Coleen Rooney reveals why ‘going to the dunny does not trouble me’ and the very first thing Wayne mentioned to her when she bought out the jungle in her first post-I’m A Celeb interview

The first thing Coleen Rooney’s eight-year-old son Kit said when he made his surprise visit to see her in the I’m A Celebrity camp was: ‘Ugh, she stinks’.

Given that she’d been in the Jungle for three weeks by that stage, it was hardly Coleen’s fault if she was smelling a less fragrant than usual.

But by the time she joined me to give the Mail her first interview just two hours after finishing second to McFly frontman Danny Jones in this year’s series, she was back to her immaculately groomed self, smelling of a fusion of bath soap and subtle but expensive perfume, her hair scraped back into a low bun, offset by a pair of chunky gold earrings.

Yet despite doing so well in the Jungle and staying in contention until the very last moment, Coleen confesses that she almost quit the show in the first week after she woke up and saw her luxury item: a pillow emblazoned with a picture of Wayne and her children.

Her confidence was already at a low ebb because, as soon as she stepped foot in the Jungle, Coleen began to question why she was there.

Her campmates were actors, dancers and musicians and she was the 39-year-old wife of the former England football captain Wayne Rooney. In short, a WAG.

As fellow contestants such as Strictly’s Oti Mabuse taught salsa and the McFly frontman, Danny Jones, belted out his classics on an old guitar, she sat silently struggling with her self-esteem.

‘What do I bring to the camp?’ Coleen asked herself as she stared down at that pillow and burst into tears.

‘Those first few days were tough. I got there and I thought, “What have I set myself up for?” There were loads of personalities and I just sat there.

‘Then, day three, the headaches from withdrawals from caffeine, sugar and alcohol kicked in. I didn’t really prepare before I went in. And then the hunger came because we didn’t really get stars in the first week.’

Staring down the barrel of three weeks sleeping rough in the Australian bush away from her family back in Cheshire, Coleen thought, ‘I’m not sure I can go all the way.’

But a week later, she experienced a breakthrough. For the woman who sparked the Wagatha Christie saga – with her fiendishly ingenious investigation into who was selling stories gleaned from her private Twitter account to the tabloids – proved just as shrewd a detective in the jungle.

By the first Friday in camp, she was the only contestant to figure out that the Reverend Richard Coles and Love Island’s Maura Higgins were lying about the hellish living conditions they were enduring in their separate camp.

After meeting the two new campmates, Coleen spoke up, telling Danny Jones: ‘Something’s not right, they’re not telling the truth.’ (It became her show catchphrase and, appropriately enough, when speaking to the Mail, she was clutching a mug bearing the statement.)

From that point on, the competition changed for Coleen. She came out of her shell and went on to solve other camp mysteries, securing not only her reputation as a valued member of the group but a place in the final.

It turns out that her sleuthing skills date back to her childhood. ‘I usually sniff things out before they actually happen,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Even down to Christmas presents when I was younger. I knew what I was getting before it was Christmas.’

Coleen also reveals that the month she and Wayne spent apart while she was in the Jungle is the longest they have been separated in the course of their 26-year relationship.

But the former Manchester United star, also 39, did find one way to communicate with her – by getting Coleen voted in for a Bushtucker trial.

Seeing his wife of 16 years growing increasingly despondent as she kept missing out on trials, Wayne took to social media with rallying cries of ‘Vote Coleen’ and ‘We want Coleen in a trial’.

Sure enough, she was called up to lie in a coffin crawling with rats, maggots, cockroaches and meal worms and, taken aback by his own influence, Wayne wrote on X at the time: ‘I could be in trouble here.’

Laughing when I told her this, Coleen says: ‘I’m glad he did because I was desperate to do a trial. At the time I thought: “What’s the point in coming here if I’m not doing any trials?”

The presence of the rats made Coleen realise that Wayne could have been responsible.

‘Back home, I had a rat in my car and I didn’t know I was driving around with it, but it did a lot of damage by chewing through the wires.’

But it wasn’t rats that caused Coleen the most discomfort, it was cockroaches.

And a moment that had viewers shouting at their television screens came when they saw a cockroach scuttle unnoticed across Coleen’s face and bury itself in her ear.

Recalling the torment – which saw medics rush to interrupt the Bushtucker Trial – Coleen says: ‘I was like, “What was that?” I could just feel it going round and I saw people with their faces like, “That’s not right but like, don’t panic because she will panic”.

‘But I didn’t panic, the medics came over and squirted water in and it eventually came out, it was all okay.’

To help fill the long periods of idleness that are part and parcel of camp living, Coleen would keep busy by completing 126 squats a day.

This regime paid off when she followed in the footsteps of stars from Katie Price to Myleene Klass to join the so-called ‘waterfall of fame’, by taking a shower in a bikini.

Revealing the secrets of her chiselled figure, she said: ‘At home every morning when I’m in the shower I do squats. I get up before the kids get up and I’ll do a routine of squats and I know if I’ve got them done I can carry on. 

‘I would also do a few gym sessions and Reformer Pilates but in the Jungle, obviously, it was my squats.’

Given her luxury lifestyle, some wondered how she would cope with the seamier sides of jungle life but Coleen soon proved she had the right stuff.

‘I have got luxuries in life but I’m no princess,’ she assures me, ‘I feel my campmates were surprised that I wasn’t fazed by living outside. I might not have camped that much but I used to clean the apartments at a Pontins holiday park when I was younger.’

She adds: ‘Going to the dunny [camp lavatory] doesn’t bother me, I’ve gone behind a tree before. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty, I’ve got four boys, we’ve been in situations where we’ve got dirty. 

‘We go to ponds and mud trails. None of that fazed me and if I had all of my lot there, I could have stayed there for weeks and weeks.’

Indeed, Coleen took on many of the chores to make up for not looking after her sons. ‘It’s just my daily life to pick up after people, to just get on with it,’ she says. 

‘If I don’t do it myself it mightn’t get done. It was hard to step back from not doing other people’s. There were times when people took longer to do their chores. I was desperate to go and do that but we got punished for it.’

The first thing she did after coming out of the jungle was to FaceTime her husband. ‘Wayne just said how proud he was,’ she says. ‘Obviously, in the letter he sent to me in camp, he said he’s never missed me as much as he does now.

‘I can understand that because we’ve not spoken. We’ve been apart for weeks and weeks on end. [Normally] we speak a number of times a day, and we FaceTime. To not have that communication, it’s been tough.’

Wayne remained in the UK to manage his football team, Plymouth Argyle, in Devon, while their two eldest sons Kai, 15, and Klay, 11, also stayed home.

‘It was harder for them to come out [out of] school. They’re older, it’s more serious. We took the decision to keep them in school.

‘But, they did say they weren’t going to school tomorrow because their mum was in the final. I don’t know what school’s going to say about that. Obviously, they haven’t come all the way to Australia so maybe they do deserve a day off.

‘The little ones, it’s easier. They’ve brought work away with them.’

Wayne also told his wife that he had held a viewing party for the final in her honour for their closest family and friends at their £20million Cheshire mansion.

Now Coleen is back with her mother, father and two younger sons as they prepare to return to the UK to reunite with the rest of the family ahead of Christmas.

The mother-of-four planned Christmas and did all her shopping before she left so she could return safe in the knowledge that everything was ready.

In terms of the future, she says she wants to ‘enjoy Christmas, which I’m really looking forward to, and then we start again in the new year when, in January, I will sit down with my team and see what I am going to do going forward’.

Given her spectacular success on I’m A Celebrity, ITV will be desperately hoping that it is part of her future plans.