Election profile: Nancy Holdsworth

THERE will be many a soundbite between here and June 7 but I doubt any will better this: "How do you think the British public will react when we are told by Brussels to change the name of Scotland Yard to Scotland Metre..?"

Funny, pointed and, when you think about it, deeply provoking - which just about sums up Nancy Holdsworth, the United Kingdom Independence Party candidate at the coming election.

There are other adjectives which spring to mind too: blonde and bubbly, if you want the clichs. Tough, if you are searching for the steel behind the smile.

Nancy, 55, but looking ten years younger, has led a life which might have come from the pages of a Mills and Boon novelette, a hard-done-to heroine who overcame potential disaster to come up trumps.

It started badly and then got worse, so some people might think. Nancy feels just the opposite - she's had a whale of a time and is still doing so, thoroughly enjoying the cut and thrust of a general election representing what is essentially a single-issue party: To rescue Britain and all things British from the grips of the Brussels bureaucrats.

Nancy's path to the hustings was long and twisting but I shall attempt to edit it down.

Born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, she went to the local Wheelright Grammar School, alma mater of another feisty Yorkshire political lady, Betty Boothroyd, the much loved former Speaker of the House of Commons.

Things looked set fair but, when she was in her early 'teens, her father died, significantly of lung cancer. Then, a couple of years later, her mother died too and, as a 16-year-old orphan, Nancy went off to Australia to join an elder brother who had emigrated.

There, with no academic qualifications whatsoever, she became a nursing assistant helping four doctors at a medical station miles away from anywhere in the outback - "I loved every minute of it but I grew to realise that, unless I got some form of qualifications I was going to be stuck there for ever."

So, now in her twenties, she came back to Britain and studied to become a nurse. That done, she decided to go one step further and took and passed five 'O' levels in just six weeks of home study.

Although even this was not too impressive by modern academic standards, her sense of determination must have shone through because she was given a teacher-training post at what she laughingly calls "the Pud School" - the Yorkshire School of Education and Home Economics, now part of Leeds Metropolitan University.

Life, it seemed, was getting back onto a fairly normal course but ordinary teaching was not enough for our Nancy: she did some more training and ended up as a special needs teacher for girls with "behavioural and social problems."

This was a polite euphemism for young female tearaways, many of whom had been before the courts - the sort of job, I imagine, almost guaranteed to drive a teacher to despair. Once again, Nancy loved it: "It was so hands on - you had to get very close to these girls to make any impact."

On the personal front, life was getting better. She married a Dewsbury-based dentist and they came to live in the Dales, first in Malham, then in Grassington, where they had three children, now aged 21, 18 and 16.

Times were good although Nancy was getting more and more irritated by European intervention into the British way of life - "If we don't like our politicians, we can dump them every four or five years. Now, we are ruled by bureaucrats who are there forever and couldn't care less about what the ordinary citizen wants or needs."

So at the last election, she stood for Sir James Goldsmith's then Democratic Reform Party. But, what to you and me looks like tragedy, struck again: she found she was suffering from breast cancer.

"I was actually waiting for a mastectomy when we were campaigning last time," she recalls with - I swear - another hearty peal of laughter. "It was great - fighting the election took my mind off my condition."

There was a certain irony in this because, at the time, the highly controversial Jimmy Goldsmith was dying from cancer. This is probably why Nancy and her husband were invited to attend his memorial service in London along with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Sir David Frost.

Nancy, however, not only survived but, as one would expect, went on the attack. Thanks to the inspiration of the now famous Rylstone Ladies, she persuaded 11 other mastectomy ladies to pose topless for a calendar, which has now raised £8,000 for breast cancer charities.

This may sound gruesome but the calendar is in fact beautifully produced.

Nancy, who was one of the models, explains: "Whenever people talk about cancer, they talk about people who have died. In fact, most women survive and go on to lead normal lives. I wanted to show that life after cancer can be beautiful, not just a matter of survival."

Now she is back on the election trail, determined and confident to increase her vote and hammer home even further amongst the major parties just how unpopular European "meddling" is with the ordinary Brit. But, as in everything, she is doing so with a cheeky sense of humour.

He election pamphlet is just four A5 pages and has fewer words than the average small ad. There is a reason for this, which she explains with a giggle:

"It has to be short enough for people to read in the distance between the letter box and the waste bin. We all throw these things away, don't we, so you have to get over the message before it goes in the bin."

