Carol McGiffin has taken aim at former This Morning co-hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby again, this time saying things are ‘dysfunctional’ behind-the-scenes of their show.
First appearing as a Loose Women panellist back in 2000, Carol, 63, was a regular presenter until leaving the show earlier this year.
In recent weeks she’s called out her former employer ITV, and now she’s turned her attention to the broadcaster’s breakfast programme and its stars.
‘They go on about the “ITV Daytime Family” being cosy best mates, all caring and kind, but in my opinion it’s about as dysfunctional as they come,’ she wrote in her column for Best magazine.
‘It’s cut-throat, competitive and ruthless, and can be quite unpleasant, and as soon as your face doesn’t fit anymore, or you disagree with their narrative, you’re out the door.’
Last week Carol looked back at a 2010 appearance on This Morning during which she had been promoting her memoir Oh, Carol!
‘He wasn’t very nice to be honest,’ she said during a segment on GB News when speaking about Schofield.
‘He treated me like, “Oh another Loose Woman with another book.” I kind of get that, but he was so not interested it was a struggle.
‘I was giggling, actually laughing because I couldn’t believe he was being so b****y rude.’
She later added that she’d heard a ‘lot of stories’ about Schofield ‘being rather unpleasant to a lot of people, especially to a lot of people who were further down the food chain in TV’.
In a statement to Metro.co.uk an ITV spokesperson said the broadcaster and the This Morning team were ‘incredibly proud of the twelve and a half hours of award winning live television they produce five days a week’.
‘It takes a huge team of people to all pull together to make the award winning, much loved programme which each week reaches 4.4million loyal viewers.
‘It’s a fast paced environment turning around a daily show that covers live and ever changing issues. We have robust mechanisms in place for complaints to be raised and those that are, are appropriately investigated.’
They added: ‘What we’re hearing from the This Morning team is that they just don’t recognise the picture that some are painting about the show.’
McGiffin has also previously claimed the Loose Women cast had an inkling something was going on between Schofield and the young runner he had an ‘unwise but not illegal affair with’.
Following Schofield’s confession that he had lied to his bosses and colleagues about the nature of the relationship, ITV said they had conducted an investigation at the time, but ‘were not provided with, and did not find, any evidence of a relationship beyond hearsay and rumour’.
But when speakng to Dan Wootton on GB News, Carol said that it was ‘obvious something wasn’t right and ‘everybody knew.’
‘I knew there was something wrong. Everybody knew there was something wrong, and when people around ITV say “Oh, we didn’t know anything about it”, you did. Everybody did. Everybody knew.’
The young runner moved from This Morning to Loose Women in ‘early 2019’.
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV1.
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