EVERYONE has their soft spot. Try to talk to Ann Widdecombe about her public image or personal life, or accidentally drop in a phrase which she considers to be a clich and you'll get something between a flat response and a good telling off.

But get her onto one of her pet subjects and she'll warm instantly, actually coming across as rather sweet.

Ann's favourite pet subject is pets - or cats, to be more precise. It's safe to say that Ann is a cat person.

The homepage of the website of this Conservative MP and writer - The Widdy Web - doesn't have a picture of her shaking hands with Iain Duncan Smith or arguing in the Houses of Parliament, but instead shows her beloved cats - Pugwash II and Arbuthnot.

The children's section of the site even has a couple of poems that she's written about her cats, although Ann is the first to admit that they're not her best work.

"They're great fun," she enthuses about her cats.

"I've had cats throughout most of my life. The one exception was when I was living in a first floor London flat and it wasn't appropriate. Unless you have an extremely old cat, which I did when I went there - I got him to 23 actually - it's unfair to have cats in a first floor flat. So there was a period of about ten years when I had no cats at all. Other than that, I've always had cats."

It's not just cats that Ann is fond of, she's an all-round animal lover. She is fervently anti-fox hunting and involved in an initiative to set up a safe haven for donkeys in the Holy Land.

Another of Ann's favourite subjects is her childhood. Like her cats, it also features heavily on The Widdy Web and is another topic to which she warms.

"My childhood was so different to how it is for modern kids," she says.

"When I was a child we still had an empire, but there was very little civilian flight. So when I used to go out to places like Singapore, it would be three weeks out on a liner and three weeks back and stopping in places on the way like Karachi and Bombay and it was perfectly natural.

"Separation was natural in those days. My brother was left behind in England for three years at boarding school because of the point he was at in his education. Family separation - seeing your parents for one holiday a year and spending the rest with grandparents, godmothers and other friends - was something that our generation took totally for granted, but which strikes the present generation with complete horror," she says, not seeming to realise that the difference was probably more to do with her class than her generation.

You get the feeling that Ann could happily talk for hours about her cats or her childhood but anything more personal seems to be off-limits.

Even though she has several pictures of her family on her website, when asked about them, she won't say anything more than that they are 'hugely important'.

Documentary-maker Louis Theroux fell foul of her when he asked her about her personal life.

"I told them that I wasn't interested in a prurient programme of that sort," she says.

"There are limits. The other thing that Theroux tried to do was to film my bedroom and bathroom. I said: 'Hang on, when people come into this house, they come into my lounge, my dining room and occasionally my study because those are public rooms. There are private rooms in every household and you don't go into those. What right have you to imagine that you can?' I was trying to show him that there was a boundary there which I wouldn't have crossed."

Not that her experience with Theroux completely put her off reality TV. She signed up for Celebrity Fit Club, becoming more of a TV personality while shedding a few pounds.

Despite the title of the show, Ann resists the idea that she is now a celebrity, saying "I don't know quite what a celebrity is." She admits that the show has had an impact on her life, as well as her fitness levels.

"People come up to me on the street and say 'You have done well haven't you? It's all gone from your waist, hasn't it?'. They don't know me but they feel that they can talk to me like that because I've been beamed into their lounges for week after week."

Ann has also had to adapt to her new blonde and slimmer appearance becoming the subject of media attention.

"I don't object to it as such but I don't think it's the most important thing. I look at it as a little bit trivial," she says of all the media fuss about her looks. "I merely take the line that there are rather more important things that they could have concentrated on."

Another thing that Ann doesn't appreciate people concentrating on is sex, or the lack of it, in her novels.

"Why does there have to be? It's only an issue because it's me," she says.

"People are looking for the absence of it. I mean, you read somebody like John Grisham. He's a hugely popular author. No sex. No sex in Jeffrey Archer. That's the nonsense of it - the idea that you have to have an explicit description. If I have two characters having dinner, I don't have to describe the digestive system and if I have two characters in love I do not have to describe the physical processes. It's what I call the libertarian dictatorship, this need to talk about sex."

Ann feels the same way about the autobiography that she's considered writing.

"I don't have to go into my personal life in it. This is a modern obsession, that you must know all these things about somebody. It's not necessary," she says.

"If I was to write an autobiography, it would be about my public life together with some general observations about a childhood because that has historical interest. But whether or not I had a boyfriend at Oxford, that's my business, it's not the world's business."

Much as one might like to know the details of Ann's personal life, one has to admit, she's right.

Ann Widdecombe will be in conversation with Iain Dale at The Nuffield, Southampton, on Sunday, November 9. Tickets: from £14. Box office: 023 8067 1771.