How Eamonn Holmes shared divorce woes with a famous mistress

Eamonn Holmes's romance with blonde girlfriend Katie Alexander seems to be getting increasingly serious, with talk of them possibly setting up home together following an enjoyable cruise ship holiday earlier this month.

But it can be revealed that there's another blonde who has been ­consoling him over the recent end of his marriage to TV presenter Ruth Langsford – former 'professional mistress' Sarah Symonds.

Symonds, 54, tells me that she's been in touch with Eamonn for ­several years by email and that he's recently been confiding in her about his poor health and divorce woes.

She said: 'After he and Ruth announced they were splitting up, he sent me a number of gloomy emails saying that his health was bad and everything was difficult.

'I was sympathetic, of course. Then I saw he had a girlfriend and I felt a bit silly offering support when he had a woman on his arm.

'As for his health – dear me it can't have been all that bad if he's having a romance!' She added: 'I mean, I really didn't think he had it in him.

'You have to admire his chutzpah don't you in a wheelchair, with his mistress, looking like the cat who got the cream?

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'I was flattered that he took the time to have an email friendship with me, but wondered why he would sail so close to the flame with someone who runs a mistresses' ­support group. I am always up front about who and what I am.'

The pair first got in touch as she contacted Eamonn to ask if she might come onto Sky News to do newspaper reviews. It never came to pass but they stayed in contact.

Symonds, who allegedly had an affair with chef Gordon Ramsay from 2001-2008, and runs Mistresses Anony­mous, said that in recent years he had shared his opinions with her on former This Morning colleague Phillip Schofield and Huw Edwards.

Eamonn and Ruth, both 64, announced in May that they were splitting up. They had been married for 14 years and share son Jack, 22. It's thought that Ruth discovered contact between her husband and Ms Alexander which made it 'intolerable' for her to stay in the marriage.

Eamonn first encountered divorcee Katie after she commented on one of his social media posts in 2015. In the year before the split was announced he treated her to tickets to see Beyonce and Manchester United, and a trip to a safari park.

Now he and Ruth are divorcing, and she's hired solicitor Catherine Costley, a protegee of Baroness Fiona Shackleton. Shackleton was the lawyer chosen by both King Charles and Sir Paul McCartney in their divorces. Ruth has remained in the £3.5 million marital home in Weybridge, Surrey, with Eamonn moving out to a large ­apartment in nearby Richmond.

Speaking in June at the TRIC Awards, Eamonn said: 'It's too early to say but I hope we can still be friends.' Eamonn had a double hip replacement in 2016 and slipped three discs in his back in 2021. He was also injured falling down stairs and is not able to walk unaided.

Ms Symonds said: 'Ruth has never looked sexier or happier. I love it when unhappily married people divorce and then they can both shine. Why live in misery?' And she adds: 'If his mistress ever needs advice, she knows where to find me.'

Katherine Ryan confused by sausage roll

Comedian Katherine Ryan was perplexed by her first sight of pastry – a sausage roll – when she was 11 years old. She grew up in a coeliac household and said there was such 'a pathological avoidance of wheat, barley, rye, oats in our house' that she had no idea what the item was. 'I was like: 'Why are you eating the packaging of that meat?' 

Dynamite Debicki saved The Crown from Fayed fiasco

Elizabeth Debicki thanked The Crown writer Peter ­Morgan from the stage of the Emmy's when she won for her portrayal of Princess Diana earlier this month.

But actually Morgan owes a debt of gratitude to the actress, 34, as she's saved him from even worse ­embarrassment over the ­programme's portrayal of Mohamed Al Fayed.

In series six of The Crown, Morgan showed the Harrods boss – already by that point the subject of numerous complaints over sexual abuse – as a kindly, even fatherly figure for the Princess.

A number of the women who took part in the BBC's exposé of rapes and assault – titled Al Fayed: Predator At Harrods – said they decided to speak out over anger at how he was portrayed in the Netflix show.

But Morgan said earlier this year: 'If it hadn't been for finding Elizabeth Debicki, I'm not sure I would've told the story through Diana. I might have done it through the Al Fayeds because I thought that seeing it from [the point of view of] an outsider, racially, as it were, discriminated against, would feel more contemporary.

