People assume I’m not the smartest,’ says documentary presenter, reality star, author, autism activist and now podcaster Christine McGuinness, 37. ‘A lot assume I’m only getting work because of my ex-husband. I think it’s the opposite. I’m always having to prove myself. I’m showing, actually, I do deserve to be here.’
Christine’s ex-husband Paddy McGuinness is the presenter of Top Gear, Question Of Sport and Tempting Fortune. He is 14 years her senior and a fellow Lancastrian – he was born in Bolton, she in Blackpool. The couple, who met through friends in 2007, have three children – twins Penelope and Leo, 12, and Felicity, eight – who are all autistic. The couple split in 2022 and divorced last year, yet still share their seven-bedroom Cheshire home, more on which later. During their decade of marriage, there were times when Christine, a former Miss Liverpool, model and podium dancer, seemed little more than a smiley, blonde appendage to her gregarious husband. She had no friends and rarely left home. ‘I would stay in and say no to every invitation. I felt invisible.’
But recently a more assertive woman has emerged, empowered by her own autism diagnosis aged 33, which finally made her understand why she always felt so isolated from other people. ‘At first, when you get a diagnosis, you’ve got a lot of grieving, wondering how things might have been different if someone had spotted it earlier and supported you. Now you understand the whys: why I had an eating disorder, why I left school so young, why I didn’t have friends. Most of all, why I didn’t go out and enjoy life more. But then you say, “OK, that’s how I was and now I want to make the most of my life.” I’ve looked back at my old life and thought, “Is any of that what I wanted?” So this is like a rebirth. I can truly be my authentic self.’
Jumper, Cefinn. Briefs, Marks & Spencer. Sunglasses, Black Eyewear. Earrings, Missoma. Shoes, Malone Souliers
Sitting in a sweltering bedroom in the house hired for the YOU photo shoot wearing a black Zara dress and Chanel slides, Christine has an almost feral beauty. She is also – surprisingly for someone who says her autism means she has few social skills – warm and thoughtful.
That’s despite being exhausted, having only slept three hours the night before. She’s also anxious as trains to Cheshire are being cancelled and she can’t be late to put the children to bed – a vital part of the routine that’s all-important to their autism – since Paddy, who put his work dates down wrongly on the family calendar, won’t be around (most people would be furious, but she resolutely refuses to blame him). ‘My ex and I share all the childcare, you can’t just get anyone in to look after them because of their additional needs,’ she says. As seen in the 2021 documentary Our Family And Autism, which she and Paddy hosted before they split, the children are all behind their peers developmentally, are extremely sensitive to textures, light and noise, are picky eaters and need rigid structures. Any deviation is likely to result in all-out meltdowns.
They have never had a nanny. Christine wrote in her 2021 memoir A Beautiful Nightmare that she was abused as a child by a family friend, and she has been unable to trust anyone else to look after her children. Today she’s reluctant to ask her mother Joanne, 56, for help, as she is recovering from breast cancer. Joanne lives in Liverpool but, says Christine, ‘My dream would be if she moved in with us – she’d have her own annex. But she has only ever lived on a council estate. It would be too overwhelming to go to a mansion. It was different for me: when I met Patrick he was doing well but he wasn’t living in anything like the house we live in now. I’d have been scared to touch anything.’
Blazer, Reiss. Tights, Calzedonia. Shoes, Casadei
Although fretting about getting home, Christine is thrilled to have completed this shoot, which shows her in a different light. ‘Before, people have always made me look housewifey and that was never really me.’
The real her is also evident in the BBC podcast Situationships With Sophie And Christine, launched in June, in which she and her friend, author Sophie Gravia, discuss relationship highs and lows, with plenty of X-rated detail about Christine’s new-found singledom. (The podcast is one of her many sources of income, alongside appearing on reality shows, writing children’s books and working as an influencer.)
For the past three years, she tells listeners, she has ‘only’ dated women, allegedly including rapper and model DJ Roxxxan, and singer Chelcee Grimes. She won’t name any names or talk specifically about any relationship, but she was shaken by the brouhaha her sexuality provoked.
