Our workforce is very co-operative, very flexible, easy to work with and one of the big selling points. The idea that Britain is still back in the labour market of the '70s is utterly bizarre.

I am a bit of a lefty on some issues.

My late wife Olympia was Goan and I've been to India many times. I love the food there. We used to do our shopping in Southall, where you can find cheap but wonderful fruit like mangoes, vegetables and spices. I didn't do much of the cooking, as Olympia did a lot - I was the under-chef and did some of the chopping.

Small- and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market.

Billions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in bad deals. The London Underground modernisation, personally negotiated by one of Gordon Brown's team, was a disaster, as the National Audit Office has confirmed.

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company, I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved right.'

So I went into government with a clear mind about what the problems were, and what needed to be done.