Eamonn Holmes: ‘Where I’m from, cancel culture was getting a bullet in your head’

It’s been a difficult year for 62-year-old presenter Eamonn Holmes. In March, the veteran broadcaster dislocated his pelvis. In April, an MRI scan showed three slipped discs, and Holmes revealed he was in so much pain he couldn’t sleep. Barely six months later, in September, news reports suggested Holmes’s This Morning job presenting with wife Ruth Langsford was in danger as his editor Martin Frizell began a reshuffle - and tabloids delighted in speculating on a rift with fellow presenter Phillip Scofield.

Then, in October, Holmes caught Covid, despite being double jabbed, and in December he finally left ITV. All this and he’s not walked properly in 10 months despite physiotherapy, rehab and steroid injections. 

So how pleasing for Holmes, that when he arrived last month for the first day of his new job at GB News, it was to a standing ovation, showing how much industry colleagues approved of his appointment to their ranks.  Indeed, about halfway through our interview, recounting this moment, he is almost overcome with emotion. 

“It was actually a beautiful thing that happened to me,” Holmes begins. “Maybe even slightly emotional…” he pauses, takes a breath… resets… and carries on. “I came through the door and shouted, hello everybody, and…” Another pause. “…and they all stood up and applauded me. I got quite emotional because normally I’d be joking about, like, hello it’s Eamonn Holmes, the famous Irish broadcaster, but this day the GB Newsroom stood up and applauded, oh, I got a bit embarrassed… I don’t really know how to put that into words.”

Perhaps he should temper that surprise. GB News needs Holmes badly. (Far, far more than Holmes needed a new start away from ITV.)

After a shaky start that saw low ratings, advertiser boycotts, lead anchor and chairman (then) Andrew Neil quitting and saying working for GB News was worse than being on IRA and jihadi hit-lists, a constant series of on-screen reshuffles - plus the news Rupert Murdoch was hiring Piers Morgan to head up his forthcoming rival service Talk TV - the station cannot benefit enough from Holmes’s expert hand on the tiller. The ratings surge of Nigel Farage’s Donald Trump interview on December 1 was an island in a sea of grim viewing figures. 

But Holmes doesn’t look like a man daunted by the challenge. The Belfastian’s Zoom screensaver is the famous picture of the lad in glad rags on the day he accepted his OBE but when it dissolves and he appears, he looks younger and slimmer than his besuited former self. His white hair is ruffled and spikey, there’s a Manchester United hoodie slung over his chair.

So what will he bring to the channel to help turn things around? Holmes gives a quick nod and rattles away. “It will take us being different from the other channels, more vibrant, more energetic, more involving,” he explains. “It’ll take us genuinely listening to what our audience is saying. Not preaching to them. I was in Belfast over the weekend, and the thing that people were talking about there was not all the things that everybody says we’re talking about, Brexit and Afghanistan. 

“It was the price of heating oil and gas and electricity. My friend's heating bills have gone up 900 per cent. His kids are sitting in coats. I think fuel prices matter to people; I think social care frightens the wits out of people… those sort of things.”

That sounds, I say, less shock-jock Fox News and more old-fashioned, One Nation Conservative. “When people talk about GB News being right of centre, I don’t know - I am either a caring Conservative or I’m quite a right-wing Labour supporter,” he shrugs. “I just care about people, and I want to do the right thing.”

The channel is giving a voice to people, he explains, who feel they’re not being represented.

“There’s things they don’t like but it doesn’t make them prehistoric or racist. So, for those people we give news on Reithian Principles - you inform, you educate, you entertain, because all programming has to be entertaining.” 

That’s a principle Holmes understands perhaps, because - despite decades at the heart of the media - he never seems to have given into the lure of the establishment elite life.  Particularly in the past 15 years of his career, putting in the hours on the sofa next to his wife Ruth, talking about everything from cats to sex to celebrity, Holmes always appears fascinated by the lives of the public at large. 

And while he has bags of empathy - he is irrepressibly curious and generous - at the same time, fashionable “woke” causes are not obviously his hinterland.  So how will he feel when thrust into the heart of the culture wars, where (some) viewers will be hanging on his every word for an opportunity to cancel him? 

