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Ann Widdecombe was one of the most well-known Conservative politicians of her generation.

The former minister and MP talks to BBC Parliament’s Conversations about the dangers of political correctness, why she rarely encountered sexism during her long career and why she would relish a return to the government.

On speaking her mind

Political correctness is “silencing a great body of thought”, the 69-year old says, to the point where she wonders if we can still claim to live in a free society.

She worries that almost everyone is under pressure to keep their views to themselves, not just those with strongly-held political or ethical convictions

“You actually get bright, intelligent people that could hold their own anyway, saying to you: ‘Well, of course you can’t say that these days’. And I think: ‘Yes you can’.

“This is not the Soviet Union. You should not be constrained by state orthodoxy.

“You should be able to say what you individually think and if it is unpopular, you should stand your ground.”

The ex-politician, who is a practising Roman Catholic having converted from Anglicanism, cites the case a few years ago of British Airways employee who was told she couldn’t wear a small cross around her neck at work.

“You can be disciplined at work for wearing a tiny Christian symbol. I do it quite openly, why shouldn’t everyone be able to do it quite openly.”

In such a climate, she says it is doubly important that politicians speak out.

“The only people who don’t have to (keep quiet) are the parliamentarians. We can say what we like. We can be against gay marriage, we can be against abortion, we can want to limit immigration – we can say what we like.

“The ordinary citizen is much less blessed these days. I’ve always said if you hold a view what is the point of holding it if you don’t stick by it.”

On the state of contemporary politics

Ann Widdecombe left front-line politics in 2010 but has remained in the public eye, most famously when she took part in Strictly Come Dancing.

Having served in government for seven years under John Major in the 1990s – latterly as prisons minister – does she ever dream of returning to government?

“Yes. Undeniably, I’d like to be doing Brexit. I’d like to be doing the health service. I’d like to be tackling immigration. I’d like to be doing all those things.”

But whose job would she like most – Theresa May’s, Boris Johnson’s, Liam Fox’s?

No, it turns out what she would like most is to fill Justine Greening’s shoes, trying to raise educational standards.

“I’d love to be doing education where my biggest bugbear at the moment is prescriptive marking – where you just tick points that have to be made rather than the overall structure of the answer.

“That is not education. That is a travesty of education and explains why we have got grade inflation.”

On sexism in public life

Although she rarely encountered sexism in her early political career – partly, she says, because she did not go “looking for it” – she acknowledges it did exist.

The politician, who stands at just over 5ft, recalls a story of the reception she got when she applied to be a Conservative candidate in the early 1980s.

“Occasionally it came out… I went up for one of the Sunderland seats and one of the women – it is always the women – on the interview panel said to me … ‘you are very small and frail, are you sure you are up to it?’

“When I went out, there in the anteroom was a decidedly under-sized man and I bet she didn’t ask him that.”

Despite being in a very small minority as a female MP in the late 1980s, she says she never “found a problem” in how she was treated.

“I went into Parliament expecting to be taken on my own merits. It never occurred to me that I was a woman MP. I was an MP who happened to be a woman.

“I wasn’t this peculiar thing which was a woman MP, a great curiosity.”

Other MPs weren’t so sanguine, however. She remembers a Labour MP elected in 1997 – among the intake that was labelled Blair’s babes by sections of the media – approaching her to complain about the behaviour of male colleagues.

“I said ‘yes and how horrible is it that they are so rude to each other’. She hadn’t thought of that. She had just been roughed up in the chamber. She assumed it was because she was a woman and the fact was, it was because she was useless.”

“I never went round looking for problems so I never found them. The only problem I found as a woman MP were there were insufficient loos.”