'But then, of course, Elizabeth Debicki showed up. So, in the end, I chose to do it as a mixture through the eyes of the Al Fayeds and Diana.'

Morgan, Netflix and Left Bank Pictures are all refusing to comment on Al Fayed and his portrayal.

Will it end with a sequel?

Bad news for Blake Lively: Justin Baldoni holds the film rights to the sequel of It Ends With Us.

The film, starring Lively and ­Baldoni, has been a huge box-office hit despite the PR car-crash generated by Lively's apparent 'mean girls' behaviour towards Baldoni, who directed and starred in the film, based on the book by Colleen Hoover.

I hear he's in no hurry to make the follow up, It Starts With Us. The same characters are in both books, so a big decision would need to be made on the leading lady…

How Stan piled on two stone to play The Donald

Chiselled Sebastian Stan has escaped from the 'doll ­factory', according to director Ali Abbasi, who has put him in a blond wig to play Donald Trump in the film The Apprentice. Stan, Bucky Barnes to Chris Evans's Captain America in the Marvel films, added more than two stone in a ­matter of weeks to depict the former US President.

Abbasi remarks: 'In my book, if you're the good-looking, sensitive guy 20 movies in a row, that's not a star for me, you're just one of the many in the ­factory of the Ken dolls.'

David Mitchell reveals hopes for Upstart Crow revival 

David Mitchell was disappointed when Upstart Crow, the sitcom written by Ben Elton in which he starred as William Shakespeare, was canned by the BBC.

But now there's hope of a revival, reveals David. 'Ben Elton is keen to write more episodes and the BBC are saying: 'Not at the moment but maybe at some point,' he says. 'I'd love to do more. I'm very proud of the show and I think Ben Elton is a genius.'

David, who debuted as TV's latest detective in Ludwig earlier this week, starred alongside Harry Enfield and Liza Tarbuck in Upstart Crow, which ran for three series on BBC1 from 2016 to 2020.

Depp leans into reputation as bohemian wastrel 

Johnny Depp is leaning into his reputation as a bohemian wastrel in the new film Modi, which is mostly about the artist Amedeo Modigliani getting 'shanghaied by the ripple', as Depp puts it – or knocked out on cheap booze.

The film, which had its premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival this week, features a three-day slice of the life of the artist hero on a bender, having booze and drug-fuelled rows with his girlfriend. It's Depp's second film as a director, 27 years after he directed The Brave, which was critically mauled at the Cannes Film Festival.

Payday for Holly stand-in

Likeable TV personality Josie ­Gibson made a packet thanks to the troubles at This Morning. Accounts filed last week show that in the year to December 2023, with Gibson standing in due to the absence of Holly Willoughby, her assets rocketed from £247,000 to £470,000.

Influencer Lauryn Goodman complaining about artificial grass

Lauryn Goodman is still complaining about AstroTurf. The 'influencer', who has two children with married footballer Kyle Walker, asked for £32,000 to lay artificial grass in her garden. She said in a podcast she plans to tell children Kairo and Kinara: 'Your dad didn't want to give us AstroTurf, your dad didn't want us to have air con... I asked, it was a no.'

She's particularly cross because Walker's four children with wife Annie live in a £3.4 million mansion in Cheshire, which does have artificial turf. However, I'm told it was already there when they bought the place.

Wombles singer-songwriter praises Sting's sex appeal

Sting's legendary sex appeal has been saluted by Mike Batt, the singer-songwriter best known for his work with The Wombles.

In his new autobiography, The Closest Thing To Crazy, Batt recalls making an album in Holland while The Police were laying down Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980. He says the band let him share their cocaine and gave him a lift to a party. 'It was amazing the way Sting walked in, picked the most beautiful girl in the room and disappeared upstairs. I was awestruck.'

Emmanuelle reboot is 'craptacular' 

Turkey alert! Emmanuelle, the remake of the 1974 softcore bonkathon film – has been unveiled this week at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and by all accounts it is amazingly bad. The Hollywood Reporter’s critic coins the terms ‘craptacular’ and ‘great-bad’ to capture its essence and Variety notes that director Audrey Diwan has tried to pull off a feminist retelling of the original book, but failed.

‘Emmanuelle is a text so flimsy that reworking it is a bit like trying to defibrillate a blancmange.’