“It feels very strange indeed sitting here without Phil.” Bless her. Determinedly, brightly, Holly went on reading from her script, like Doris Day cast as Medea. Instead we got more of the War of the Sofa. Can we have some real news please? Like the war in the Ukraine, perhaps? We’ve had over a week of the Phillip Schofield business, and my overwhelming emotion has been one of “so what?”.Īs far as we are aware, a television presenter had a legal if foolhardy fling, and tried to cover it up. She asked us if we were OK? No, I wasn’t. Never has she been more trivial, more pointless or self-righteous, as hard and empty as a cut glass bowl, and as easy to see through. “Right, deep breath.” As openers go it wasn’t quite up there with Walter Cronkite’s announcement of the assassination of JFK, but we felt for her, we really did. She looked like an ingenue who has just discovered the world is a wicked place and that people have something called sex. Her wardrobe was also equal to the task: a schoolgirl white blouse with severe buttons and a high neck. Her eyes were wide and brimming, her cheeks blushed to peony, her lip gloss a trembling bubble gum pink.

She had applied her maquillage with care. Ms Willoughby, the nation’s sweetheart, who had returned from holding down a beach in the Algarve, was ready for her personal D-day. Is it something to do with Brexit, they must have been wondering in the foreign offices of Washington, Paris and Berlin? The rest of the world must think we are mad.

Its collective breath cannot have been so bated since Neville Chamberlain announced to the nation in September 1939 that Britain was at war with Germany.Īt any rate, the executives at This Morning had chosen to give Phillip Schofield’s consensual affair with a male colleague, and his subsequent fall from the sofa, the gravity and import of a national disaster.

The nation waited with bated breath for Holly’s message.

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