Looking back, which she often did, Ann Widdecombe’s years at Oxford University were among the happiest of her life.

There was a dreaminess about that time in the early 1970s, she recalled, not least because of the boyfriend – her first and last – who stood at the centre of it.

Colin Maltby, a brilliant physics scholar from Christchurch, was, she admitted, ‘the man that at that stage I thought I might marry’.

For nearly three years Ann and Maltby spent their days together, punting along the River Cherwell, trundling back and forth across town between their respective colleges in Ann’s old turquoise Morris Minor and dancing until sunrise at all-night summer balls.

They met each other’s families. As the relationship deepened there were holidays to Portugal, Gibraltar and Morocco where the couple swam in the Mediterranean and rode on camels.

This week, drawing on previously unpublished interviews with both Ann and Maltby, the Daily Mail can tell, for the first time, the full story of their bittersweet university romance and break-up.

Conducted over several hours in the late 1990s when Ann was shadow home secretary, these extraordinary conversations reveal a softer, more romantic side to a woman who would go on to become one of Britain’s most formidable and outspoken politicians but who also, after her chaste relationship with Maltby ended in heartache, remained single until the tragic end of her life last week.

So why, in spite of the powerful affection she felt for him, did Ann’s relationship with Maltby end? And what effect did that heartbreak have on her in the decades that lay ahead?

Colin Maltby pictured with Ann Widdecombe in 1973, while the pair were students at Oxford University

Ann was three years older than Maltby when they met in the summer of 1971.

Having failed to get into Oxford the first time around, she had left her convent school in Bath and spent three years studying Latin at Birmingham University before reapplying and winning a place to study politics, philosophy and economics at Lady Margaret Hall, at the time one of Oxford’s all-women colleges.

She crossed paths with Maltby, a straight-A student from King Edward VI School in Birmingham, at The Oxford Union – the world’s oldest debating society which since its founding in 1823 has nurtured the persuasive talents of many an MP as well as a dozen prime ministers.

It was there, during a ‘fancy dress’ debate held at the end of summer’s Trinity Term in 1971, that Maltby, described by one contemporary as ‘an academic nerd with big glasses, a shambolic dress sense and wild hair’ first saw a different side to the politically ambitious Ann.

‘I remember that Ann appeared in a spangly pair of purple hot pants and a very garish outfit, looking extraordinary,’ he said in an interview with political journalist Nicholas Kochan, who was researching for an authorised biography on Ann when they spoke at length in the late 1990s.

At the end of the debate, Maltby recalled, she was carried out of the chamber by someone dressed as a gorilla.

The couple pictured punting on the river in 1971. Widdecombe and Maltby were together for three years

‘She was different,’ he said when asked what attracted him to her.

‘She was distinctive. I guess if I was going to bring it down to a single thing, she was always her own person and she still is.’

When the pair returned to Oxford for Michaelmas term in October 1971, Maltby, who like Ann was by then a final year student, purposely threw himself into life at the Union to get closer to Ann, participating in debates and inviting her for coffee under the guise of discussing strategy for committee meetings or discussing the topic of an upcoming debate.

Both were also members of the university’s Conservative Association.

‘We became interested in each other because we were interested in each other’s political activity, ambitions and views,’ he said.

If at first Ann saw Maltby as a useful political ally then he quickly impressed her with his brilliant mind and ability to argue a point.

According to Ann: ‘We spent more time together and we got to know each other better. By the end of that year we had a relationship which had gone beyond politics. We started to care about each other as people, so we were friends. We were going out.’

Nicholas Kochan, who went on to write the 2000 biography, Ann Widdecombe: Right From The Beginning, believes that the relationship ‘allowed her to be vulnerable and open as she had never been before’.

 Ms Widdecombe, pictured at her home in Haytor, Devon, would go on to become a political firebrand and Conservative minister

In one unpublished short story Ann wrote and showed to Kochan: ‘Only once have I rejoiced in yielding it up, in confiding.’

Maltby, says Kochan, was the recipient of this confidence. With him she could reveal her introverted side.

By the end of 1971 the pair were ‘romantically committed’, as Ann put it.

After they were spotted kissing in the front of Ann’s beloved Morris Minor, which she called Methuselah, outside the front of Christchurch, word spread around the Union that the friends had become a ‘power couple’.

