Rylan Clark has claimed Boris Johnson’s team once tried to pull a planned interview on This Morning when they found out the presenter would be conducting it.
The politician sat down with Rylan and Holly Willoughby on the ITV daytime show in June 2016, but writing in his new autobiography Ten, the former X Factor star alleged he was told that Johnson’s advisors felt he wasn’t “qualified enough” to do the interview.
Speaking about how he often faces snobbery around his interest in and commentary on politics, Rylan wrote (via Evening Standard): “In 2016 before the EU referendum, for example, I was due to interview Boris Johnson on This Morning.
“Then I found out he had threatened to pull out because his advisers heard that I was standing in for Phillip Schofield that day.
“Apparently they thought I wasn’t ‘qualified enough’ to ask him questions.
“Obviously, This Morning didn’t tell me this, and I’m sure it wasn’t Boris who said it, it was probably someone on his team, and I did eventually interview him, but how do they know if I’m qualified or not?”
HuffPost UK has contacted Boris Johnson’s team for comment and is awaiting a response.
Rylan has regularly shared his take on politics on social media and also hosted Channel 4′s coverage of the last general election.
He has previously hit back at “snobby-arsed” critics of his political commentary explaining why he feels “no pressure to fit in a box others want to put (him) in” and why people have been wrong to dismiss him.
Earlier this year, Rylan hit out at the Tory party during an appearance on The Last Leg and called on MPs to “run the country right, look after people in this country and stop being a fucking arsehole” amid in-fighting in the Conservatives.