‘I refuse to be a victim': Anne Diamond on surviving her son's death, a brutal divorce and now cancer

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3 days ago

Anne Diamond is passing judgment on the sofa on which she is sitting in a private room at Le Manoir, the Oxfordshire restaurant and hotel close to where she lives, run by her friend Raymond Blanc. 'It's got a nice firm cushion. But yours is too soft. You can't get out of it very easily,' she says.
She knows a bit about sofas, of course. 'The thing to be aware of when you are sitting on one, particularly on TV, is your knees. It's all the camera can see. So when I did breakfast TV I would always wear skirts that covered them up.'
I almost feel as though I am in the studio with Diamond, on an episode of Good Morning Britain in the 1980s as she says this. She has the same sparkly girl-next-door cheer at 70 that she had as an astonishingly young 26-year-old in 1979, when she breezed onto our screens and helped kickstart a golden age of daytime television. Immediately, her brightly coloured persona and effervescent warmth marked a break with the twin-set-and-pearls era of previous female television presenters such as Jan Leeming.
Instead she was just like us, chatting to celebrities as though she'd known them forever, sharing photographs on air of her first pregnancy scan and eventually ditching the posh frocks for knitwear – albeit extraordinary 1980s creations with shoulder pads and sequins. 'I figured out for myself that wearing ostentatious designer clothes didn't work,' she says. 'People didn't like that very much. So I wore jumpers.' She's wearing one today, in fact, under a smart white suit. 'A lot of TV at the time was still pretty stuffy. But Good Morning Britain didn't have any airs and graces.'
We've met the week after the programme with which she is indelibly associated – although by 1992 she and her co-presenter Nick Owen had jumped ship to front a new BBC show, Good Morning with Anne and Nick – has descended into turmoil. Headlines are screaming 'ITV bloodbath' as the channel announces 220 job cuts to its daytime schedule, including Good Morning Britain and Loose Women, on which Diamond appeared as a regular panellist between 2016 and 2018. What on earth is going wrong?
'It is failing to connect,' says Diamond in the sort of voice that implies this would never have happened on her watch. 'It's become terribly showbiz but in a lowest-common-denominator way. I find it difficult to watch because it's all Coronation Street stars.' Nor does she think it's newsy enough. 'It should have more of a news magazine format. Instead they've gone for the quick buck, which hasn't worked, because their viewing figures are much lower than they say. Both ITV and the BBC [whose flagship show is BBC Breakfast] have massaged the figures to make them look higher than they are.'
Officially both programmes have around five million viewers. Either way, it's a far cry from Diamond's days, when Good Morning Britain would regularly attract an audience of around 14 million. Diamond realised the show had become a fixture of the cultural landscape when she met Paul McCartney at a function at the Dorchester.
'People had said a morning breakfast show would never work because people in Britain didn't watch TV at breakfast. But we quickly proved them wrong. At the Dorchester there was an enormous crowd around Paul and [his wife] Linda, but Paul turned around and said, 'Annie Diamond!' And I said, 'You know me?' And he said, 'Well, we have our cornflakes every morning and we watch breakfast television when you are on.' I found that stunning.'
The key to Diamond's appeal was that she never pretended to be anyone other than who she was. Parts of Britain couldn't always keep up. When, in 1987, she announced she was pregnant with her then-boyfriend Mike Hollingsworth (they married in 1989 and divorced 10 years later) and that she planned to keep on working, the tabloid press erupted.
'It didn't occur to me that because I was pregnant I shouldn't be on screen,' she says. 'But the papers screamed that I was the most famous unmarried mother in Britain, which my mother didn't like, particularly. Some people clearly found it revolting that a pregnant woman should be presenting morning news.'
Yet viewers were delighted, sending in well wishes and knitted booties by the bucket load. It was testament to how much Diamond had inserted herself into their lives. 'People almost felt as though they knew us. The trick with that sort of show is to create a family of presenters that people can become fond of. We also had a keep-fit spot, cartoons and lots of cookery – things to keep the whole family watching.' She thinks the steep decline in viewing figures on breakfast TV is not simply a case of audiences turning to streaming formats. 'It's just not family-orientated anymore. It's all about sex. It's like the Daily Mail [sidebar] of shame. And that's a mistake.'
Is the format salvageable? 'I'm tempted to say yes, but I would make it more him-and-her on the sofa. I certainly don't know whether paying big money to big stars is the way to do it. I love the BBC, but the culture there at the moment is c--p; it's got an awful lot wrong with it. They allow some big stars to be on every programme and to dominate the channel, yet there is lots of young talent underneath that should be being brought through.'
