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I WON’T BE DERIDEDASA HAS-BEEN
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Eamonn Holmes’s default mode is affable. He is cheery to waiters and barmen – he used to work in a pub – and his Northern Irish bonhomie extends to everyone from the lift attendant to the doorman at the London hotel where we meet.
The veteran TV presenter, who recently started his new job as co-host of GB News Breakfast, is so resolutely unstarry he asks everyone their names and takes an unfeigned interest in what they do for a living. Ratings for the show, which he co-hosts with his old friend and Sky colleague Isabel Webster, are rising. Reviews are positive. Viewers, it would seem, are warming to their partnership.
Eamonn’s talent is to make his job – chatting to the nation as it emerges from sleep and informing it of the day’s news – seem effortless, but he is modest about his skills. ‘TV is a great job, but I’ve never felt it’s a real job. It’s just made to look and sound difficult by people who want to make themselves seem important,’ he says.
The oblique sideswipe could well be aimed at the unnamed cadre of executives who plotted his exodus from ITV’S This Morning after 15 years: both he and his wife Ruth Langsford were relieved of their weekly presentation duties last year. He remains bemused about the reason for this. ‘I’ve really no idea why,’ he says. ‘No one explained anything to me. I’m all for TV companies being able to choose who works for them, but it would be nice if you were told why you were going.
‘They’re sly. They didn’t want to announce that I’d been dropped because it would adversely affect audience figures, so they made it look as if I’d walked away from them rather than the other way round. They had a chat with my agent and announced that I was going to GB News when they’d done no more than ask if I’d be interested in joining them.’
He believes ITV, in its clamour to meet ‘diversity’ targets, was responsible for a snide suggestion that he was ‘too male, pale and stale’ for the show. At this, he bridles. ‘I’m not going to have myself derided as some sort of has-been. I may be male and pale but I’m still at the top of my game.’ He also points to double standards within the channel’s hierarchy. ‘When are they going to start being diverse with their management? These decisions are made by middle-aged white managers. The diversity is only on screen. It’s hypocritical.’
He has a dig, too, at the daytime ITV execs who clamoured to offer medical assistance when he had a stye – visible to his audience – yet 11 months ago, when he was forced to use a walking stick to assuage pain from three slipped discs in his back, ‘No one asked after me or said, “How’s your back and your leg?”’
Today, though still using the stick, he looks lean and fit, the twinkle intact, the zeal for the job he loves unabated. And over at GB News, there’s an easy rapport between him and his new TV ‘wife’ Isabel. Viewing figures for their brand of ‘wokefree’ news have reached a record high since Eamonn, 62, joined in January. Both rival shows on BBC and ITV are sufficiently worried to be running trailers promoting their morning programmes.
‘I’m just here to do the job I’ve been doing for more than 35 years and it feels comfortable,’ he says of his new role. ‘I’ve genuinely moved on. I have purpose and
direction. We’re there to inform and educate and I don’t care if it’s GB News or The Wheel, it should also be entertaining. There has to be energy and I want to present the news in a human way, to make it accessible and relevant. But rather than being depressed about wokeism I’m mildly entertained. People take themselves very seriously. Their ability to see the ridiculous has totally deserted them.’
He is resolutely egalitarian; suspicious of the educated elite. ‘I’ve always found it quite hard to be dictated to by posh people. Why do you need a degree from Oxford or Cambridge to do television? Most people who have, don’t do it very well. TV is about cartels, certain agents, certain presenters,’ he says, and I wonder if one of the presenters he’s talking about might be ITV This Morning’s Phillip Schofield.
In 2019 Phillip slighted Ruth, 61, by cutting her short in the middle of a trailer for Loose Women. This rankles with Eamonn. ‘Phillip is renowned for snubbing people. He’s very passive-aggressive,’ says Eamonn. ‘It’s up to Ruth to say how she felt about it, but I was feeling a little hurt for her.
‘No one would have snubbed me like that. I have a good Belfast street fighter in me. I wouldn’t be shy of saying, “Excuse me, I think you’ll find I was speaking.” I would be direct. I don’t go for presenters who think they have a special privilege or aura or influence.’
Allied to the emollient Irish charm, there’s a vein of steel running through him. He grew up in Belfast in a close-knit Catholic family, one of Leonard and Josie Holmes’s five sons. His dad was a carpet-fitter and money was short. Eamonn’s first family home was a two-up, two-down with an outside lavatory and no bathroom.
His teenage years coincided with the Troubles, when bombs and shootings were the cacophonous soundtrack to his schooldays. Although he got used to living on a knife-edge, he still looks back on his upbringing with warmth; his love of his home city, and the parents who raised him, undimmed. But he remembers the all-pervasive violence: a shopping centre bombing, being held with his brothers at gunpoint in their own garden, a firebomb on a bus.
‘I was taking the bus to my Catholic grammar school one day and it was hijacked by masked men who burnt it down. I remember running up the school drive, late, and the head was reading matins. I said, “Excuse me Father, my bus was hijacked,” and he said, “In detention!” No excuse for lateness was acceptable. Today I would have been sent to the sanatorium and had psychiatrists attached to me,’ he smiles wryly. ‘But where I come from cancel culture was a bullet in the head. That was the reality of life in Belfast. People I went to school with died or were shot.’
