Deirdre Reynolds: ‘What exactly was Holly Willoughby expected to do about Phil’s affair’

Well, no, Holly Willoughby - since you ask, I’m not.

A fortnight on, I have a pain in my face (among other bits) with the Liveline-style melodrama on both sides of the Irish Sea over a 61 -year-old man dipping his pen in the company ink.

For all the goldfish out there: This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield hit front pages last month when he confessed to embarking on an “unwise, but not illegal” affair with a 20 year-old colleague back in 2017.

Having already thrown her co-host under the bus by insisting she’d been lied to about the romance, on Monday, Holly put it into reverse upon her return to the ITV sofa, as she dolefully told viewers she felt “shaken, troubled and let down”.

If it was designed to draw a line under the story, her painfully earnest speech - already a meme - had the exact opposite effect.

‘Holly knew!’ bellowed several tabloid headlines during the week, with English former rugby star James Haskell the latest to stick his beak in by blasting the 42-year-old’s wide-eyed betrayal routine as “utter nonsense”.

So, let’s say she did know - what exactly was she expected to do about it?

Rat her co-star-of-13-years out to his wife, Stephanie Lowe, or run to their telly bosses?

Or, like the rest of us when two colleagues are rumoured to be touching base in more ways than one: absolutely nothing.

A revealing Forbes Advisor survey on workplace romance published in April found that 40 per cent have cheated on their current partner with a co-worker. Sixty per cent, meanwhile, have heard gossip about coworkers running it up the flagpole, so to speak.

Aside from HR, who in their right mind would wade in beyond water cooler tattle - but how typical that Schofield’s ‘work wife’ should end up taking much of the flak for simply minding her own.

Increasingly blurring the line between collegiality and familiarity, the corporate world’s pervasive idea of a ‘work family’ could explain some of his ex-colleagues behaving as though Schofield had died, and not just just done the dirt, after he resigned from the broadcaster and was dropped by his talent agency.

When former sofa buddy Alison Hammond broke down in tears on the chat show over the “really painful” saga was the moment I thought: ‘These people really need to put their out-of-office on more.’

For some much-needed perspective: when you die, your real family presumably won’t immediately replace you with Craig Doyle (much as they’d like to).

Squeaky-clean Holly’s ‘Are you OK?’ speech has been ripped apart as “insincere” and “escalatory” by crisis communications experts.

After being dragged into someone else’s mess at work, far more relatable would have been for the busy mum-of-three to simply shrug: “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

That’s my advice to Gordon the Gopher, anyway.