Jojo Moyes

I have read books that are so cliched and lazy, my eyes have bled. But I also have read books marketed under the chick-lit umbrella that are so honest, clever and gritty that I've wanted to give up writing and paint walls instead.

I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.

We live in a crazily youth-orientated world nowadays. It's a trickle-down thing. We see pictures of lithe, attractive celebrity couples such as Brad and Angelina or the Beckhams cavorting around, covered in tattoos, stomachs as flat as the singing in early 'X Factor' rounds.

You replace it by 23 percent tax, a frank, transparent tax embedded in the cost at retail, and everybody gets to takes their whole check home. And the average income earner gets a 50 percent increase in take-home pay.