He’s recently seen Kenneth Branagh’s Bafta-nominated film Belfast, which chronicles a childhood they both shared – they lived close to each other as children, but on opposite sides of the sectarian divide – and he recalls a conversation he had with
‘Diversity is only on screen at ITV. It’s hypocritical’
Branagh at the film’s premiere. There were, he believes, anachronisms in the film that jarred with him.
‘I said to Kenneth, “I’m just observing, but we didn’t have an Indian corner shop or a black teacher or Chinese pupils in our classrooms in 1969. Belfast wasn’t London.” The journalist in me was saying it was historically inaccurate. I was simply asking, “What’s the truth?” and Kenneth said, “I had to do it for the funding.”’
He isn’t grinding any political axe – he is resolutely non-partisan, which is part of his appeal – but he doesn’t balk at pointing out such anomalies and other inequities he regards as wrong. He is compassionate about those in need in the UK, supporting Belfast homeless charities and foodbanks, but unafraid of voicing his view that charity should begin at home. ‘To be giving money round the world, unless it’s to help victims of disasters like floods and earthquakes, when you have serious food poverty
at home and a creaking social care system seems wrong.’
He is outspoken on other topics, too, and has a keen contempt for toadies. He says neither he nor Ruth are ‘good at kissing bottoms’.
‘Sometimes it is really quite pathetic the way some people suck up to influential people. Ruth and I have to genuinely like people to socialise with them.’
He speaks of Ruth and his kids with jokey affection; the extended Holmes family are a happy, supportive bunch. Eamonn has three kids, Declan, 33 – who, with wife Jenny, last year presented him with his beloved grandchild, Emilia – as well as Rebecca, 30, and Niall, 28, all from his first marriage to Gabrielle. Ruth and Eamonn, who have been together for over two decades, have a son Jack, 19.
Eamonn’s dad died at 64 of a heart attack but mum Josie, 93, is still going strong, ‘and the other day she asked
me, “Why did you leave Belfast? None of my other sons felt the need to.” All my brothers live within a twomile radius of her. Mum would be delighted if I was assistant manager of the Co-op round the corner.
‘The one thing guaranteed when we all get together is laughter. The kids are very irreverent; not remotely respectful. They tease me about my incompetence with technology. Life is so complicated these days, isn’t it? Ruth says, “We used to have a remote control for the telly and just put it on or off,” but now everything is problematic and you have to worry about wi-fi codes and the internet. The kids are very good at helping us with all of that.’
Their marriage is a solid one, bonded by the joshing and humour we’ve seen on screen. He’s an inveterate legpuller. ‘People say, “Poor Ruth, having to put up with him,” but I assure you, she’s more than capable of looking after herself.’
He has a devoted female following, too. I know this because I bought a notebook online with the inscription, ‘Sorry I wasn’t listening I was thinking about Eamonn Holmes’ on its cover, to take to our interview – I thought it would tickle him. Several female friends expressed an eagerness to accompany me to the chat, too.
When he posts a photo of the notebook on Instagram after our meeting, it garners over 10,000 likes. A slew of his friends comment. ‘I need a copy,’ writes TV presenter Vanessa Feltz. Actress Donna Air asks, ‘Isn’t everyone thinking about you?’
One tabloid even writes a story about it. What have I started? And more pertinently, what is it about Eamonn Holmes? The lilting Irish brogue is irresistible. He’s a charmer. And, of course, he is genuinely interested in people. I wonder how Ruth
reacts to his fan club. ‘She’ll say, “If they could only see you struggling to put on your socks in the morning,”’ he laughs. He still has mobility problems associated with his back.
He met Ruth in the mid-1990s. ‘For me, it was love at first sight. I tease her still that she always regarded herself as too sophisticated for me. She’d say, “Daddy’s in the Army,” and I got the impression he was a Brigadier-general, but it turned out that he ran the motor pool,’ he laughs. ‘She just sounded posh as the Army paid for her to go to private school.’
He says her life is full – her fashion line on the shopping channel QVC is its secondbiggest brand – but concedes ‘it’s been a tough few years’. Ruth’s sister, Julia, took her own life in 2019 after suffering long-term mental health problems. ‘She was her only sibling and they were very close. I’m proud she’s been able to take comfort and solace in work.’
I wonder if he worries about his own mortality; after all, his dad died when he was just two years older than Eamonn is now. He confesses to a degree of ‘maudlin Irish fatalism’ but also admits he is in no way ready to slow down – as part of his GB News contract, he’s due to host his own talk show. He’s still deliberating over the format. Should it be chats with famous people, or ordinary people whose lives are interesting? He’d like to know what his viewers would like.
And he admits that his daily 2.30am alarm is not, after more than three decades in breakfast TV, remotely appealing. So perhaps a later slot would be welcome? ‘Yes, a show for GB News that began at 6pm would be very nice indeed,’ he smiles. And I’m sure his fans would follow him, morning or evening. Eamonn hosts GB News Breakfast with Isabel Webster, weekdays from 6am-9.30am on GB News (Sky 515, Freeview 236, Virgin Media 626).
‘Schofield is renowned for snubbing people’