Huw Edwards’ family friend has said he ‘pulled the wool over all our eyes’ and admits she’s struggling to come to terms with the disgraced presenter’s double life.
‘We knew him well, and yet we didn’t,’ adds the woman who, like so many others, is now questioning what she and her family really knew about the award-winning journalist, not to mention struggling with feelings of betrayal when she recalls the times their families spent together.
Above all, she says, Edwards seemed ‘very much the family man’ who appeared to adore his five grown-up children, his wife, TV producer Vicky Flind, and the comfortable life they shared in Dulwich, south-east London.
‘He and Vicky always seemed so very close and so normal,’ she adds. ‘No airs and graces.
‘He doted on her. He seemed to have eyes only for her. At times I felt quite envious of their relationship.’
By rights, and had he only taken a different path in life, Huw Edwards should have been sitting down to write his autobiography about now.
If his plan to retire quietly in 2023 had come to fruition, he might have been regaling us with tales from the top echelons of the BBC, sharing anecdotes from his two decades as the face of its flagship News At Ten programme.
If his plan to retire quietly in 2023 had come to fruition, he might have been regaling us with tales from the top echelons of the BBC. He could have given viewers a rare glimpse of the man behind the newsreader – but the real mystery is who Huw Edwards really is
Edwards spent two decades as the face of the BBC’s flagship News At Ten programme
Many have been left questioning what they really knew about the award-winning journalist
Fall from grace: How did one of Britain’s most famous TV presenters go from national stalwart to national pariah in the blink of an eye?
He could have given viewers a rare glimpse of the man behind the newsreader.
Who that man is, of course, is the real mystery at the heart of the Huw Edwards story.
For having suffered one of the most monumental falls from grace imaginable – a fall which has now prompted calls from the BBC for him to pay back more than £200,000 of his salary since his arrest last November – it has been left to others to piece together the truth about the 62-year-old presenter, who stunned the nation last week by pleading guilty to making indecent images of children.
‘His was clearly a Jekyll and Hyde character. I was taken in completely,’ was how the devastated and baffled family friend put it to the Mail this week.
Her confusion is shared by millions across Britain who tuned in to watch Edwards present news coverage of some of the most pivotal events of the past two decades: the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton; the 75th anniversary of D-Day; Her Majesty the Queen’s Diamond and Platinum Jubilees; and the announcement of her death in 2022.
Then, of course, there were the nightly bulletins he presented during the Covid pandemic when the daily viewing figures reached 14.5 million.
How does one of Britain’s most famous TV presenters go from national stalwart to national pariah in the blink of an eye?
Edwards seemed ‘very much the family man’ who appeared to adore his five grown-up children, his wife, TV producer Vicky Flind, and the comfortable life they shared in Dulwich, south-east London
‘He’s gone from the most trusted broadcaster in Britain to nothing, almost overnight,’ says a BBC insider.
‘People are mortified. They are feeling shock, shame and embarrassment. They can’t get their heads around it. The mood in newsrooms in London and Cardiff is quite low at the moment.’
This week the Mail spoke to those who knew and worked with Edwards, tracing his story back to his earliest days in Wales as the son of two well-respected grammar school teachers.
Indeed, until Edwards’s life began to unravel last year he was feted by villagers in Llangennech, near Llanelli in South Wales, where he grew up and where his 87‑year-old mother, Aerona, still lives in a bungalow.
‘He was a local hero and the most famous person to come from here,’ said a neighbour this week. ‘
Now it’s all come out in the open, people are feeling ashamed and want to wash their hands of him.
‘I feel sorry for his mother and his family. What was he thinking? A man in his position.’
Edwards as a young child with his father, Hywel, who was not an easy man to impress
One unequivocal sign of Edwards’s downfall came last week when a street mural of the newsreader, painted a year ago in his home village, was covered up by the artist who created it.
It was just April last year, long before the allegations emerged, when Steve Jenkins and a beaming Edwards were photographed together next to the artwork.
But within hours of hearing of the former news anchor’s admission of guilt that he had downloaded indecent images of children, a disgusted Jenkins, who is known professionally as ‘Jenks’, sprayed a can of white paint over the portrait.
‘After what happened I decided the mural had to go,’ he told the Mail this week.
Another local added: ‘He was an ambassador for the village, for Llanelli and Wales, but now people don’t want to know him.’
On Thursday, in yet another brutal response to his repugnant crimes, Edwards was stripped of one of the highest accolades in Welsh public life when he was expelled from the Gorsedd of the Bards, an honour bestowed on him in 2022 during the National Eisteddfod of Wales in recognition of his contribution to Wales and Welsh culture.
His membership of the organisation has also been terminated.
This casting out, in particular, is likely to be a bitter blow to the disgraced presenter.
The Eisteddfod, which celebrates Welsh arts, language and culture, has played a central role in Edwards’s life since childhood.
His late father, literary historian and Plaid Cymru Dyfed county councillor Professor Hywel Teifi Edwards, who died in 2010, was the world’s leading Eisteddfod authority and used to take his son along to the annual event.
Not an easy man to impress, of all his son’s achievements this was one which would undoubtedly have made Teifi Edwards proud.
The Edwards family’s roots in coal mining, farming and labouring were solidly working class.
‘People are mortified’: Huw Edwards’ colleagues are said to be feeling ‘shock, shame and embarrassment. They can’t get their heads around it’
Huw’s paternal grandfather, ship’s carpenter John Edwards, was a merchant seaman who spent three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp after his ship was sunk in the Atlantic during the Second World War.
His maternal grandfather, Leo Protheroe, was a coal miner who was crushed to death at work, aged 28, by a falling rock.
Like his parents before him, Huw Edwards received a grammar school education; in his case, at Llanelli Boys’ Grammar, once described as the Eton of Wales.
