OPENING the hotel door to greet Phillip Schofield, I am met by an ashen, shaking, near-skeletal man.
He speaks so quietly, our camera microphone has to move closer to pick him up. This is a man on the brink.
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I ask him how he is? Wryly, he replies: “I am in a very bad way. Mentally, utterly, utterly broken.
“And if it hadn’t been for my girls last week I wouldn’t be here.
“I know I deserve it but they said, ‘Don’t you dare, we’re here to look after you’. I feel embarrassed and ashamed.
“I have just felt like I was going lower and lower and lower and lower. And then, this bizarre, numbness washes over you, like a selfishness.
“I’ve had such a s*** couple of years, and with this ultimate final cataclysm, I looked ahead at nothing and the girls said, ‘Don’t, we are here to look after you. Don’t you dare do it on our watch’.
“And that took me one step back and they won’t leave me alone. They were guarding me.”
For the past two weeks, Phillip has been hung, drawn and quartered on social media over news of his affair with a much younger colleague.
He cheated on his wife and repeatedly lied to family, friends and his ITV colleagues.
He is now off all social media and has deleted it all from his phone. So speaking from a hotel suite in Surrey, he says: “AI won’t kill off the human race — it is social media.
“Because — what is the saying? — a lie goes all the way around the world before the truth has even put its boots on. It’s invention and it grows and grows and it is like cancer. Social media is cancer.
“You can’t stop it. There are completely innocent people caught up in it, and they are then put on trial. It is what we have become. Who is our next victim? Bring them down, now someone else.
“And that, to me, is the worst. There are good parts to social media but the bad parts are vicious, vile, deeply homophobic and so… It is a witch hunt.
“It continues and continues. Do they not know there is a human being at the end of this? Do you actually want me to die? Is that the end game?”
Today, Phillip is joined by his daughter, Ruby, who is clearly devoted to him.
The award-winning presenter, a TV veteran of 41 years, approached The Sun via his lawyer about conducting this interview.
While it is unquestionably the hardest 90 minutes of my professional life, afterwards, there is almost an element of catharsis.
His demons have, in some way, been publicly exorcised. He has apologised, time and time again.
Indeed, after speaking to me he chats, on camera, to the BBC’s Amol Rajan. He is desperate, it seems, to self-flagellate.
He explains, candidly: “I know doing an interview with you is not going to make that stop.
“It won’t stop it. I just want to do everything I possibly can to say it’s my fault; don’t go after him, don’t go after his friends, don’t go after his family. Nobody did anything wrong apart from me.”
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The shiny, happy, smiley Phillip Schofield of yesteryear has gone. In his place a shell of a man.
“I am not sleeping, I am not eating,” he says. “There’s a lot of Southern Comfort.
“My mind is in constant, utter turmoil. I think back to regrets, forwards to… What do I do now? What I am going to do now?
“I do not think I will be able to walk down a street ever again. It is like everybody knows.
“I am dressed like this because I haven’t been able to go home. I can’t go out. I don’t think a charity will want to be associated with me.
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“I got dropped by The Prince’s Trust, which I understand, but it broke my heart.
“I’ve lost everything. It’s all gone. Telly was my safe space, the one thing I loved. Now I don’t know if I will ever work on telly again.
“I don’t know what my identity is any more. I don’t know who I am now. What happens in six months time? What am I going to do?
“I have the rest of my life now to try and plan for Steph and the girls, and hope that I can look after them.”
Overnight, the star, a household name and one-time national treasure, feels he has lost everything.
His huge salary has gone. He will not be suing ITV and is not demanding a settlement package.
He says: “I think when you’ve caused this damage, you can expect nothing. It’s my fault. I completely understand.”
He turns over his hands and shows off a collection of blisters and calluses — another physical sign of this ongoing saga. “I’ve been vaping, a lot,” he sighs.
“I didn’t realise until suddenly it hurt, but I’ve been sitting looking up at the sky or out of the window, just staring into space.
“I just sit on the sofa and stare. I realise by doing that, I’ve blistered both hands.”
Someone else who has been hit incredibly hard is his mum Pat, 87.
Earlier this month her youngest son, Timothy, 54, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
He was jailed for 13 years after he was found guilty of a series of child sex crimes. The abuse spanned three years, during which time the victim was a teenager.
Timothy will serve two-thirds of his sentence before being released.
The civilian police officer was convicted of causing a child to watch sexual activity and of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child.
He was also found guilty of three counts of causing a child to engage in sexual activity and two of sexual activity with a child.
In a victim impact statement, the boy told how he was left “bitter” and “numb to life” by the abuse.
He said he felt like he was trapped in a loop of fear and anxiety that only ended when Timothy Schofield was arrested.
The case has torn the Schofield family apart. Welling-up on talking about his mum, Phillip adds: “I had to go down to Cornwall to be with her for the sentencing.
“Our family thing was always to buy fish and chips and go and sit on the headland. I picked my mum up and she went in to get the fish and chips and while she was getting it my phone rang.
“It was my then manager, saying, ‘Mate I’m so sorry, it has become too loud for ITV. You will have to step down from This Morning.’
“She said to me before I arrived ‘you’re not coming down with any bad news are you?’
“She sat in the car and she was all happy to see me. Then she said, ‘Oh your face has changed. I said let’s go onto the headland. And I had to tell her. She is devastated.”
He claims ITV has offered him therapy, but he is yet to accept.
Instead, he is relying on his wife, daughters and friends. He has also been contacted, he says, by a raft of ex-colleagues offering support.
“A friend said this to me today, ‘Remember, you are the person your friends know. The people who love you.
“The people that have worked with you and love you from working with you. All of them.’
“You hope decent people don’t believe (the bad things) but at three in the morning, that is what keeps me awake.
“Someone, a lovely man called Tony, walking me here today, said ‘You keep smiling’, but I just don’t know how.”
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