Former GMTV presenter Fiona Phillips has weighed into the feud between Lorraine Kelly and Esther McVey – and accused the later of lying.
Earlier this week, Lorraine appeared to throw shade at the Conservative politician during a conversation on Good Morning Britain.
The two worked together on breakfast show GMTV in the 1990s, so GMB’s Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid were eager to ask Lorraine about her former colleague, who had been on the show earlier.
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The co-hosts linked to Lorraine to find out what was coming up on her show later that morning, and Susanna asked Lorraine: “Do you remember Esther McVey from her GMTV days?”
The Scottish presenter replied, “Yep. Yes, I do” and quickly moved on, but Piers persisted: “So you got on with Esther then, Lorraine?”
She told him, “I don’t remember, love, I don’t remember at all. It was an awful long time ago” and Piers joked, “If looks could kill she’d be six feet under.”
Things turned frostier when, during a press conference about the Tory leadership race, Esther was quizzed about her time on GMTV with Lorraine.
She claimed she and the Scottish presenter once shared a dressing room, and that the supposed feud started when Esther was promoted to a permanent presenting job with Eamonn Holmes.
Lorraine responded to Esther’s claims on GMB on Tuesday (June 11).
Piers showed her a clip from the press conference and Lorraine admitted she was baffled.
Piers asked: “So [is she] basically inferring there you lost in a kind of love war over Eamonn?”
Lorraine replied, “Well, who wouldn’t want to fight over Eamonn Holmes?” before adding, “No, there is no battle. I’m baffled by that though because I had my own show from 1992 and I don’t actually think she joined until five years later.”
The plot has since thickened, as broadcaster Fiona Phillips told the Mail Online that McVey was the real problem and accused her of ‘lying’.
She told the publication: “Esther said that she had been promoted. But that is an absolute lie. She was only on there because she was covering my maternity leave.
“During which I was asked several times by colleagues pleading to know when I was coming back. Esther was never presenting there permanently. She was at Channel Five I think at the time and she was jobbing, just trying to get work.
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“But I don’t know because I wasn’t there. She said she had been promoted. But she wasn’t even there to be promoted. You don’t embellish your CV.”
ED! has contacted Esther McVey’s reps for comment.
In her Sun column, Lorraine explained that her somewhat “terse” demeanor on GMB was more to do with McVey’s career as a politician than anything personal between them from their GMTV days.
She wrote that she abhors McVey’s stance on LGBT rights and called her “an example of everything that is wrong” with Britain’s “toxic political landscape”.
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