ANDREW PIERCE: Can Ann Widdecombe solve this Countdown conundrum? 

When she took to the Strictly dance floor, she was compared to a ‘dancing hippo’ and a ‘Dalek in drag’.

But despite the harsh judgments of the studio critics, millions of viewers loved veteran Tory Ann Widdecombe when she appeared on the BBC show in 2010 and made it all the way to the final six.

The saintly Widders, who had by then quit as an MP, was also a surprise runner-up in 2018’s Celebrity Big Brother, only to be pipped at the post by an Australian drag act. After a short spell as a Brexit Party MEP, she is now looking for a new challenge.

And I hear that she might have found one. Convent-educated Widdecombe, whose early life was spent in colonial Singapore, has had numerous spells in Dictionary Corner on Channel 4’s Countdown. But with Queen of Mean Anne Robinson, 77, bowing out in the summer, could the redoubtable Widders, 74, take her place?

A well-placed source tells me Widdecombe’s name is now being bandied about in the meeting rooms of the TV channel.

Queen of Mean Anne Robinson, 77, is leaving Channel 4’s Countdown this summer

The former prisons minister, a devout Catholic who was once offered the ambassadorship to the Holy See, has a formidable vocabulary: she once baffled MPs when she deployed the phrase ‘semantic prestidigitation’ during a Commons debate. As everyone knows, prestidigitation means ‘conjuring, hocus pocus, magic’: sounds like just the kind of fairy-dust Widders would bring to the cerebral Countdown studio.