Confronted with this recollection, Ann insisted on pointing out that the kissing was ‘chaste’.

‘We would not do anything as ghastly as sitting on the back seat,’ she told Kochan.

On another occasion, the pair were interrupted in Maltby’s rooms at Christchurch by a friend who only realised he’d butted in when he noticed that Maltby had set aside his glasses.

They became so talked about that a fellow student even named his pet goldfish Colin and Ann.

But even the slightest whisper that their relationship was sexual was immediately shot down by Ann who, as a well-known Union hack, was a ready target for the student newspaper Cherwell.

She always maintained her relationship with Maltby, three years her junior, was chaste

When in May 1972 its gossip column reported that Ann’s old Dansette record player had been moved to Maltby’s room at Christchurch – implying that they were living together – she forced them to print a retraction by threatening to sue.

Ann recalled how it became a ‘huge joke’ between her and Maltby, who quipped that his own reputation had also been damaged by reports of their celibacy.

‘Colin said: “When am I going to get my apology?”,’ she said.

If that was the year that the relationship intensified, then it still didn’t become physical in nature.

According to Maltby: ‘Sex was never an issue. I don’t think it was discussed.’

But according to another contemporary, they often held hands in public.

‘They were sometimes billing and cooing. It was clear when you saw them that they were on affection terms,’ said a fellow student.

Ann recalled those days in her autobiography, Strictly Ann, recalling how at a Worcester College summer ball: ‘Colin and I danced to a South American steel band in the early hours of a summer’s morning before watching the dawn come up.’

She added: ‘The world seemed my oyster. We floated through Oxford clad in black and white as we sat finals. Colin and I bought each other flowers from the market to pin on our academic gowns, we drifted down the river in punts.’

Even so, when they went on holiday to Portugal after sitting their finals, she insisted on booking separate single rooms – much to the surprise of staff at their hotel in the beach resort of Estoril.

Ms Widdecombe, who died last weekend, received a third class degree from Oxford and found temporary work after university with Oxfam

Maltby recalled: ‘We had to insist to the hotel receptionists that “Yes we had booked two rooms, and yes we really did want two rooms”. And I remember the hotel being slightly surprised about this.’

Hilariously, Ann’s recollections of the trip included their visit to a cork factory in Lisbon.

‘Portugal in those days had the most thriving cork industry,’ she said.

‘We had lots of happy moments. They were very good times.’

They returned to Oxford in the autumn where Maltby, who got a double first, embarked on a doctorate and Ann, who was awarded a third class degree, found temporary work with Oxfam, selling tickets for a charity raffle.

Both continued to spend most of their free time at the Oxford Union.

But it was Maltby, not Ann, who was widely tipped to become a future Tory prime minister.

He ran for the coveted position of president that term but was not elected. Ann provided a shoulder to cry on.

According to Maltby: ‘She is sensitive and always was, more in concern for other people than in a sense of being unduly sensitive for herself. She is not easily wounded or hurt or upset or self-centred. She reacts to other people’s happiness and suffering and in that sense she’s absolutely genuine.’

Maltby said of his former flame that she was ‘sensitive’ and reacted to others’ happiness or suffering genuinely

Christmas 1972 was spent together at the Bristol vicarage of Ann’s brother Malcolm. It was the first time that Maltby met his girlfriend’s family.

The occasion, he recalled, was ‘Dickensian’ in its jollity: ‘Everybody spent a lot of time with each other, with the children, and lots of alcohol flowed and that was very jolly in the English winter.’

According to Nicholas Kochan, meeting Ann’s ‘formidable’ father for the first time was a key moment in the relationship. To Ann’s delight, they hit it off.

Former Royal Navy officer James Murray Widdecombe, known to his family as Murray, served as head of naval supplies and transport at the Ministry of Defence, a career which took the family overseas, including to Singapore, where Ann attended the Royal Naval School as a young girl.

‘Murray was a huge presence in Ann’s life and in her mind,’ says Kochan. ‘The fact that her father liked Maltby was very important to her.’

The following year saw the couple’s paths begin to diverge.

