Stacey Dooley has spoken out about finding love with her Strictly dance partner Kevin Clifton, her “working class roots” and how her work has “politicised” her in an intimate new interview.
The 32-year-old told the Guardian how she went from a teenage truant “nicking blue eyeliner from the chemist”, to one of the UK’s most popular documentary-makers.
Having left school with no qualifications, she admitted her success made it harder to cling to her working class roots, but said her work had also made her a lot more politically-minded.
“I always think it’s odd when people say: ‘I don’t give a f*** about politics,’ because it determines how you live,” she said.
The life-long Labour supporter said of new Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “I don’t know how long he’ll last.”
While Dooley is known for being open and opinionated when covering topics ranging from right-wing extremism to child sex exploitation, she remains guarded about her love life.
She described dancer boyfriend Kevin Clifton as “amazing” but said the couple have turned down tens of thousands of pounds for interviews about their relationship.
Dooley met the professional dancer when they were partnered on the latest series of Strictly Come Dancing, which they won.
It was Clifton’s first series after splitting from wife Karen, while Dooley was in a relationship with Sam Tucknott.
The filmmaker said: “Kev and I have agreed not to go into too much detail about our private lives because you can’t really indulge that and then ask for privacy.
“That’s why we’ve turned down interviews that have offered us tens of thousands of pounds.
“What I am happy to say is Kev’s amazing, I’m happy, life happens, I’ve got an amazing career and I’m very lucky.”
In April she responded to Tucknott’s claims that her romance with Clifton developed while she was still with him, posting on Twitter: “Anyone with any adult life experience knows there are two sides to every story.
“I haven’t got the time or energy to correct some of the utter nonsense I’ve read on here.
“Re Sam, I loved him very much and only wish him happiness and success going forward.”
Dooley also hit back at critics who claim she has given up on her serious work for life as a celebrity, saying: “I think that’s an unfair statement. When you win Strictly, you can go down two paths.
“All the offers come in, and you can do very little work and put your name to things for lots of money, or you can go back to making documentaries in Syria and Nigeria and work really bloody hard.
“I said no to a lot of things I didn’t believe in. It’s not that I’m holier than thou, it’s just that it wasn’t for me. So I went back to the day job.”
The Luton-born presenter who used to “bunk off” school as a teenager described herself as “the hardest-working person she knows” and said she was well-placed to do the work she does.
“At the start of my career, some people were like: ‘This is a breath of fresh air’; others: ‘There are thousands of trained journalists that deserve her job’,” she said.
But not being trained – and not being universally liked or “vanilla”, as she put it – offered her an advantage, she said.
“Middle-class journalists might not be able to connect with a girl who lives in Queens [in New York] and has been abused by her father in the same way that I can.”
Still, she admitted her colleagues are “less snobbish” about her background than they used to be.
“Oh God, I’ve had it all. Sometimes they would say ‘Ooh, you’ve got holes in your jeans’, or mimic my accent.”
She added that she did not respond to jibes, saying: “I don’t give a f*** what they think. Some people don’t understand why I’m there.
“But I work really hard and I deserve to be there. And our documentaries speak for themselves. We are always top three on iPlayer and often we are most-watched factual. The only one we can’t beat is EastEnders.”
She continued: “We all pay our TV licence. It doesn’t matter whether you live on an estate in Luton or you live around the corner from Hyde Park and studied at Oxbridge – we all need to be heard.
“We all need to look at people on television and say ‘Yeah, they represent me in some way’. That’s where we’ve gone wrong in the past. I think the BBC would be the first to say current affairs is still too white and too middle-class and too male-heavy.”
Anyway, she said, “it’s all balsamic vinegar and oat milk – I’ve got a middle-class palate now, whether I like it or not.”
