Questions of conscience are raised every time the reader begins to feel the least bit comfortable. Human weaknesses are stripped bare and examined microscopically. Even the characters in the book are starkly aware of all their failings but nothing is excused and no hope is offered.

Do not read this book if your optimism is anything less than unassailable. Read it if you hate people.

However, these positive points are more than outweighed by the negative ones. The prose is humdrum and in dire need of editing (far too much information on the making of sandwiches, the pouring and carrying and quaffing of drinks, and so on). Only with Mark does Ms Widdecombe even attempt anything approaching full characterisation. The other figures are clichéd or cardboard: Sally has long red hair and is clever, Sam is a plain-speaking businessman, and as for Clare, she hardly even qualifies as a cipher. Everyone speaks in the same stilted and unconvincing manner except for Sam. The author never lets us forget he is from Yorkshire, and so for the first 200 pages, every time he has dialogue, the words 'champion' and 'lass' are worked in - and even on one occasion, 'right champion'.

It seems to me that Ms Widdecombe lacks the one crucial element for a successful novelist: she cannot empathise with people from outside her social class or with those who do not share her views. When Ginny, Mark's Australian secretary, blurts out that she votes Labour at home, from Clare's horrified, tight-lipped reaction, you would think that Ginny had just confessed to selling crack at the school gates. In addition there is a vein of jaw-droppingly offensive snobbery against working and lower middle class women: they all wear short skirts, have dyed hair, smoke, and talk about boyfriends and nail polish; when the woman from Social Services turns up, we are informed that her hair is several days overdue for a wash.

Another problem is that the author is completely out of touch with modern life. She does not appear to know how people, ordinary or otherwise, actually live, what they wear, how they talk, what things are likely to happen to them, how they would react. Mark and Clare are outraged when people treat their disabled son as if he does not know what is going on around him, yet have sex in front of him (and the cat!).

Ginny is in her twenties and has come to England on a working holiday. One evening she goes to see A Little Night Music with a friend. Now I know anyone of any age may be a fan of Stephen Sondheim, but if Ms Widdecombe had asked around and found the name of a club or a gig Ginny might have been going to instead, this would have had the advantage of seeming to broaden her range of characters.

Later, Mark reads a financial report in a national newspaper with which he disagrees; he composes an article in reply, sends it off and is rewarded by a phone call from the editor, and a promise of payment and publication. I dare say this would happen to Anne Widdecombe, but Mark is only an ordinary accountant: surely the most he could hope for would be an unpaid appearance on the letters page?

There are many more examples of these kind of implausibilities: the young boy who says 'old chap'; the teacher who wears 'a floral frock more suited to a beach' (when did you last see anyone in a floral frock on a beach?); Mark's tan and flat stomach, despite working in a dingy basement office and taking no exercise; his plans to watch the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front on television one evening after work (a black and white film from 1930 in prime time? come off it!); his sudden access of Widdecombesque knowledge about the habits of newspaper editors once reporters are camped outside his house.

Early in the novel, Aunt Isabel's kitchen is described as 'small, modern and determinedly old-fashioned'. At the time I dismissed this as another one of the author's inept descriptions (like that of the boy in hospital who, bandaged head to toe, is laughing uproariously at something said to him by a nurse - how could they tell?), but knock out its second and third words and you have an apt description of the whole work: 'small and determinedly old-fashioned.' The bottom line is that this book wasn't worth publishing, and probably wouldn't have been without its celebrity by-line.

And the ending, unspeakable , I have not thrown a book away in such disgust since trollopian heroine died of a broken heart after her black hearted suitor deserted her becuase he could not get his hands on the money.