Other politicos please note.

THERE will be many a soundbite between here and June 7 but I doubt any will better this: "How do you think the British public will react when we are told by Brussels to change the name of Scotland Yard to Scotland Metre..?"

Funny, pointed and, when you think about it, deeply provoking - which just about sums up Nancy Holdsworth, the United Kingdom Independence Party candidate at the coming election.

There are other adjectives which spring to mind too: blonde and bubbly, if you want the clichs. Tough, if you are searching for the steel behind the smile.

Nancy, 55, but looking ten years younger, has led a life which might have come from the pages of a Mills and Boon novelette, a hard-done-to heroine who overcame potential disaster to come up trumps.

It started badly and then got worse, so some people might think. Nancy feels just the opposite - she's had a whale of a time and is still doing so, thoroughly enjoying the cut and thrust of a general election representing what is essentially a single-issue party: To rescue Britain and all things British from the grips of the Brussels bureaucrats.

Nancy's path to the hustings was long and twisting but I shall attempt to edit it down.

Born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, she went to the local Wheelright Grammar School, alma mater of another feisty Yorkshire political lady, Betty Boothroyd, the much loved former Speaker of the House of Commons.

Things looked set fair but, when she was in her early 'teens, her father died, significantly of lung cancer. Then, a couple of years later, her mother died too and, as a 16-year-old orphan, Nancy went off to Australia to join an elder brother who had emigrated.

There, with no academic qualifications whatsoever, she became a nursing assistant helping four doctors at a medical station miles away from anywhere in the outback - "I loved every minute of it but I grew to realise that, unless I got some form of qualifications I was going to be stuck there for ever."

So, now in her twenties, she came back to Britain and studied to become a nurse. That done, she decided to go one step further and took and passed five 'O' levels in just six weeks of home study.

Although even this was not too impressive by modern academic standards, her sense of determination must have shone through because she was given a teacher-training post at what she laughingly calls "the Pud School" - the Yorkshire School of Education and Home Economics, now part of Leeds Metropolitan University.

Life, it seemed, was getting back onto a fairly normal course but ordinary teaching was not enough for our Nancy: she did some more training and ended up as a special needs teacher for girls with "behavioural and social problems."

This was a polite euphemism for young female tearaways, many of whom had been before the courts - the sort of job, I imagine, almost guaranteed to drive a teacher to despair. Once again, Nancy loved it: "It was so hands on - you had to get very close to these girls to make any impact."

On the personal front, life was getting better. She married a Dewsbury-based dentist and they came to live in the Dales, first in Malham, then in Grassington, where they had three children, now aged 21, 18 and 16.

Times were good although Nancy was getting more and more irritated by European intervention into the British way of life - "If we don't like our politicians, we can dump them every four or five years. Now, we are ruled by bureaucrats who are there forever and couldn't care less about what the ordinary citizen wants or needs."

So at the last election, she stood for Sir James Goldsmith's then Democratic Reform Party. But, what to you and me looks like tragedy, struck again: she found she was suffering from breast cancer.

"I was actually waiting for a mastectomy when we were campaigning last time," she recalls with - I swear - another hearty peal of laughter. "It was great - fighting the election took my mind off my condition."

There was a certain irony in this because, at the time, the highly controversial Jimmy Goldsmith was dying from cancer. This is probably why Nancy and her husband were invited to attend his memorial service in London along with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Sir David Frost.

Nancy, however, not only survived but, as one would expect, went on the attack. Thanks to the inspiration of the now famous Rylstone Ladies, she persuaded 11 other mastectomy ladies to pose topless for a calendar, which has now raised £8,000 for breast cancer charities.

This may sound gruesome but the calendar is in fact beautifully produced.

Nancy, who was one of the models, explains: "Whenever people talk about cancer, they talk about people who have died. In fact, most women survive and go on to lead normal lives. I wanted to show that life after cancer can be beautiful, not just a matter of survival."

Now she is back on the election trail, determined and confident to increase her vote and hammer home even further amongst the major parties just how unpopular European "meddling" is with the ordinary Brit. But, as in everything, she is doing so with a cheeky sense of humour.

He election pamphlet is just four A5 pages and has fewer words than the average small ad. There is a reason for this, which she explains with a giggle:

"It has to be short enough for people to read in the distance between the letter box and the waste bin. We all throw these things away, don't we, so you have to get over the message before it goes in the bin."

Other politicos please note.