‘I thought, “Is [women dating women] really a big deal in 2025?” Now I understand that, unfortunately, to a lot of people it still isn’t considered OK. I cannot get my head around it. Why does it matter?’
After all, before marrying, she had dated both men and women but has said she feels ‘safer’ with women for obvious reasons. Between the ages of nine and 13, she was abused by a man she describes as ‘close to the family’, who made her watch pornography and ‘snuff’ movies. Then, aged 13, she was raped by a boy from school.
‘My mum was open-minded about me dating women and my ex-husband knew about it from when we first met and was fine with it. So he wasn’t shocked when this came out.’
Counsel came from her ‘best friend’ Duncan James, singer with the band Blue, whom she met when they appeared on reality show The Real Full Monty. James was in a relationship with a woman and had a daughter, before coming out as gay in 2012.
Dress, Elissa Poppy. Sunglasses, Carrera. Shoes, Casadei
‘I couldn’t find one other female in the public eye who was married to a man for a long time, then went on to date women, so there was no one to ask, “How do I address this, how is it for you?” No one. Duncan was the only person I had to talk to, who knew how it felt.’
She won’t give herself a label, such as bisexual. ‘I’m just me,’ she shrugs. That determination to be true to herself and not pander to others’ expectations comes after a lifetime of being seen as a victim. Until two years ago, her father Johnny, 63, was a heroin addict; he spent his life in and out of prison (‘I don’t see him much because he lives in Blackpool, but he’s doing amazing’). Her mother had three children – she was 18 when her first daughter Billie-Jo was born. Christine came a year later, and after that, a son Jamie, with another man. She had left Christine’s father after her baby daughter crawled over his syringes. As a single mother, Joanne brought up three children alone on a Merseyside council estate. The family was so poor that Christine once stole a pair of school shoes from Asda, when hers were too dilapidated to wear any more.
An anxious middle child, Christine suffered from anorexia, which can still resurface when she’s stressed. She was bullied at school and by the age of 14 had dropped out. However, within five years, the apparent fairytale chapter of her life began when she met Paddy at 19. By 23 she was married, and the following year the twins were born. It sounds hellishly tough, not least because Paddy went back to work four days after their birth, to present the ITV Saturday night show Your Face Sounds Familiar. Yet she insists she had all she ever wanted. ‘My dream was Daddy going to work and Mummy staying at home to look after the children.’
Still, cracks in her happy-ever-after fantasy soon started to show. With hindsight, she realises she was ‘over-the-top protective’, declining all offers of support with the children. They were living in Paddy’s three-bedroom house in Bolton, where she knew no one.
With so little contact with the outside world, something she now attributes to her autism, which made her struggle with socialising, she avoided normal new mum social situations. Only when the couple started researching nurseries did they realise how different the twins were to their peers. Aged four, attending a private nursery, they were diagnosed with autism. Felicity, who showed many similar traits from very early, was diagnosed at three.
Christine’s life became a round of ferrying the children to specialists and therapy sessions. ‘It was exhausting. Now I’m a working mum, I definitely think it’s easier going to work than being at home with the children. But I feel so lucky I was able to have those early years with them and I never missed an appointment.’ Most of this she did alone. Paddy has admitted he struggled far more than her with the children’s diagnoses and in 2023 announced he had been diagnosed with clinical depression. By now a household name after hosting ITV’s Take Me Out, he spent a lot of time away from home working and golfing, which Christine accepted as his way of coping and didn’t complain.
Christine with Paddy at the National Television Awards, 2019.
In 2018, a scandal broke when he was photographed in Soho, arm in arm with Nicole Appleton formerly of the band All Saints. The implication was they were having an affair, something no one involved has ever addressed publicly. Christine was devastated, but said then she’d never leave him, for the children’s sake. Paddy returned home to Cheshire and the pair brushed the incident under the carpet.
