“IT was outside a photographic studio one December night that I got a glimpse of the real Stacey Solomon, the side her fans don’t get to see because of her carefully orchestrated persona.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
I’d met her in Acton, west London, for an interview and a photoshoot just days before Christmas in 2011.
Halfway through, she wanted a break. The X Factor star turned TV celebrity was four months pregnant at the time so I thought nothing of it.
Until I saw her light up a cigarette outside and puff away happily.
After seeing that I’d spotted her, she begged me not to tell anyone, assuring me that she just had the ‘odd one here and there’.
I agreed to keep her guilty secret and we carried on our chat to promote her single, a terrible cover version of Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas.
Unfortunately for Stacey, however, just a few weeks later, she was caught by a photographer from a paparazzi agency smoking outside another building.
In a desperate attempt at damage limitation, she called in to ITV1’s Loose Women show to apologise and was in tears as she later told Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield of her shame and embarrassment on the This Morning sofa.
It wasn’t enough to stop the 36-year-old being stripped of her Celebrity Mum Of The Year title and the saga muddied the Dagenham-born star’s glossy image just a year after she was crowned the winner of I’m A Celebrity in 2010.
But Stacey is determined, even ruthless, according to some, and she was not going to let a bit of a fuss over her nicotine intake sabotage her ascent to fame and fortune.
Today, she and her husband, the former EastEnders actor Joe Swash, are one of the main double-acts the BBC is pinning its hopes on to help it win the ratings war with ITV.
Many would regard the pair, who married in July 2022, as being more suited to the Corporation’s main commercial rival. After all, they did meet on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity show when she was a contestant and he hosted the spin-off programme `I’m a Celebrity… Extra Camp’.
But the BBC’s decision to screen the couple’s fly-on-the-wall documentary Stacey & Joe, which began in 2025 and has run for two seasons, has paid off handsomely.
Millions have since tuned in to watch the pair and their blended family – they have six children between them, three together and three with other partners – at their Essex home, Pickle Cottage.
The success of Stacey & Joe follows Stacey’s triumph with her BBC Two decluttering show, Sort Your Life Out, which has been running for five seasons.
But while many in the business adore the star for her down-to-earth persona, others have not been so keen to work with her.
‘Stacey has definitely rubbed some people up the wrong way over the years,’ says one former associate. ‘She is very happy to drop people despite them working hard for her. Stacey has been through many PR companies and different agents to get where she is today.
‘There are many people she left behind along the way who don’t exactly have great things to say about her. She would come expecting a lot and if you couldn’t deliver for her then you were out.’
One such publicist was the late convicted sex offender Max Clifford, who Stacey hired in 2011 in her ruthless attempt to become famous.
‘Stacey thought he would be able to get her the work and the positive headlines,’ says one source, who was around at the time. ‘To be fair, she dropped him and the women in his business who represented her when he got arrested a year later.’
Stacey also gave a glimpse of what she is like behind the camera when she said she was ‘gutted’ and felt her team had been ‘robbed’ when Sort Your Life Out was beaten to the Bafta for best Factual Entertainment show by Rylan Clark’s Grand Tour.
At the time, she claimed she sounded off as a way of standing up for her team but those familiar with her say it was an example of how she can sometimes behave like a ‘diva brat’.
Then there was her fall-out with Mrs Hinch despite the ‘cleanfluencer’ having been a bridesmaid at Stacey’s wedding in 2022.
Mrs Hinch, whose real name is Sophie Hinchliffe, has nearly 5 million followers on Instagram, known as ‘Hinchers’, and has been close friends with Stacey since 2019.
But the pair, who would often post photos of each other on social media, have been conspicuously silent about their friendship of late and were last seen together on-screen as far back as 2023.
Some wonder if the froideur that appears to have developed between the two is down to Stacey trying to help her sister Jemma, who has carved a career for herself in a similar area as Mrs Hinch, by taking cleaning deals away from her former bridesmaid.
Today, some go so far as to say that Stacey and Joe are the most irritating couple in showbusiness.
In his younger years, Joe, 43, who played Mickey Miller on EastEnders, was a regular on London’s West End nightclub scene.
I would often see him at the exclusive Funky Buddha club in Mayfair, where he would be desperately trying to befriend members of the Chelsea football team.
Joe also dated a string of glamour models and became the victim of a series of ‘kiss and tell’ stories in the Sunday red-tops after a number of ex girlfriends sold their stories.
‘Joe was all very tawdry back then,’ a former colleague of his tells me. ‘He loved the women, it was a perk of being on EastEnders back then. He wasn’t particularly pleasant a lot of the time.
‘He went through loads of women, it was all very grubby and very, very grim.’
It was quite a different story when I saw him and Stacey at the opening of the Christmas-themed Harry Potter World in Hertfordshire last Tuesday.
Joe, who has swapped his tight T-shirts for a more sophisticated look, which last week included glasses and a grey overshirt, was playing the doting father alongside Stacey.
‘He’s turned things around for himself,’ says a former pal. ‘You’d never have thought he would get himself a career, or a wife, like this. It’s amazing – if a bit depressing – that this is where the BBC is at now.’
That said, those in the know say that, at times, all is not well between the two.
Last December, they were seen having a heated argument at Westcliff-on-Sea train station in Essex during filming for their reality show.
Joe was spotted storming down the road, puffing heavily on a vape, while Stacey was seen in tears hugging someone as the bemused camera crew looked on.
‘This is the thing: it’s not as lovely as they make out,’ says a source who knows them.
It was later claimed that the pair had just been to a couple’s counselling session to address issues, including communication problems and the impact of Joe’s recent ADHD diagnosis.
While the show puts a gloss on their lives, for Stacey Solomon, being a TV star certainly has its benefits.
Today she’s worth millions – thanks, in part, to her talent agency YMU, the firm behind the likes of Ant and Dec and Davina McCall.
Apart from her television work, she has a parenting podcast, Here We Go Again, fashion and homeware ranges at Asda and Primark, and a partnership deal with haircare brand REHAB.
The star also has a very lucrative deal with jewellery firm Abbott Lyon and has worked with brands such as In The Style and Jet 2 over the years.
It’s been a stratospheric rise for a single mother who was first catapulted to fame as a teenager.
Which takes me back to a phone call I had with the X Factor’s publicist before the auditions had even begun in 2009, to tell me that there was a 17-year-old mum who was going be up there with the winners. Simon Cowell had already marked her out for ‘big things’, they said.
In the event, Stacey came third behind winner Joe McElderry and runner-up Olly Murs.
But looking at where Stacey has got to without her X Factor svengali, I’d suggest not even the great Cowell himself could have elevated her to the heights she has reached by herself.