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.
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.
Huw Edwards admits having sexual images of boy as young as seven on his phone: Ex-BBC star,62,faces up to 10 years in jail after being sent more than 40 indecent images of children by paedophile on WhatsApp
'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,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.'
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