The former Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe has been appointed leader of a Christian group campaigning to leave the EU. Miss Widdecombe is the first president of Christians for Britain, founded by Adrian Hilton, who runs the Archbishop Cranmer blog, and the Anglican minister Giles Fraser. Miss Widdecombe, a columnist for the Catholic Herald, said: “It is no good thinking we can come out at a later stage. There will not be that opportunity. It is a now or never situation.” Miss Widdecombe was once described in a newspaper profile as “a fairly restrained Eurosceptic”. In her 2013 autobiography, Strictly Ann, Widdecombe described the EU as “an extravagant, regulation-bound, interventionist Leviathan of a would-be superstate, the ultimate goal of which [is] federalism”. She wrote that Britain needed to have a plan for leaving the EU: “I am not prepared merely to run away; I need to know where I am going next.” Miss Widdecombe, who converted to Catholicism in 1993, held several ministerial positions in John Major’s Torygovernment, and later served as shadow health secretary and shadow home secretary. On its website, Christians for Britain states: “The EU’s bureaucratic, corporatist mindset is antithetical to the UK’s democratic traditions and historic Christian values.” A group representing the opposite view, Christians for the European Union, has also been founded.