Unwise, But Not Illegal

Newsrooms all around Fleet Street have been abuzz with a story this week about an amusing last minute deadline panic at the Daily Mail.

Late last week, Mail editor Ted Verity came into possession of a bombshell photo showing Boris Johnson, his mother, his sister and little baby Wilf out in the open air at No.10. The Mail wrote up a big front page story about how the photo was PROOF that Boris had done no wrong and that the police are conducting a baseless witch hunt against him.

It was all laid out, ready to go to press, when one of the hacks looking over it piped up to ask if the four of them shouldn’t have been much further apart – given that social distancing rules were in place at the time. Sure enough, the picture they were about to splash across their front page not only proved that Boris Johnson broke the rules he put in place, but that he still doesn’t understand them now.

Because the super secret source of the photo, who thought its publication would fully exonerate Boris, was… Boris.

You might, quite reasonably, think the country has lost its goddamn mind getting so worked up over the fall-out from the host of a largely unwatched morning TV show conducting an “unwise, but not illegal” affair with a young runner – not least because this story has been plastered all over WhatsApp groups and social media for literal years now.

But the properly fascinating bit of this story is the cover up. How brazenly the people closest to it will lie to save their skins. How unprepared the channel was to deal with a scandal like this, despite getting a test run with Ant McPartlin a few years back. And how – when so much of this story was common knowledge across the length and breadth of the country – it only actually became a problem for Schofe when the press finally decided to run it.

The revelations are opening all sorts of fruitful avenues for Popbitch to explore, and we’ll have plenty of opportunities in the coming weeks to deal with them. This week, we thought we’d start with a broader look at the talent agency that stuck with Phil for 35 years, how they kept his indiscretions out of the spotlight all this time, how they keep their wider client base out of trouble – plus, how they once covered up one of Phil’s unwise AND illegal incidents…

[Read Secret Agents on Popbitch]

What is it about the This Morning set that inspires bouts of young runner shagging? Schofield is by no means the first. One ITV presenter was famous in-house for getting caught in flagrante with a young work experience girl in the studio’s fire escape. (The boss at the time had him exiled to a far-flung regional channel to keep it all hushed up.)

When Phillip Schofield was a tender young teen – working as a lowly teaboy at the BBC, trying to break into showbiz himself – he too attracted the attentions of a famous older broadcaster. Someone who gave Schofe his very first bit of Radio 1 airtime.

Jimmy Savile.

In his 2020 autobiography, Schofe recounts the piece of valuable advice Savile once imparted to him. Advice he sadly failed to heed: “Be nice to everyone on the way up; you’ll need them all on the way down.”

FYI: Phil offered to buy Savile a drink for this, but Savile turned him down – saying that it “wouldn’t be appropriate”.

It isn’t just Schofield’s agents who’d run interference with the press to keep unflattering coverage of him at bay. Head honchos at ITV weren’t above getting their hands dirty either.

It wasn’t uncommon for tabloid reporters who wrote anything even mildly critical of Phil and Holly to find This Morning’s editor Martin Frizell raging in their inboxes, personally emailing the bylined hacks to complain direct.

If the story he disliked appeared in the Daily Mirror, he particularly enjoyed making thinly veiled threats that he would nuke the Mirror’s association with the Pride Of Britain Awards if they didn’t change their tone. While some journalists and editors did indeed alter headlines and stories post-publication to placate him, others just blocked his email address and let him whinge into the void.

Given his own HR history, you might have wondered what in the everloving fuck gave Dan Wootton the almighty nerve to start running his mouth about Phillip Schofield’s behaviour. But runner-lover romance is something of an area of expertise for Wootton.

At the start of his career, back in his native New Zealand, Dan was the much younger lover of a morning TV presenter, for whom he was a junior researcher too. He was 21; she, Lisa Manning, was 40. And, much like Schofield, Lisa ended up leaving the show amid some fevered gossip in the local papers.

It too ended badly. She dumped Dan after falling for actor John Rhys-Davies (a.k.a. Sallah from Indiana Jones/Gimli from Lord Of The Rings) – and they remain married to this day.

Remember when the Jimmy Savile scandal broke in 2012 and Max Clifford was one of the first out of the gate to start giving his two cents on it all – only to be revealed later as one of the dirtiest perverts going?

We recommend you keep an eye on some of the people who are shouting loudest about this Phillip Schofield scandal – as some of the papers and networks who are making the most noise, predictably, have the most to cover up themselves. There’s barely an organisation going that hasn’t got a similar skeleton in its closet.

Eamonn Holmes’ reasons for sticking the knife into Schofe are pretty obvious. The two have a long-standing professional rivalry – so the glee he’s taking in all of this is purely business. However, the irony hasn’t been lost on many that GB News isn’t exactly the safest pulpit from which to spout this sort of stuff.

As well as the stories we’ve previously run about the harassment that the station’s on-screen ‘talent’ have subjected underlings to (both at GB News and at former jobs), there are now a lot of ex-colleagues getting rather energised about the hypocrisy on show, re: toxic atmospheres and abuse in the workplace.

It looks primed to blow up sooner rather than later, but we don’t imagine Eamonn will regret his decision either way. As he says: abuse has to be called out.

Tottenham Hotspur fans, bitter at having no manager, no director of football and no European football next year, have been wondering just what the hell chairman Daniel Levy has been doing all this time. Well, we can ease their minds. He’s working tirelessly on it.

Earlier this week, the club’s stadium played host to Beyoncé in concert. Among the VIPs spotted enjoying the gig were Jay Z, Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Dua Lipa and Frank Ocean – to name a few. In fact, the whole of the Director’s Box were up and dancing throughout the gig. All except for one person.

Daniel Levy, who was sat in his usual seat, phone glued to his ear throughout the entire concert.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody at all, former FT journalist Seb Payne has got himself shortlisted as a possible Conservative candidate for Selby and Ainsty, for when incumbent Nigel Adams stands down at the next election.

He’s not exactly kept his allegiances on this front hugely secret. A few years ago, he caused a lot of chatter among lobby journalists when the FT ran a series of big political interviews and commissioned Seb to interview Jacob Rees Mogg. The photographer who was assigned to grab a couple of pictures was surprised when they turned up to the Rees Mogg household to find Seb already there, wearing a dressing gown. It turned out he’d decided to make a weekend out of the whole thing and enjoy a little sleepover.

The future for Vice UK journalists after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy is looking increasingly bleak. Despite all of the C-suite managing to cream off six and seven-figure salaries while company finances were circling the toilet, loads of journalists in the UK are now being handed paltry statutory redundancy packages.

Staff realised money was tight when they took away the coffee machines at the start of the year, but this week they removed the watercoolers too – leaving them nowhere to congregate to bitch about the execs…

Want to buy the bar from Cheers?
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Congratulations to: This year’s Popbitch Fantasy Football League winner, Archer’s Bowen Aribo (who narrowly beat Football Friends and Benanarahma). Thanks once again to Kerching for managing the PB League.

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