Please note "BBC Breakfast with Frost" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used

DAVID FROST:

I'm joined by Ann Widdecombe, who has appeared as if by magic sitting here. Good morning, Ann.

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Good morning to you.

DAVID FROST:

The equal, equal pegging on the situation of law and order between the two parties, given you're so far behind on other things, is that actually encouraging to you?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

I don't actually see it as equal pegging because there have been a number of polls which have shown us ahead. What is very, very clear is that people do not trust Labour on crime and indeed, one of the papers today reveals a memo from an aide to Jack Straw warning him about the perception of very poor performance. And it's not a false perception. We've got 2,500 fewer regular officers, nearly 5,000 fewer specials

DAVID FROST:

police recruitment, however, in the last year, we're told is up 74%.

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Ah, but it's still vastly down on what they inherited. And of course recruitment is only one very tiny part of the equation. Retention is equally important. And the government of course will always try to blind you with very selective statistics. Just ask people what their personal experience is. Do they see police officers these days? Do they actually trust the government on crime? I mean if, it's worth pointing out

DAVID FROST:

How could you do better, how could you do better, you always say this and we never get the answer really. I mean, how would you do better than 74%?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

I have actually spelled out what I would do, David. We would have a national police cadet force. We would make more use of part-timers, we would deploy specials much more in rural areas. We would look at retained policemen in the way that we have retained fireman and above all what we would do is to actually get the police we do have out policing by removing the burdens of paperwork. There's a twofold issue here. One is the actual numbers. I've just told you what we'll do about that. But the other is what the police are actually doing with their time when you've recruited them. But just let me say this. We understand that tomorrow Labour are going to make a big thing of releasing yet more criminal early. They have already made special arrangements which weren't there before to let people out of prison before the half-way point in their sentence. We've got more than a thousand victims now of those very people who've come out early and at a time when they should still have been in prison have committed crimes.

DAVID FROST:

But at the other end of the scale, when you look at the business end of this thing on prisons, and getting more people in prison and not releasing people from prison, when you actually read or talk to the people actually at the sharp end, I mean, Martin Nary, head of the prison service, the Inspector, Sir David Ramsbottom, and so on, they all stress, so does Lord Justice Woolf that, you know, prison doesn't work, putting more and more people in prison is not the answer, we've got to rehabilitate people to get them back into society because, as David Ramsbottom would say, you know, all but 23 of the people in prison today will one day be out and they need to be rehabilitated in some way and so on. Not necessarily the 100,000 hard cases but the vast majority of the rest. Prison doesn't work, they say, except of course as Michael Howard used to say, for the people actually in prison who can't commit crime. But, I mean, all the people at the sharp end say that.

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Well, I've been at the sharp end, I've been Prison Minister. I say this to you, prison works in two ways. It works by protecting the public because if you have persistent offenders in prison they cannot be committing crimes. I don't think it's any coincidence, David, the very sharp sustained fall in crime coincided with a huge rise in the prison population. That is the first thing. And the second thing is yes, there does need to be more rehabilitation, which is why I have said that we will have full working days in prisons with self-financing prison workshops, with prisoners doing real work. And what's Jack Straw's attitude to that? He laughs. Now that says a very great deal about how seriously Labour do not take rehabilitation in our prisons.

DAVID FROST:

What about asylum? How is your policy going to be different to theirs?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

The huge difference is this. We will detain all new asylym seekers in secure reception centres while we process their cases. And that will enable us to do two things. One to deal with it much more speedily because we'll have everybody there. Secondly, to remove those whom we refuse, at the moment only a very tiny fraction get moved, everybody else stays anyway. But thirdly, for those whom we're going to accept we'll be able to do a proper resettlement package for them, and not just leave the genuine asylum seekers, and the very hit and miss business that he gets, to the local authorities at the moment. It's a better package all round and it will send out a sharp deterrent message to those who are merely playing the system, that if you come to Britain to play the system you'll be detained, you'll be turned round, and you'll be sent back. Nobody's going to pay £5,000 to a human trafficking agent for that.

DAVID FROST:

The secure, the secure centres, detention centres, have been costed by the Treasury, anyway, at about £3 billion extra to build all these places.

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Well that's a billion more than they said last time. What a joke. Oakington, which is this government's only new detention centre so far, actually cost £6 million, £6 million and it will process when fully up and running one-fifth of all asylym seekers. If you can process a fifth for £6 million, what possible arithmetic ends up in billions for the rest?

DAVID FROST:

What about today's paper here, that, the Observer says that one of the Tories' advisers on health, says that people earning over £35,000 a year should not have access to NHS treatment. In other words the policy of health care being free at the point of delivery for everyone would no longer exist for people over £35,000. Is that

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

That is not Conservative Party policy

DAVID FROST:

That's not Conservative Party policy

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Conservative Party policy has always been that the NHS should be free at the point that you get it. But what we have also said is that no matter how much you pour into the health service it won't be able to meet every last demand that is made upon it and therefore it is sensible for the NHS and individuals to use the private sector as well.

