GB News star Andrew Pierce paid tribute to his friend earlier today
I've known Widders, as some of her closest friends called her, for 30 years.
When we spoke on the phone the other day, she was still fizzing with ideas.
She'd planned what to do at Reform UK's conference in September and was full of strong views on what Nigel Farage had just announced in Clacton.
I'd seen her a few weeks earlier at a garden party, supporting the veterans' charity Not Forgotten, where she ended up on her feet for four and a half hours.
At 78, Ann was still the same trooper she'd always been, and she'd never have complained about standing for hours on end. That was simply who she was.
Ann was a great parliamentarian and a fantastic woman to have been friends with.
She served as an MP for 27 years and held ministerial office for seven of them, first as Prisons Minister under John Major and later as Shadow Health Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary.
She was never afraid of a fight, in the Commons chamber or out of it.
Ann brought that same fearlessness to her later years with Reform UK, where she served as immigration spokeswoman with all the energy of someone half her age.
But she had so much more to give, too. It felt like this redoubtable woman, this force of life, would, as Mrs Thatcher once said, "Go on, and on and on".
She never cut the right jib for the centrist Tories – the David Camerons and George Osbornes of this world.
Looking back at her career – 27 years as an MP, seven as a minister, and years of tireless charity work besides – it's outrageous that the Tory Party never put her in the House of Lords.
Whatever you made of Ann, she was a titan of Tory and Eurosceptic politics. She will be sorely missed.