He and his younger sister, Meinir, now a professor of cancer nursing living in Australia, were ‘aware of what was expected of us at school’, he said back in 1999.
‘My parents’ expectations were high.’
By his own admission, he was ‘a horrendous swot’.
But it wasn’t all work. In 1973, he had an early taste of appearing on screen, as a member of a school team which took part in a quiz show on HTV Wales for which Edwards and his co-competitors sat in model steam locomotives which were shunted into tunnels if they answered incorrectly.
He got his first taste of journalism after volunteering to write for the school magazine, The Jester. He later became its editor.
Having studied French, Economics and Maths at A-level, he went on to study French at University College, Cardiff and spent a year abroad as a teaching assistant in the town of Neufchâteau.
But his failure to get into Oxford, despite reaching interview stage, was – he told The Times in 2020 –something which left him with ‘a bit of an inferiority complex’.
In fact, as the Mail learnt this week, Edwards’s sometimes difficult relationship with his formidable father often left him feeling inadequate.
He once admitted to being ‘hopeless’ at rugby, much to the disappointment of Teifi, a passionate Welsh nationalist who once threatened to withhold his TV licence fee during a row over Welsh language programming.
‘My ambitions were destroyed early, thanks mainly to my dad who kept saying I was an embarrassment,’ Edwards told the Mail in 2021.
‘Later I became a good skier and canoeist, not that my father counted them as valid sports. I once thrashed him at snooker, which gave me great satisfaction.’
‘It was a fractured relationship, not a warm one,’ says one who knows him. ‘I get the impression he never felt quite good enough for his father.’
Edwards said in 2020 that his father had ‘a tongue like an axe at times’ and once put his success as a presenter down to the verbal lashings he got as a child if he stumbled over his words while reading in chapel.
‘The biggest and most serious thing was rushing, speaking with too much haste, stumbling over my words,’ he told S4C for a programme to celebrate his 60th birthday in 2021.
‘That always brought with it a punishment, or at the very least I’d get a mouthful when we left.’
On the same programme, his sister Meinir recalled that father and son ‘didn’t always get on’.
Edwards’s relationship with his mother, Aerona, on the other hand, has always been close.
She was the one, he told the Mail in 2021, who ‘did all the hard work raising us’.
And she is said to have recorded every single one of her son’s news bulletins.
He graduated in 1983 and, after cutting his teeth on local radio, in 1984 won a place on a BBC training scheme in London.
Being told by a senior BBC Wales editor that he would ‘never make network’ because of his Welsh accent, only made Edwards determined to get on.
Just a couple of years later, the Llanelli Star newspaper ran an article about the former Llanelli grammar school boy who had been made Parliamentary correspondent for BBC Cymru.
Two sides: At work, Edwards had a ‘huge ego’ and had to be ‘top dog’ – but he was said to be a very different man off screen
Reporting live on Tony Blair’s entry into No 10 in 1997 boosted his profile.
By 1999 he was presenting the BBC’s 6pm bulletin. He moved to ‘the Ten’ in 2003.
In public, says one who knew him professionally, ‘people thought he was very grey in looks and very Welsh. He was insecure’.
Another who worked with him says that behind the scenes, ’gossipy’ Edwards had a ‘wicked sense of humour’.
‘A very, very funny man, very conspiratorial, very indiscreet and gossipy.’ He had a ‘huge ego’ and had to be ‘top dog’.
But off screen, with his wife Vicky and their five children, he couldn’t have been more different, says the family friend who spoke to the Mail this week.
She recalls: ‘On one occasion, they’d had a major plumbing failure and the Dyno-Rod van was round. Huw was out on the drive in shorts and bare feet.
‘As we made our way in, he greeted us in an exaggerated Welsh accent with: ‘I’m up to my knees in sh** here!’ ‘
On holiday in Cyprus when the Edwards children were small, she remembers that ‘he was very much the family man; in and out of the pool with them, playing with them, larking about’.
Nobody guessed, she says, that Edwards might be living a double life.
Not even when, a few years ago, he suddenly underwent an image transformation, losing three stone and working out at a local boxing gym, sporting a trendy new haircut and what appeared to be fake tan.
As another former associate told the Mail this week: ‘All any of us can say is what the ****? We all thought he was having a mid-life crisis when he started posting pictures of himself in the gym and so on, but nobody suspected what was happening.’
Speaking to The Times two years ago, Edwards said he put on weight over several years after the death of his father from pancreatic cancer in 2010.
‘I allowed myself to think that I’d come to terms with it, but that was such a stupid and naive thing to think.’
Getting fit, he said, meant ‘being mentally more robust’. He said he hadn’t seen a therapist: ‘If I’d needed to, I would have done.’
In 2022, however, he told Men’s Health UK that he had suffered a 20-year battle with depression which had left him bedridden at times.
‘Your mind goes into a place where you don’t want to do anything,’ he said. ‘You can’t make any decisions. Things that you usually enjoy, you dread.’
In July last year, Edwards’s wife revealed he was being treated in hospital with ‘serious mental health issues’ after allegations that he paid a vulnerable teenager £35,000 over two years for sexually explicit messages and videos.
Police found no evidence of criminal behaviour in relation to this incident.
But speaking earlier this week, the young man said he felt ‘groomed’ by the presenter and ‘sick’ at learning he had pleaded guilty to having made indecent images of children.
Next week Edwards will turn 63, although given the events of the past few weeks it’s hard to imagine that he will be celebrating.
With his career and marriage in tatters, no one knows what the future holds for a man who, barely a year ago, was surely a shoe-in for a knighthood and a publishing deal to tell his story.
But as he said himself, in 2020: ‘You don’t know what’s around the corner. You don’t know how long things will last.’