At this point, the name Gary Lineker inevitably pops up. The Match of the Day presenter left the BBC last weekend after two decades when the corporation finally lost patience over his use of social media to promote certain causes, including Palestine. 'If they had handled Lineker better and curbed his tweeting years ago, he'd still be on television,' says Diamond, who has great admiration for Lineker as a presenter.
'But it was the same with Huw Edwards. The BBC didn't handle it until it became such a crisis, the only way out was to get rid of him. That is bad management.' Does she think the corporation is scared of their big stars?
'If so, I can't think why. There's no excuse for why they've allowed them to become too big to handle. Instead, they let everything grow into a full-blown, front-page crisis.'
She points to the cuts to regional broadcasting as a case in point. Diamond started out as a rookie journalist in regional newspapers on the south coast before joining BBC West in Bristol in the late 1970s. 'If you come up through regional news, it teaches you a respect for the people you're broadcasting to,' she points out.
'But I think there are a lot of broadcasters nowadays – producers, directors, executives, particularly, and presenters – who don't understand that there are people watching and listening. It's important you get your words right.'
Does she agree with Mishal Husain, who, on departing Radio 4's Today programme in April, argued that 'personality-focused journalism doesn't have to be bombastic', a comment that was widely seen as a criticism of some of the changes to Today?
'Yes. You have presenters who have been allowed to get carried away with their own sense of importance.'
Diamond, the middle of three girls, grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. Her father, who held a physics degree, was recruited by the Ministry of Defence at the outbreak of the Second World War to help develop radar at a hastily established base inside Malvern College – where the pupils were relocated to Eton and Harrow. It was there he met Diamond's mother, who worked as a secretary on the same project. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, she neither knew who she was working for nor, for many years afterwards, what her husband's role involved. Diamond only began to understand her father's importance – he had worked on miniaturising radar to fit individual aircraft – when several eminent scientists attended his funeral in 1997.
After the war ended, bits of information about the radar project started dripping out. At the time, however, the level of secrecy was so high that even the residents of Malvern had no idea who these young men (and several women) in civilian clothing were.
'They were very suspicious,' says Diamond. 'They spat at the scientists [around 2,000 had come to Malvern] and sent them white feathers because they were convinced they must be conscientious objectors. It must have been terrible for my father, because all he wanted to do was fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. And yet he was ordered to become a designated worker instead.'
Diamond made a documentary, Anne Diamond: VE Day and the Secret War, about her father for Viking TV, and is working on developing it into a series. She is keen for more stories about the scientists who worked at Malvern, and has set up an online campaign, Radar Families, in which she hopes to compile a social history of this forgotten chapter of Second World War history.
Some of the stories are eye-popping – one includes an RAF test plane carrying cavity magnetrons (a high-powered vacuum tube used in early radar) crashing, and the onboard scientist having to clamber over the dead bodies of RAF pilots to get to the cavity magnetron before the emergency services arrived. I suggest to her that the subject would make an excellent film. 'Yes, well, it's probably not as exciting as a 'shoot them down' war movie. But those men were heroic. Malvern is the forgotten Bletchley Park. Without radar we wouldn't have won the war.'
Beneath Diamond's shiny forthright sincerity there are nerves of steel. She has been through some dreadful times. In 1998 she separated from Hollingsworth after it was revealed he had had an affair; it later transpired he had been unfaithful throughout their marriage. Once again the red tops had a field day.
'There was a picture of me going into work at LBC, where I was hosting the radio breakfast show at the time, and they took a picture of me arriving at the studios at three in the morning,' she says. 'I looked very dishevelled, because you do at three in the morning. That made the front pages, with the headline 'Has Anne Diamond lost her sparkle'? The next day, my mother and sister, who was a hairdresser, arrived and sorted out my appearance. I remember my mother saying: 'Don't be weak, be strong. Weak is not a good look.'' And that helped? 'Yes, yes it did. But it was brutalising. You sit at the end of your bed and you feel, 'Cripes, who am I?' Because for so long I'd known where I was in life. I was a wife and mother.'
But that heartache couldn't compare to what had happened seven years earlier. In 1991, she and Hollingsworth lost their third son, Sebastian, to sudden infant death syndrome (also known as cot death) at just four and a half months old. They already had two older sons, Oliver and James, and went on to have two more, Jake and Connor. Thirty years on, Diamond's grief remains raw. 'You don't get over the loss. By the time they are four and a half months, you've built the rest of their lives in your mind. I knew he was going to be a rugby player because he had that sort of physique. He was such a part of the family.'
The attitude from the medical establishment at the time only intensified her grief. It was, at best, indifferent; at worst, misogynistic. '[Sebastian's death] was dismissed as a gynaecological problem. The attitude was very much 'Motherhood is a gynaecological issue, and if you lose babies, you lose babies. You simply have to cheer up and have another one.' But to me, it was the biggest tragedy of my life, and the idea that I just had to accept it was shocking.'