While Maltby was finally elected as Oxford Union president in the spring of 1973, Ann was taken on as a graduate trainee by Unilever and moved to her first home, a 1960s flat in Ottershaw in Surrey, not far from where Murray and Rita Widdecombe lived.

She continued to visit Maltby regularly, who was still studying in Oxford, always booking a room at the Galaxie Guest House on the Banbury Road. She also went to visit his family in Solihull.

The pair spent Christmas 1973 and New Year on holiday in Morocco, again booking separate rooms at the Chellah Hotel in Tangier.

They attended parties, visited Berber markets, rode camels and took a trip to Gibraltar. Ann forever kept the menu from the meal they were served on Christmas Eve.

But if she thought – and her parents hoped – that one day they would marry, then by the end of the year it was all over.

Pictured on the day of her death during a television interview, Ms Widdecombe never married nor had any public romance after Maltby

Maltby, who had curtailed his post-graduate studies and was travelling widely with the Federation of Conservative Students, broke up with her over dinner at The Bear, a pub in Esher, Surrey.

He recalled: ‘I think it had been going on long enough. We had been drifting apart. At some stage I just thought to myself: “Well you really have to decide whether this is going to go on drifting or whether it’s actually sufficiently important that you’re going to do something about it.”

‘It was me who decided that we should part, not that we were together in any physical sense at all by then.’

‘We didn’t part in an angry fashion and we weren’t at any stage hostile or bitter. But I’m sure there were some tears afterwards.’

Stoic Ann later wrote in her autobiography: ‘I knew even before we met that he was about to end what was by then a failing relationship. My feelings were mixed.

‘Naturally I was deeply upset by the end of a romance which had lasted nearly three years but I had known well enough that it had no future and the following morning my overwhelming sensation was one of relief.’

Speaking to Kochan, however, she said that ‘by the time we broke up, I had not the slightest idea that it would happen’.

Asked what went wrong with the relationship, she poignantly concluded: ‘It blossomed and it died.’

The sting in the tail, however, was the news which came just a matter of weeks later, that Maltby had already found someone else.

Ann was ‘well aware from the indiscretion of friends’ that her boyfriend was seeing Liz Bath, a Sheffield University student and fellow official at the Federation of Conservative Students.

Their engagement was announced in the Times in March 1975, just three months after Ann and Maltby spent their final Christmas together with her family.

Maltby, Ann said, broke the news to her a week earlier. According to Kochan, while she was shocked at being two-timed, she took the ‘pragmatic view’ that this was the way relationships ended.

Ann even attended their Dorset wedding in July 1975. She was also a guest when Maltby married for a second time to his current wife Vicky with whom he now lives in Switzerland.

According to father-of-three Maltby, he and Ann remained ‘reasonably close friends’ over the years, having dinner at each other’s houses.

‘She knows the children and we’re all fond of each other,’ he said.

Maltby said Ms Widdecombe ‘discovered for herself’ that it was not ‘necessary’ to marry and said he believed she was ‘quite fulfilled with her life as it is’

Maltby ultimately quit politics for a career as a fund manager, taking on roles at prestigious City firms including Rothschild & Sons, Kleinwort Benson, Equitas and BP.

Ann, meanwhile, first entered Parliament in 1987 when she was elected Conservative MP for Maidstone under Margaret Thatcher and going on to become one of Westminster’s most high profile figures.

Asked whether he thought marriage might have been a hindrance to Ann’s political career, Maltby said: ‘She might just as easily have met somebody else six months later and been completely happy, got married, had children and still been a very great political force.’

He added: ‘If Ann had really felt that she needed to have a husband to be fulfilled I’m quite sure she would have got married. Ann discovered for herself that it wasn’t necessary. I think she’s quite fulfilled with her life as it is.’

Until the terrible events of last weekend, when she was killed in horrific circumstances at her remote Dartmoor home, Ann Widdecombe would no doubt have agreed with her former love.

Reflecting on their relationship more than 20 years ago, she said: ‘Some people have rather cruelly tried to suggest that it’s because of what happened with him that I never married. That has never been true.’

Hers, she said, was ‘probably a life that was not destined for marriage’.

Despite always treasuring those halcyon days at Oxford, being single was something she never lamented.

‘The important thing for anybody looking at my life was that it didn’t happen,’ she said.