‘I have brought myself down’: Phillip Schofield says his career is over

Phillip Schofield has said his career in television is over after he “brought [himself] down” after lying about his affair with a younger man.

The former This Morning presenter, 61, resigned from ITV last week after admitting to his “biggest sorriest secret”, an “unwise but not illegal relationship” with a man who is now in his mid-20s.

In an interview with BBC News, his first since leaving ITV, Schofield said: “I have brought myself down. I am done. I have to talk about television in the past tense, which breaks my heart.”

He said that if his daughters had not supported him last week, he “wouldn’t be here”. “They’ve guarded me and won’t let me out of their sight,” he said.

Despite finding the interview distressing, he felt moved to speak “because there is an innocent person here who didn’t do anything wrong”.

He added: “I just have to say, ‘stop with him. OK with me. But stop with him, leave him alone now.’”

Schofield’s reference is to his former lover, whom he met when the man was a 15-year-old boy at drama school and whom he followed on Twitter “totally innocent[ly]” after a friend told him the boy was a fan.

He denied flirting with the boy and said he was “hardly” in touch which him other than to offer career advice and give him work experience at the studio, until the man was 20 or 21, and had begun working at ITV. Schofield was married at the time.

He said there was “absolutely not” a moment of initial sexual attraction, and replied “no, god, no” to the question of whether he had a sexual relationship when the boy was underage.

The affair began a few months after the man started working on the show, Schofield said. “We’d become mates. In my dressing room one day, something happened, which obviously I will regret forever, for him and for me – mostly him.”

He said nobody else on the team was aware of the affair, including his co-presenter, Holly Willoughby. “This has been the cataclysm of the lie. It starts in the denial and then the rumours started, you lie, you’ve had a workplace fling and you lie about it,” he said.

The affair was consensual, he said, and he did not consider it an abuse of power, but “a very grave error”. “It was my fault. I was older, I should have known better, I shouldn’t have done it.”

Schofield said his downfall was the result of the lie getting “too big for both of us”, and crossing over from online speculation to mainstream news. “All of that consistent bad press – it wouldn’t stop, it just carried on … It continues and it’s relentless and it’s day after day after day after day.

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