New I’m A Celeb campmate Rev. Richard Coles once lied ‘for attention’ about having HIV

Reverend Richard Coles, the former Communards pop star turned retired Church of England priest, joins the I’m A Celeb cast of 2024 tonight with Love Island icon Maura Higgins. But what most people might not remember about the controversial Reverend is that Richard Coles once lied about the fact he had HIV in the middle of the Aids crisis of the 1980s – and will surely rile up the I’m A Celeb campmates if it comes up.

In the 1980s, when Reverend Richard Coles was in the height of success as part of the pop group The Communards, he spoke about how he lead a hedonistic life of sex and drugs whilst enjoying the fame. In his 2014 memoir, he confessed that he had lied about having HIV in the height of the epidemic . He told the Guardian at the time he had done so for “attention”.

“The other thing, which is the really difficult thing to admit, was that I was sort of drawn to it, because there was this sort of weird glamour to it,” he said. “Imagining that there’s some weird glamour to something that was killing people that I cared very much about, horribly. It gives a sense about my shallowness.”

During an interview with The Times in 2017, when he was competing on Strictly, he described the lie as “the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

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“Pretending I had HIV was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Reverend Richard Coles said, a few years back before I’m A Celeb. “It was in the middle of the Aids crisis. I went a bit bananas. A lot of people did.” He says he did “correct the record as soon as I could, and sought the forgiveness of the people I had said that to”. He also said how his closest friend Matthew was very angry with him and stopped speaking to him for a year.

Reverend Richard Coles says he thinks about those who did not survive the Aids crisis“every day. What they would have done, who they would have become. Those of us who survived it talk about it with great sadness.”

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