Lorraine Kelly: The daytime stalwart admired by many (except perhaps Boris Johnson)

“Who’s Lorraine?”

No one, perhaps not even the prime minister himself, can say what went through Boris Johnson’s mind as he uttered those words at the conclusion of his car-crash (more motorway pile-up, actually) interview with Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain.

Firmly, indeed icily, in control of Johnson, Reid and the PM grimaced at each other through a series of bad-tempered exchanges before Reid finally tried to shut him up by declaring that “Lorraine is waiting to take up all the issues you have brought up in this interview”.

Perhaps out of mild irritation, perhaps as a minor act of subversion, perhaps out of genuine bewilderment (you can never tell) Johnson made his puzzled aside and then chuntered on while the sound mixer gently muted him. Not before, though, Reid reminded the vanquished figure before her that “She’s a legend”. She didn’t need to add that he, Johnson, was also a legend. Of mendacity.

Lorraine is a legend, and of course everyone knows “who” Lorraine is. A better question might be “what” is Lorraine. Is she for real? Why has she become a “legend”?

Superficially, she is the queen of mid-morning mumsiness, which is a tougher gig than it sounds. After leaving school in East Kilbride, (she turned down a university place) she joined the East Kilbride News, before a brief stint as a researcher with BBC Scotland in Glasgow. Shortly after that she was appointed Scotland correspondent of the then new TV-am company, in the very earliest days of national “breakfast telly”, in 1984. She was 25 and already an onscreen presence. The legend was born.

Then there was the Lockerbie disaster of 1989, when a terrorist bomb brought Pan Am Flight 103 down over the Borders village. It was obviously a global story of huge sensitivity, and the plane had crashed the previous evening. As the dawn broke to reveal the wreckage and the carnage, the early morning television shows had the first pictures. Kelly acquitted herself well enough to be given some presenting shifts, and then a permanent place on the Good Morning Britain sofa, alongside the unlikely legend that was Mike Morris.

And there Kelly has remained. She has never strayed far from that territory, roaming freely across the pre-lunch prairies of light news, chat, magazine style-features and heartwarming human interest stories of struggles won and lost. Pets, celebrity memoirs, health scares, diets, the weather… all life is there. Not unlike Elizabeth II, a dignified, calming, reassuring constant, an anchor of stability in a volatile world. Breakfast television companies came and went, new formats tried and and abandoned, the hurricane of Piers Morgan blew itself out, but Queen Lorraine has sailed serenely through the storms.

On her various top-rated shows, she has been Lorraine Kelly, LK, and now Lorraine, but she has also insisted on a peculiar double identity. During a high-profile court battle with Her (real) Majesty’s Revenue and Customs that ended in 2019, Kelly, perversely, stated that she wasn’t in fact the bright, chirpy, empathetic figure she appeared on her eponymous TV show, but rather a personality; that she was in a sense playing a role. HMRC, reasonably, took the view that when she presented programmes for ITV she was in fact effectively an employee of ITV.

Not so, argued Kelly. Lorraine had signed a contract in 2012, through a company she owns jointly with her husband, Steven, to present Lorraine and Daybreak, until Good Morning Britain was relaunched in 2014. Under this arrangement she paid around £1.2m less in tax and national insurance than she would have done had she been a normal employee. (Which gives you an idea of her legendary earnings.)

It’s probably best understood by analogy. At one end of the spectrum, Sophie Raworth, for example, reading the news or interviewing politicians is essentially Sophie Raworth, no more, no less. Olivia Colman, at the other end of spectrum, doesn’t appear on screen very often as Olivia Colman but as, say, the Queen, or Mark Corrigan’s put-upon girlfriend Sophie in Peep Show, or as the voice of the rabbit Strawberry in Watership Down.

Kelly argued that, in legal terms, she was more like Colman than Raworth. She won. Judge Jennifer Dean ruled that the relationship that Kelly had with ITV “was a contract for services and not that of employer and employee … We did not accept that Ms Kelly simply appeared as herself – we were satisfied that Ms Kelly presents a persona of herself, she presents herself as a brand and that is the brand ITV sought when engaging her.

“All parts of the show are a performance, the act being to perform the role of a friendly, chatty and fun personality. Quite simply put, the programmes are entertaining, Ms Kelly is entertaining and the ‘DNA’ referred to is the personality, performance, the ‘Lorraine Kelly’ brand that is brought to the programmes.

“We should make clear we do not doubt that Ms Kelly is an entertaining lady but the point is that for the time Ms Kelly is contracted to perform live on air she is public ‘Lorraine Kelly’. She may not like the guest she interviews, she may not like the food she eats, she may not like the film she viewed but that is where the performance lies.”

Without wishing to doubt her honour the judge, that interpretation seems a bit far-fetched to me. Kelly – Lorraine – just seems so genuine, so “human”, so simpatico it cannot possibly be a mere show. Her interviewing style is chatty, informal, but with some guile. She says her approach is “let them talk for a wee bit, then go for the kill!”

But she can’t be just putting it on, being all lovely to her guests, but then going home to torture some kittens. Can she?

