She's best known as former shadow Home Secretary. She is now a Tory backbencher: MP for Maidstone and Weald. But she's always had ambitions to write novels.

An Act of Treachery is Ann Widdecombe's second novel and follows the success of The Clematis Tree about euthanasia and the calamity which befalls a family when a child becomes handicapped.

Ann Widdecombe spoke about her book and her change of image on Breakfast.

This latest offering is the story of an affair between a teenage French girl and a Nazi officer during the German occupation of Paris - fairly emotional, full of love and hate.

It's about good people behaving badly covering complex moral difficulties.

A tale of illicit love, hate, and loss in Occupied France, the central character is a beautiful schoolgirl of 16 who becomes tenderly involved with a married German officer, in open defiance of her devoted family.

Ann insists that, as much as the book explores a conscience-stricken love, it also focuses on the destructive force of hatred.

"The holocaust is the dark background to this novel...there are no heroes in this story. People behave badly and well simultaneously... life is often like that."

Given her caricature status as a fully paid-up spinster and virgin, Ann maintains she can understand romance. But she says the characters are in no way based on her... and also flatly denies that beneath her strict exterior that there's an old romantic:

"Is Ruth Rendell a bit of an old murderer because she writes detective novels? People immediately try to deduce something about the author from the work, but all a good novel does is explore. It says, here is a situation and a mish-mash of characters, and then, with a certain degree of control, it traces their reactions."