Singer reveals her ‘terrifying’ ordeal

The Welsh singer Katherine Jenkins broke down in tears in an ITV interview with Piers Morgan on Saturday while recounting a “terrifying” ordeal in which a violent attacker tried to rape her when she was a student in London.

“I’d been out with my classmates from the Royal Academy [of Music] when somehow or other we got split up on the way home,” the 29-year-old recalled.

“I was walking across the bridge, near Paddington, and as I crossed this sort of gangway which went down to the station I suddenly felt someone too close to me. Within seconds, he was in front of me trying to drag me down this gangway. The police believe he was trying to rape me.”

Jenkins sobbed as she described how she tried to escape from the man, “who looked so normal, he looked like he had just come out of the pub and had a normal office job. I remember my purse was there so I knew he wasn’t trying to mug me.

“I wanted to kill him, I was so angry about it,” she continued. “I thought, ‘I’m going to get away from him’, and ran, in massive heels, across the road, but there was this big wooden wall and then he punched me. He threw his weight against me, and I just thought, ‘He is actually going to rape me, so if I can get into a ball on the floor, then he won’t be able to do it’.”

Eventually the attacker fled; the star was never able to identify him for police.

On Friday, Jenkins, whose new album, Believe, is out tomorrow, told The Times that press-wise, she’s had a scarring year. “There are things I just don’t think should be public knowledge,” she said. “I recently found out I had half-sisters [middle-aged twins from Neath], which I didn’t know about before. I can deal with that, but they shouldn’t have to.”

Then there were the revelations that she used to take drugs “quite a bit”, which appeared after a previous Morgan interview. “It’s a difficult question for anybody in the public eye,” she said. “Because if you say you have, are you saying it’s OK to do this? But, look, I’ve made tons of mistakes, and actually people amazed me. They said, ‘We’ve all done stupid things; we’ve all got skeletons in our closets. At least you were honest about it’.”

No regrets, says Edwina’s girl

“I’m proud to be a single mother — and may even do it again,” announced Debbie Currie, daughter of the former Tory MP Edwina Currie, in the Daily Mail.

Debbie’s daughter Zoe, 3, was the result of a drunken one-night stand, and the gas-meter reader, who lives in the Peak District, reveals that she had “actually discussed the idea of single motherhood with friends before I got pregnant”.

The 34-year-old has “no regrets”. In fact, “I feel sorry for women who said they wouldn’t get pregnant without marriage, because they are still single and childless. For a woman not to have children because she hasn’t met the right man doesn’t make sense.”

“Grandma Wina” often comes to visit. “She was just glad I was 30 before it happened,” Debbie confided.

Blokiness is next to godliness

“I don’t like this notion that we all somehow have a feminine side,” the TV presenter James May, who worries that the term “blokiness” has become debased, told the Radio Times last week.

“Blokiness”, claimed May, who is best known for his presenting role on the BBC motoring show Top Gear, alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, “has come to mean a sort of supposedly endearing hopelessness, and I think blokes are doing themselves a bit of a disservice. Because I think the point of being a man is that you’re supposed to be dependable and you should be able to have a go at anything. And that includes things that we have now decided are on the girly side, like cooking or reading the poetry of WB Yeats.”

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