So she refused to do so. She badgered away at the pathologist and the coroner for information, to no avail. 'I was just angry. I was angry at Sebastian for not crying out. And I was angry at the people who came to take his body away. It was three days before they did the post-mortem. Any trace of anything useful to know would have been lost by then.'
Yet the Department of Health already knew at that point that putting children to sleep on their backs dramatically reduced the risk of cot death. A research project in New Zealand had been launched, encouraging all parents to put their children to sleep on their backs, and the government had agreed to allow a group of newborn babies in Bristol to be used as a control group. On discovering this, Diamond was consumed by a fury that has barely abated. 'I was incensed. Terribly hurt. I still think that if I'd been told [the advice from New Zealand], Sebastian would be alive today.'
She persuaded a group of experts to meet the then-health minister, Virginia Bottomley ('the health secretary William Waldegrave never bothered to see me') and convinced Bottomley that they needed a television campaign. Initially, she had to battle just to get Bottomley to listen. 'I later gathered from the medical experts that, when they talked to the health minister without me present, she expressed her doubts about my veracity because I was a bereaved mother and just a TV presenter.'
The resulting campaign, Back to Sleep, remains the most successful health campaign in television history, reducing cot deaths from 2,500 a year to around 300. In 2023, Diamond was awarded an OBE for services to public health. She becomes teary, and I feel a lump in my throat too. 'Going to the palace was wonderful. To hold a medal and think, 'That's for Sebastian.' I'm very proud of him.'
The day after Sebastian's funeral, The Sun published a photograph of Diamond and Hollingsworth carrying his coffin. In 2011, Diamond cited this as evidence of excessive press intrusion during the Leveson Inquiry, accusing Rupert Murdoch of running a campaign against her after she had challenged him in the 1980s over his papers' disregard for the private lives of celebrities. She also told the inquiry that The Sun had offered her nanny £30,000 for a story and had infiltrated the hospital shortly after she gave birth to Oliver by impersonating a doctor.
Today, she is a bit more sanguine about the impact of all this. 'I had fame when fame was very difficult to handle, and you had to be prepared that every single thing you did made a bloody picture in the papers. You knew you were always being scrutinised every moment of your life and that reporters were going through your rubbish. So I am fanatical about shredding everything.'But I know what sort of stress constantly being in court does to you, and what it means to become obsessed with how unfair the press is being,' she continues.
'That's why I worry about Prince Harry [Diamond knew his mother, Princess Diana, well during the 1990s]. I worry about the fact that he is obsessed with getting justice in a world in which maybe you can't. And actually, the best thing you can do is just get very good security guards and live behind a high fence if that's what you can afford.'
She is, I suggest, a rare voice of support for Harry. She agrees the British public have lost sympathy for him. 'He needs his mum, but then, she might have become obsessed as well. He needs someone to say, 'Enjoy your best life'. The trouble is he hasn't got anything else to think about or do.'
Diamond never had that luxury, for which she is grateful. She had four children to bring up, a career to manage. Thanks to the influence of her 'very pragmatic' mother, who sounds tremendous, she has always simply got on with things. In 2023 she announced she had undergone a double mastectomy, after being diagnosed with breast cancer – she is now cancer free. 'I was never scared. And I knew it was treatable. I just thought, 'Right, lop the breast off, if that's what you have to do. Just get rid of it.' You have to accept that your body is a bit like an old car, and that it needs a lot of work and you have to look after it.'
It's because of her health that she doesn't want another mainstream presenting job. She currently presents the breakfast show on GB News at the weekend, 'which is just right'. She dislikes some of the critical conversations around GB News. 'Terms such as 'woke' and 'far-Right' are becoming almost meaningless,' she says. 'To call somebody far-Right just because they have a worry about immigration is not fair, because it's a simple human worry. It's all too easy to label people.'
She is chuffed the show has been once again nominated for the Television and Radio Industries Club best news show, having won it twice before. 'That must annoy [traditional broadcasters].'
Diamond never dated after splitting with Hollingsworth. 'It put me off dating forever. Honestly, I've been there and done that. I've never been interested, or never allowed myself to be interested. But I'm quite happy where I am. I defend the right of people to live like that and to think, 'Actually, I don't need a man.' Throughout my life I've survived because I've refused to think of myself as a victim.'
Her resilience is humbling. She is quite the most astonishing person, a born survivor. 'I'm the oldest presenter on GB News. I'm very lucky to be still on air. People keep saying to me, 'Why don't you retire?' I know I should, but at the moment, I've got it good.'
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