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Conservative Party stalwart Ann Widdecombe has sensationally quit - to rejoin frontline politics with the Brexit Party.

The 71-year-old has been a staunch Tory for 55 years - serving as Shadow Health and Home secretary.

But now she has joined Nigel Farage's fledgling party on a mandate to hurry up and get Britain out of the EU.

She will stand in the South West region for the EU elections on May 23 - on a lively ticket that includes Boris Johnson's sister Rachel (Change UK), arch-Remainer Andrew Adonis (Labour) and rape comments row UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin.

Ms Widdecombe told the Express: "The public needs to send a very clear message and that is we expect the vote to be respected so just get on with the job of getting us out of the EU.

"If I am elected in Brussels my message to (Jean-Claude) Juncker and company will be very simple, very loud and very clear. Nous allons (we go)."

She served as a former Shadow Home Secretary from 1999-2001 and will aim to stand in the South West for election to the European Parliament on May 23.

(Image: Leon Neal)

LGBT rights campaigners condemned the return of Ms Widdecombe - who spent decades battling equal rights - just days after Nigel Farage claimed his new party would be "intolerant of intolerance".

The former Tory grandee voted against equalising the age of consent at 16, civil partnerships and the repeal of Section 28.

In 2000 she told MPs she "rejected" the idea "that there is somehow equal validity between the homosexual lifestyle and marriage and family."

And in 2012 she defended "gay conversion" therapy - which Theresa May has branded "abhorrent" and vowed to ban.

She blamed the "homosexual lobby" for "turning all its fire" on conversion therapy adding: "The unhappy homosexual should, according to gay activists, be denied any chance whatever to investigate any possibility of seeing if he can be helped to become heterosexual.

"If anybody turns to a properly qualified practitioner for help there must be a presumption that he or she can get it. It is not a state crime to want to change one's sexual leanings. Yet."

Labour MP Wes Streeting said: “The Brexit Party is shaping up to be a weird assortment of people who’ve fought tooth and nail against hard-won rights and freedoms, epitomised by Ann Widdecombe."

A Stonewall spokesperson said: "Any form of ‘therapy’ that attempts to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity is unethical and wrong.

"These so-called conversion therapies have been condemned by all major UK health organisations as they try to shame a person into denying a core part of who they are, and this can have a seriously harmful impact on their mental health and wellbeing.

"Same-sex attraction is natural, normal and not something that can or should be ‘cured’."

(Image: Channel 5 / PR Handout)

Writer Otto English said: "Widdecombe opposes abortion & lgbt rights.

"She opposed repeal of Section 28 supported re-introduction of death penalty & wanted blasphemy laws retained.

"As a minister she defended shackling pregnant prisoners with chains when receiving ante-natal care."

Earlier this month Ms Widdecombe branded Theresa May the worst Prime Minister since Anthony Eden.

The former prisons minister and CelebrityBig Brother star went on to say the current Parliament is the worst since Oliver Cromwell, and Jeremy Corbyn the worst opposition leader in the history of the Labour Party.

She also claimed a no-deal Brexit would not be a disaster.

(Image: AFP/Getty Images)

“We’ve got the worst Prime Minister since Anthony Eden," Widdecombe ranted on the BBC's Newsnight.

“We’ve got the worst leader of the opposition in the entire history of the Labour party.

“And we’ve got the worst Parliament since Oliver Cromwell.”

But she said Mrs May's deal is the best of "several bad options".