But something shifted. Determined to no longer be simply viewed as a wife, and against her famous husband’s wishes, Christine began making appearances on The Real Housewives Of Cheshire. Campaigning on behalf of both her children and other adults like her with a later-life autism diagnosis brought Christine much-needed confidence. In 2022, claims surfaced of Paddy’s further infidelities. Within a week, the couple announced they had split and had in fact been living separate lives ‘for months’, despite still sharing the family house.
‘The marriage was long and successful. It ran its course,’ she says. Tellingly, she adds, ‘In a marriage, you need more than love. You need trust, you need loyalty and you need respect. Without those three things, it doesn’t stand.’
The exes now live on separate floors, so how does that work? ‘I’m as confused about it as everyone else,’ she says, laughing. ‘It certainly wasn’t in the plan. But no matter what’s happened between us, we love our children and they need to be in a routine. Going to Mummy’s house and then Daddy’s house is not going to work for them. So if we have to be in the same house and have a cup of tea with each other, that’s fine.
‘We can have a laugh,’ she continues. ‘I’d consider Patrick [she never calls him Paddy] family, because there are times when you go, “Oh god, they’re doing my head in,” but it’s family, so you’ve just got to get on with it.’
Christine on Loose Women with Oti Mabuse and Sophie Gravia (right
Will their unusual living arrangements stay this way for ever? When asked this question, Christine fails to mention that Paddy put the house on the market earlier this year – although at a price of £6.5 million (a huge £4.4 million more than they paid for it in 2020), there hasn’t been a lot of interest. ‘You can’t plan,’ she says. ‘There are times when you think the children are doing amazingly, then something will happen that’ll throw them right off.’ The children now all attend mainstream private schools and are doing well.
How about dating? ‘We spoke about this after we separated – what are we comfortable with, how much did we want to share – because neither of us wants to wake up and find the other on the front page of a newspaper. But it’s been three years now, I don’t need to know what he’s doing and he doesn’t need to know about me. It just stays outside the home.’
So she wouldn’t bring a date home? ‘No way!’ she shrieks. ‘Even if I lived on my own it would be a long time before I took that step. I was messaging an amazing woman last year, and it took three months before I agreed to meet her for a date.’ She would never use a dating app and meets people through friends, as she feels her public profile is too high.
Her ex-husband’s love life, or what plans the two might have in place if he brought someone home, are areas Christine refuses to discuss. The implication is they have both moved on and their private lives are none of each other’s business. For now, Christine claims she is single ‘and not in a rush’ to find someone. ‘I just hope to carve out a strong career to support my children.’
She doesn’t want more children, but could she imagine herself getting married again? ‘No,’ she says. That’s it? Done? ‘Yeah. I don’t mean I’m traumatised by marriage; I was just so young then. I didn’t understand how you’re legally tied to someone if you’re married. I want to be in a committed relationship, but I want the freedom to walk away.’
Situationships With Sophie And Christine is available on BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer
CHRISTINE CONFIDENTIAL
Most loved possession
My kids’ drawings.
Place you want to visit
Bali – I’ve only been outside Europe once.
Idea of holiday hell
Anywhere cold or overcrowded.
Go-to karaoke song
Think Twice by Celine Dion. I’m not a singer but go big or go home!
Spotify song of last year
I went to Barcelona and danced in the rain to Pawsa’s Too Cool To Be Careless.
Last thing you took a photo of and sent to someone
My children at sports day. I sent it to my mum.
Cat or dog person?
Cats, they’re more independent.
Most memorable conversation
Telling my kids we’re all autistic.
Word you most overuse
Gawjus.
Astrology: believe it or bin it?
Believe it – I’m a Pisces, the most powerful and connected of all.
Hero beauty product
Dry shampoo – I’m a busy mummy!
Last thing you lost
My memory! This can be a problem with autism.
Superstition
I always make a wish at 11.11.
Best breakfast
Toast with avocado.
Wordle starting word
‘Clean’ – feels like a fresh start.
Favourite swear word
FFS, in a funny (not furious) way!
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Fashion director: Sophie Dearden-Howell.
Fashion assistant: Hope Palmer.
Hair: Sven Bayerbach at Carol Hayes using Oribe.
Make-up: Caroline Barnes.
