An Act of Peace

THE IDEALISTS, Ann's third novel, is the first to have politics as the backdrop. Her principal characters - John Carey is British, a pacifist and left-leaning Conservative, and Stephen Masawande is from an emerging African state about to gain its independence who believes passionately in western-style democracy. They meet first at Oxford as undergraduates, where they are in competition over the same girl. Years later they find themselves at odds with each other politically and personally. Pacifism is a hard cross to bear for a potential political leader. Western-style democracy is difficult to sustain as one after another African state falls to dictatorship and autocracy. And the fellow undergraduate they both loved at Oxford returns to their midst ...The novel is in its earliest stages of writing, a novel, says Widdecombe about people whose early ideals are hard to maintain in the grown-up world.