Perhaps the answer lies in Holmes’s early life in Belfast, in a Catholic family on a Protestant street, during the 1960s and 1970s. For young Holmes, culture wars didn’t involve keyboards – they involved Armalite rifles and Semtex explosives. When Ian Paisley made inflammatory statements, the Holmes family weren’t worried about getting caught in a Twitter storm – they’d be worried about getting hit by a petrol bomb. 

Nonetheless, Holmes weighs his words. “I think woke is here to stay,” he begins. “It may be different to what a lot of us know or understand but you’ve got to realise it’s very real to the generation that talks about it now. Do I think my opinion is relevant in today’s age? No, and I think the more I give opinions the more people say: ‘What would you know? You’re a dinosaur!’ 

“My job as an interviewer is to ask questions and it’s for my audience to decide. I don’t have an ego that needs people to listen to the world according to Eamonn. I’m not going to sit like Nigel Farage and say I know all the answers. I don’t want to be the judge and jury.”

Then he pauses and suddenly seems weary. He comes from a world, he explains, where opinions could be lethal. “I’ll tell you what cancel culture was in Northern Ireland – it was a bullet in the head.” He gives a sigh. “That’s how you were cancelled. I had a gun held to my head at one o’clock in the morning in a blacked-out street.” 

On another occasion, in 1982, Holmes was hosting the teatime news on Ulster TV in the middle of huge civil disturbances. “I did a pre-recorded interview with Gerry Adams. When he left the studio, the Reverend Ian Paisley comes right through reception. Paisley was surrounded by bodyguards and uniformed police and Adams was surrounded by plain clothes associates. It was like a western. 

“The police put their hands on their guns and the Adams people put their hands inside their jackets. They circled each other and left. Now I see the social media spats and I think you’re all just playing games.”

Holmes’s route to the screen was certainly not along the gilded path of the liberal elite. His dad was a carpet fitter “and a great adventurer,” Holmes recalls with pride. “He would take us in his van everywhere just to give my mum a bit of a break.”

Holmes senior was a master craftsman. “He died on the job, lifting carpets, aged 64. I’m one of five boys and when Dad would get us to help I was useless, he used to end up shouting at me. 

“I was looking for something I could be good at. It turned out that was TV presenting, and I really felt blessed that I could do it well.”

At 16, Holmes left school to take the NCTJ journalism course then moved to Dublin to work on a building magazine. “You could not believe how boring it was,” he shakes his head. “One day my journalism college lecturer phoned me and said, ‘Eamonn, you always wanted to be on TV didn’t you?’  I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Fitzpatrick.’  

“She said, ‘Well Ulster Television are auditioning for farming reporters,’ I said, ‘But Mrs Fitzpatrick I don’t know anything about farming, I’m a city boy born and bred.’”

He goes on: “She said, ‘Rule one of journalism, Eamonn, find out!’ And that’s what I’ve done ever since - whether you’re covering soap operas, politics or horseracing, you find out.”

It’s a style that has served well. From Farming Ulster, he moved to the sports desk then Good Evening Ulster - and became such a local celebrity that Gerry Adams asked for his autograph “for his sister,” Holmes twinkles. “But it made the interview easier.” 

He joined the BBC in 1986, helped launch GMTV in 1993, went to Sky News in 2005 and with his wife Langsford hosted This Morning from 2006. He stayed on air in Ulster on and off – presenting the odd show and staying so involved in local comings and goings that George Best’s family asked him to conduct the football superstar’s funeral ceremony.

“They didn’t want a vicar, they didn’t want a religious service and that was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” he says, then thinks for a minute. “That and introducing Bill Clinton in 1995 for him to say that the war was over. That was an amazing night in Belfast, 100,000 people, Bill Clinton, I still get chills.”

Holmes seems to know everyone in Belfast. He was mates with Jamie Dornan’s gynaecologist dad, recently taken by Covid, and knows the Golden Torso himself from when he was a kid in school. He was invited to Kenneth Branagh’s local premiere for his autobiographical film Belfast.

Watching it, he started to well up over a Judi Dench line – ‘Sure the Irish were made for leaving.’ 