Unusually, for a celebrity, evidence, or even rumours about Kelly’s secret nastiness are not “legendary”, but vanishingly rare. Geordie Shore’s Charlotte Crosby, however, has a strong opinion. In 2016 the reality TV star and producer of ‘Charlotte’s 3 Minute Bum Blitz’, a DVD, went on Kelly’s show to promote her autobiography, with the unpromising title Me Me Me. She didn’t enjoy it: “Lorraine Kelly is a b****, I’m telling you now she is,” she told a Facebook Live session. “I went on Lorraine’s morning show, right, and she was so horrible to us. She could have just been horrible in one answer, that would have been enough. But she continued and continued. She wouldn’t let it drop.” Crosby pronounced Kelly’s show “crap”.

Esther McVey, Conservative MP and former brekkies comrade of Kelly, might agree, though in this case the animosity seems to be mainly on Kelly’s side. In a strange precursor to the Johnson incident, Susanna Reid had just finished an interview with McVey, then a Tory leadership hopeful (yes, really) and, alluding to their past, asked Kelly: “Do you remember Esther McVey from her GMTV days?” The answer was curt to the point of rude: “Yeah, yes I do,” before moving to the programme menu.

Then, Piers Morgan, the Antonio Guterres of the airwaves, butted in with: “So you got on with Esther then, Lorraine?”. Kelly: “I don’t remember, love, I don’t remember at all, it was an awful long time ago.”

Kelly, a champion of LGBT+ rights, has been disappointed with McVey’s parliamentary voting record on equal marriage, for example. Kelly recently said of McVey: “She’d been quoted as saying some really terrible things, especially towards the LGBT community. I just thought: ‘Nah, you don’t do that’.”

McVey does make Ann Widdecombe sound woke, but has hinted that a rivalry dates back to a period in the 1990s when she, and not Kelly, was given the honour of sharing the sofa with Eamonn Holmes, the sun god of the genre. All that can be said is that Esther McVey didn’t make it to No 10 and is currently co-hosting a mid-morning show on GB News with her husband, the Conservative MP, Philip Davies, whose commitment to feminism is well known.

That’s about it, really – the HMRC, someone off Geordie Shore, and McVey. Her private life seems happy and quiet. Steve Smith, a cameraman and her husband of about 30 years, stays away from the media, wisely, but daughter Rosie Smith (27) is edging into mum’s media world through joint podcasts and some writing.

Kelly, who spent her early life in the Gorbals and later “adopted” Dundee as a home, and even commuted from there for some years before moving to England, had no special advantages in life. Her father was a television repairman, her mother what used to be termed a housewife. Born in 1959, into an era of Glaswegian sectarianism even more strident than today, dad was a Protestant and mum a Roman Catholic, so she maybe learned a bit about tolerance too. She made her way in the media game entirely on her own merits and gifts as a broadcaster, someone who is such a natural and permanent feature that she sometimes gets a little taken for granted. The Johnson “moment” was an unusual episode in that respect, and it reminded us of her legendary, if understated, status.

Evidence that the private Lorraine Kelly closely mirrors the public Lorraine Kelly is plentiful. For example, one might normally turn to the gossip website Popbitch for vicious stories unsuitable for publication on strong legal advice. Kelly breaks that rule, and here’s the cheering anecdote about her behaviour at an awards show:

“They say she was extremely nice to everyone who approached her at the event and at the end of the evening, just as she was about to leave, someone from a big charity came over to ask if she would think about providing a prize for a forthcoming auction they were doing. Quick as lightning, Lorraine took off her brand new designer shoes and handed them over – leaving her to walk out of the building and down the street to a waiting car in just her stockinged feet.”

Whatever the truth about the real Lorraine, she is undoubtedly popular, with her CBE, extensive charity commitments, and still-healthy ratings. An admittedly extremely unscientific survey of Twitter last year suggested that she prompted the highest net positive volume of Twitter mentions. The Self-Made Celebs study noted she came top “with fans praising her for her outspoken hosting skills and feelgood retweets of dog pics and positive articles”. For what it’s worth, Louise Minchin, Amanda Holden and Rachel Riley were runners-up, while Tess Daly and Claudia Winkelman have work to do.

Perhaps the most incisive commentary on the recent controversy is provided by Janet Street-Porter (who I am pleased to declare I worked with when she was editor of TheIndependent on Sunday). Street-Porter, herself an accomplished and long-standing TV presenter, says: “Millions tune in to daytime television, where hugely popular shows like ITV’s Lorraine, Loose Women and Good Morning are an essential link to the outside world, the place where their stories are told, and their concerns are addressed. Mums, shift workers, pensioners, anyone at home, any age or sex. Don’t stick daytime telly in a little box marked ‘lightweight fluff’…

“Daytime telly is where people tell their stories. Share their fears. Ask for help and offer support to others. Politicians who ignore daytime television risk being labelled out of touch.”

On the morning I wrote this article I wandered downstairs, thinking a little about this profile, switched the TV on and there she was – Lorraine Kelly, doing her usual effortless-seeming job of getting the very best out of the actor Parminder Nagra, the lead in the ITV drama DI Ray. I paid more than my usual attention to the screen, witnessing Kelly’s extraordinary gift of having something like the kind of conversation any of us would like to think we’d have with a big Hollywood star down the line from Las Vegas. That’s who Lorraine is. Legend.