A Friday lunchtime in south-west London and upmarket Amici Restaurant, on Wandsworth Common, is packed with prosperous-looking women in their 30s and 40s. There’s lots of expensive blonde hair, well-cut clothes and the scent of white wine and end-of-the-week hilarity is in the air.

But this is no gathering of the idle classes. Far from it. The 80 or so women who have turned up are all members of Talk In Company, an organisation for former high-flying professional women who have temporarily given it all up to become mothers. They’ve come for risotto, salad and an address by Ann Widdecombe, this month’s star speaker (the month before it was Victoria Mather, the month before that Nicola Horlick). So instead of being seated in standard ladies-who-lunch configurations of two or four, they are deployed at large tables of eight or 10, all facing the front of the room. For half an hour, the member for Maidstone and the Weald keeps her audience entertained with tales of parliamentary ups and downs.