“I never sought to go to England, but I had to,” he explains. “I had the top job in Northern Ireland, everything was going well but I knew at 25 years of age that by the time I’m 31 they’re going to dump me. So I left, and oh my God, my family couldn’t deal with this. None of my brothers left. A month ago – a month ago - my mother phoned me and said ‘I couldn’t get to sleep last night, son. I needed to know - why did you go to England?’”  

For everyone outside your family, though, you’ve lived a fair old life, I say. Perhaps the only time the public has seen him raw and vulnerable was discussing his back pain earlier this year. 

“That was incredible,” he admits. “I actually couldn’t get any sleep at night - I could not lie on my back, on my side, on my front, it was pain beyond belief. I got epidural injections, cortisone injections and it calmed down after six weeks.  But talking about it, so many people said they’d also suffered chronic pain. I’m eight months down the line. My sciatic nerve is dead in my right leg, but there are people who have no hope of ever getting rid of their pain.”

He’s now receiving rehab training from James Davies, who coaches Premier League footballers, and the treatment hurts almost as much as the condition. But three weeks ago, he came off his crutch. 

“Sometimes I use a cane and most times I use nothing,” he says, contentedly. “Your health is your wealth, that’s what I’ve learned in these past eight months.”

Did he learn anything from the This Morning debacle? While the exact reasons he parted company are opaque, Holmes had been the subject of a watchdog inquiry when – during the first wave of the Covid pandemic – he suggested conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to 5G phone masts should not be dismissed, in an outburst that railed against the “mainstream media”. The following day Holmes distanced himself from the theories, stating that “every theory relating to such a connection has been proven to be false". Ofcom then ruled that his comments were “ill-judged,” and that they risked undermining viewers' trust in public authorities.  

A few months later, Holmes and Langsford were dropped from their Friday presenting slot - although ITV has confirmed it will be retaining Langsford as a presenter.

He bats the subject away. “I’m moving ahead to new ventures where what I do is appreciated,” he says. “The thing about This Morning is, I’d get in trouble by being myself. For instance, chef’s here in the studio talking about her special Christmas pudding. Ruth goes ‘then at 12:15 - how to lose a stone for Christmas and keep it off.’ I’ll be standing beside my wife and say ‘You should take a note of that, lose a stone for Christmas’.  The joke is that I’m the fat one, she’s not. Within seconds on Instagram and Twitter there’ll be ‘did he really just fat shame his wife?’ All these complaints are from girls 18 to 25 but they’re the audience. Times have changed.”

I wonder if he’ll miss presenting with his wife. “Never say never. Ruth is an amazing human being who I never get tired of just watching from afar. If you love someone and if you fancy someone then it’s easy - I’ve never seen anybody so independent. She’s been on TV the same length of time as I’ve been. 

“She’s very happy I’m on GB News because she knows I do news best. She does her work very professionally and she’s got a fashion range with QVC. She can switch off. I can’t. So, we’re a good team and we’re a bad team. She’s home, it’s end of story, there’s no discussion about work.”

Home for the pair at present is a six-bedroom house in Surrey with a smart kitchen - Langsford’s backdrop for Instagram posts, and a man cave for Eamonn, complete with Man U memorabilia and Devils’ red floor.  He has four children - Declan, Rebecca and Niall with first wife, Gabrielle, and 19-year-old Jack, the son he shares with Langsford.  

Holmes has suggested that they will relocate in future back to Belfast. He spent  Christmas there, apart from Langsford, with his mum, who found lockdown hard.

“I’ve learnt a lot from my mother’s mistakes,” he says. “She’s 93 and when my dad died 30 years ago she never made new friends, she never learnt how to drive, she never mixed in clubs or societies, she didn’t update herself with technology. Now she says everyone she knows is dead. That’s not going to happen to me, I’m going to listen and surround myself with young people.”

Isn’t there a mismatch here, I say? You talk about young people as both your life force and the people who see you as a dinosaur. 

He laughs. “It’s about change. I accept that you’ve got to change with the times. I’m always open to evolution. The way I’m looking at GB News is - the world is changing, and we can’t go back. We just have to make sure everyone feels they can be heard going forward.”

Breakfast with Eamonn and Isabel will run 6am - 9:30am from Monday January 3 2022 on GB News