countryside would suddenly be overrun by foxes without it is just nonsense. It’s a cruel and unnecessary practice.”

What about the argument that abolishing it was likely to cut a swathe through the rural economy, leading to unemployment among everybody from stable hands to dog breeders? “It doesn’t wash. If something is cruel, you don’t keep it going just to create jobs. How would the slave trade ever have been abolished if we had taken that attitude in the 19th century? If you want to reduce crime, you don’t worry about whether there will be enough work for the police. If you care about ill-health, you don’t worry about the impact on health service workers.”

All this is even more unexpected when you consider the Widdecombe family background. Both her parents were keen hunters, her late father having been a member of one of the West Country hunts, and her mother, with whom the MP still lives, having once hunted otters, in the days when such things were still allowed.

There were mounted otter-heads on the walls at home when she was a child. As the scene flickers briefly before the mind’s eye, it occurs that in the fullness of time, the pursuit of foxes too will very likely come to seem quite as unimaginable, no matter what the degree of heat the present debate continues to generate for the time being. Ann Widdecombe reflects that the one thing above all that helped to do away with otter-hunting was Ring Of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell’s 1960 autobiographical novel, later filmed, about a man who brings a previously unknown species of otter back from the Middle East, and raises it in Scotland.

While having broadly supported the legislation that came into effect in February 2005, she feels that a classic strategic mistake was made. “It tried to be too comprehensive. Never go for everything at once. What should ideally have happened is that we began with a ban on hare-coursing, followed that with stag-hunting, and then got on to fox-hunting.” She feels that too many exemptions were written into it, for such activities as falconry for example, with the result that the law is being “openly mocked”.

She issues a challenge to law enforcement authorities: “As it stands, the legislation is scarcely being policed. Hunting is getting away uniquely with systematically breaking the law. What is needed is a sharp lesson. I realise it will be massively difficult, but the police need to clamp down fiercely, and make an example if need be of one particular hunt, to send a warning message to the others. Otherwise, the danger is that it is perceived as a class issue, the message being that these people can afford to break the law because the police won’t trouble them.”

As to the future, she is confident that many more hunts will re-register as drag hunts, and will learn to live without the ritualised cruelty involved in stopping up, flushing out and pursuing an outnumbered animal to exhaustion. Some of the exemptions in the legislation will have to be removed, she predicts.

The vagaries of party politics in the present climate are such that there isn’t likely to be any further parliamentary examination of the legislation this side of another general election. “If the Conservatives win next time, we are pledged to having a free vote. Many of my [pro-hunting] colleagues think they will easily win that, but we shall see. If Labour win again, they might well decide to tighten up the legislation.”

I wondered whether the conspicuous past involvement of certain members of the Royal Family in hunting didn’t hamper the case for the ban? “It isn’t very helpful, but then, perhaps regrettably, not many people pay a great deal of attention to what the Royal Family does these days.”

Her stance on fox-hunting and other activities that involve the suffering of animals, even while she is no vegetarian, has reaped a sometimes bitter harvest for Ann Widdecombe, among people who might otherwise be her natural allies. She has survived several attempts within her constituency association in Maidstone and The Weald to deselect her as the local MP. You suspect, however, that even with her opponents in full cry, come the break of another parliamentary day, it will take more than a few hunting horns to drown the voice of one of Britain’s natural-born conviction politicians.

To watch a clip of Ann Widdecombe explaining her anti fox-hunting stance, click here.

So, do you agree? For a very different view on this controversial subject, read what Roger Scruton had to say, here.