DAVID FROST:

And what about the story in the Observer page 6 that said that William, William Hague was thinking of resigning, retiring from the job in disgruntlement in 1999? Did he talk to you about that?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

He certainly didn't. I have never seen William flag in this job. Indeed, what William has been to us is to unite a very fractured party. He has steadied all our nerves, he has brought us from the point where we were regarded as being at one stage bound for opposition for 20 years, to actually being ahead in the polls at one stage. Now that is a huge

DAVID FROST:

One brief moment that was when the hauliers and the farmers were out

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

It doesn't matter. Most, most people said it could never happen. And the point is we are now a much more, a united and determined party. And that's down to him. No, he did not talk about going and I don't believe he did.

DAVID FROST:

But at the same time, I mean his opinion poll ratings, if he's done all those things, and of course he hasn't managed to reduce the Labour lead, but if he's done all those things why are his opinion poll ratings worse than Michael Foot's?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Why was it that in 1978 Margaret Thatcher's opinion ratings were so low? Who went on to become one of the greatest prime ministers of this century? Come on, the real poll, a real poll will be when real people put real crosses on real ballot papers. And I think Mr Arrogant Blair is in for a very nasty shock.

DAVID FROST:

Why is Francis Maude and Michael Portillo, why are they being confined to barracks for this election? They've got to stay at central office so that someone can keep an eye on them and they can only risk sending out Ian Duncan Smith and you?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Dear me. The fact is that obviously if William is going to be going up and down the country which he's going to be somebody has to hold the fort at central office, somebody has to handle the daily press conferences. That has to be an extremely senior person. I cannot imagine anybody more suited for doing that.

DAVID FROST:

What about Simon Heffer says that what you should do is you shouldn't campaign on economic issues or anything like that because you'll lose on those, everyone thinks that Labour's been pretty brilliant at the economy and so on, and what you should fight on, he says, is the moral issue, is the whole question of Britain's moral code, Britain's moral and ethical code. That's what you should fight on rather than economics. You probably agree with that?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Well, I think we have to fight on a large number of fronts because of course people have a number of concerns when it comes to a general election. Different people make up their minds on different issues. And therefore we do have to address people's concerns. But I think certainly there is a case for saying that criminality and family break-up and the huge levels of suicides we have and of the levels of divorce and the levels of juvenile crime, that all those things probably do come down to looking at something rather more fundamental in our society. And indeed when we have big tragedies like the Bulger killing or the murder of the headmaster, Philip Lawrence, or the recent death of little Damilola Taylor, people do stop and ask those questions. Simon Heffer is right. We do occasionally need to stop and ask those questions.

DAVID FROST:

And can, can governments provide a moral lead or is that dangerous?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Governments can certainly send signals as we are doing, for example, through the tax system when we're going to give special advantages to married couples with children. Governments can send signals. What governments can't do, and no government's ever pretended to, is to be able to wave the magic wand over private behaviour in the home. But it's in the home, if I can just finish, it's in the home that children of course learn their early behaviour.

DAVID FROST:

But those changes for the family, the families you mentioned, only affects one in six of couples, and so on, shouldn't it have been across the board? And what happens in the case of a widowed person, who doesn't have a tax ¿ ?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

It affects, first of all, a very crucial section of people. And particularly will benefit those families where they have young children and one parent is actually going to stay at home and nurture and look after that child, and the other is going out to work. By the transferable allowances that will help. We've also made it clear of course that it is possible to help widows through the tax system. There's already a special recognition and we can build on that. So, what I would say to you is this, we are sending out a signal that we understand that the married couple in a life-long commitment with legal obligations to eachother, who are doing their best to bring up young children in the home, they need special help, they're going to get it from us.

DAVID FROST:

Special help that single parents don't need.

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

I would say that we need as a society to send a signal that marriage is the best place in which to bring up children.

DAVID FROST:

And, coming back to those opinion polls for a minute, 20 points and all of that, what is going to happen in this country in the next two months that would change that?

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Well, as I've said I wouldn't be too worried by opinion polls. We went into the 1970 election very badly behind and we came out in government. You pointed to William's personal ratings, Margaret Thatcher had very bad ratings. Whichever way you look, it doesn't follow that it's polls which determine what happens, it's what happens in the campaign. And we will at least have an opportunity for the next few months because your profession will be obliged to give us equal time, we will have an opportunity to get over the policies which I think will win. Policies on law and order which say we put the victim first, on asylum, which say that we will detain new seekers and deter abusive claims whilst helping the genuine, on the health service where we're going to treat the sickest patients first, on education where we're going to free up schools. Yes, of course, you want to stop me because that's a thumping good package of policies and we're not going to be stopped from putting that over.

DAVID FROST:

But, listen, next time we talk you could be the leader of the Tory Party.

ANN WIDDECOMBE:

Next time we talk William Hague could be prime minister.

END