For over 20 years, Jane Moore has been a successful journalist, television presenter, radio broadcaster and best-selling novelist. She’s The Sun newspaper’s longest-serving opinion columnist, writes a monthly column for GQ called She-Q, presents investigative documentaries for Channel 4’s Dispatches and runs a consumer website – yet, if it hadn’t been for an untimely growth spurt, she’d have been a gymnast.

"Olga Korbut was my hero! I did a lot of gymnastics at school and I was part of the grandly-titled Worcester Olympic Gymnastics Club. I was a pretty good gymnast but then I left school and started getting taller."

Height did for her gymnastic career but fortunately Jane had a back-up.

"I always wrote copious amounts at school and English was the only subject I was pretty good at, and I used to write stories all the time. I used to write for pleasure and take the stories into school and show my friends. At school they did everything they could to put me off becoming a journalist by saying, ‘It’s not a profession for a lady. It’s male dominated’. But I was completely focused and just went for it."

Jane began her career as journalist on a local paper in the West Midlands before making the move to London in the mid-80s to cut her teeth in the hot-house of journalism in Fleet Street. "The first paper

I worked for in Fleet Street was The People in its investigations department. It was quite scary actually. You’re young, you’re naïve, and you’re suddenly thrust into situations that you don’t ever come across on a local paper. And then I went to The Sun and I was the Bizarre editor and that was great fun. It was hard work because I had to go out to practically every event, schmooze people, hang about till the early hours, and then go into the office the next day at the crack of dawn. So I kind of burnt out on that quite quickly."

Given the traditional portrayal of journalism at that time is of a male-dominated industry, it’s surprising how fondly Jane remembers her early career. "Well, in tabloids it really is an incredibly competitive industry. You are there purely on the basis on whether you can do the job or not. Whether you’re male or female. I’ve never experienced sexism in newspapers. I have to say that there is far more sexism in television, because that is very much about if you still look alright.

"With all the message boards they have now on the internet, you see all sorts of comments about women like, ‘She’s not very attractive’ and other comments which you don’t usually see about men. So the public has to take a certain amount of responsibility about that as well.

"It’s just not an issue in newspapers because, at best, your picture appears as the size of a thumbprint. It’s what you write that people are interested in and the stories you bring in. If you don’t bring in stories when you’re a news reporter, you’ll get fired – whether you look like Elle MacPherson or Rab C. Nesbitt! It’s irrelevant."

In the tough world of tabloid journalism, Jane has been voicing her opinions in The Sun newspaper for over 12 years. Her no nonsense motto is, ‘Everyone’s entitled to my opinion, but they don’t have to agree with it.’

"What I write is my opinion. You can take or leave it. You read it, agree with it, or not agree with it. And people are very vociferous on both counts. If they agree, they write you letters or emails and if they don’t agree, they let you know it as well. In terms of rubbing people up the wrong way – that would only come from celebrity quarters really. You’ll write something about them that they don’t like. But I say, if you make a fortune out of being in the public eye and courting attention, you can’t complain if sometimes that attention is unwanted or less than flattering."

As a novelist, an ever-present theme in her books, including Fourplay and The Second Wives Club, are the complexities of human relationships written from a woman’s point of view. In the list of acknowledgements in The Second Wives Club she expresses her gratitude to ‘all the second wives who so willingly and humorously imparted their frustrations’. Perhaps, this is why she has been acclaimed as the ‘British Candace Bushnell’ by Glamour magazine. She also gets a considerable amount of mail from people asking for relationship advice.

"If you’re writing about relationships, there are going to be people that the scenario that you’ve come up with fits in with what they’ve been going through. I find it easy to write about relationships. I’ve got kids, I’m married and relationships interest me. And of course, they interest women and that’s my core readership. I think you have to write about what you know or what you research extraordinarily well. I write about what I see around me because it interests me."

One such muse is Wandsworth Common where Jane has been based for the last 25 years. Living in SW18 with her family is something she’s always willing to shout about. "The only person I knew in London shared a flat with others in Clapham Common. So I just kipped on her floor for a while and then one of the tenants left and I took over the room over. Since then, I’ve moved around the commons which has been great as so few of us have very big gardens – if we have one at all – so it’s really important to preserve the green spaces. Living near Wandsworth Common, I always feel that I’ve got that space."

So what would her advice be to those rise readers planning to write a novel for the first time? "I would say just get on with it. So many people talk about writing a book but never actually get on with it. So, if you’re that passionate about writing books, do it and then send it off to agents and publishers. You never know, people do get signed up cold, but they can’t sign you up if there is nothing for them to see. Get on with it. Talk is cheap as they say!"

‘Perfect Match’ is out now, published by Century in hardback. Jane runs consumer website, You the Jury: www.youthejury.com