AMANDA PLATELL: I’m so ashamed of what I mentioned about you, Coleen… however hell will freeze over earlier than I apologise to your as soon as pricey buddy

Before Coleen Rooney entered the I’m A Celebrity jungle for a reported record fee in excess of £1.5million, I thought: ‘Oh dear, here we go again.’

Another worthless WAG trying to rebrand herself and coin it in.

I recall writing disobligingly about her during the ‘Wagatha Christie‘ trial when her former friend Rebekah Vardy took her to court, after Coleen claimed Vardy leaked stories about her to the media. (A judge ruled in favour of Coleen.)

Commenting on the fact that Coleen hobbled in wearing a brace on her fractured foot, I suggested it was a carefully calculated ‘sympathy boot’.

Having watched you in the jungle for the last week, Coleen, all I can say is I’m sorry.

I got you wrong.

Far from being a precious WAG like Rebekah, Coleen has shown herself to be a sweet, unaffected mum who cares most about her four young sons and her marriage to Wayne, which she admits has had some rocky periods.

Explaining why they stayed together despite his earlier indiscretions, she said simply that ‘they are a team and there was always love there’.

Vardy is writing a daily diatribe in a newspaper trashing Coleen, declaring: ‘I said in my first column that Coleen is coming across as dull in the jungle. And nothing much has changed.’

Well, a lot has changed for me. Far from being a privileged prima donna, Coleen has shown herself to be someone who mucks in, talks honestly about her life with Wayne and sends secret messages of love from the jungle to her children back home.

But not everything has changed, of course.

Hell will freeze over before I ever say sorry to Rebekah, who is surely the personification of treachery and spite.

Ageless Aussie envy 

Aussie actress Nicole Kidman, 57, appears at a GQ magazine awards ceremony looking sensational in a red, back-laced gown – and an identikit of her fellow Down Under evergreen, Kylie Minogue (right), 56.

I’m wondering why I didn’t inherit that ageless Aussie gene. Or is it just I haven’t yet found my Mr Right tweakments?

The Charity Commission’s conclusion that Captain Tom’s daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband pocketed £1.4million from his book deal and that she sought a £150,000 salary to run his affairs made me think. Was the heroic captain’s ‘darling’ daughter egging him on as he walked round the garden – ‘Come on, Dad, another lap for the needy’ – while thinking all the time that every extra circuit would be lining her own pockets? 

++ Westminster Wars ++

• Outrageous that the Labour government justifies robbing farmers by saying they must ‘pay up for the NHS’ when, within weeks of coming to power, its pay increases to workers in public services run by the party’s union paymasters were calculated at £10 billion. 
• As for Labour’s cruel winter fuel cut, new figures predict it will plunge 100,000 pensioners into poverty. Meanwhile, it has opened more than a dozen new asylum hotels where migrants who have contributed nothing to this country get heating and three hot meals a day.
• Tesco, M&S, Sainsbury’s and Asda all warn the increase in employer NI contributions will cause job losses, store closures and increased prices for customers. The retail sector employs more than three million people and contributes more than £100 billion to the economy. Talk about biting the hand that feeds us.

The British Council lists 90 words defining the decades, using ‘bikini’ for the Forties. A little known fact is that the word derives from Bikini Atoll, where nuclear tests took place. I’d humbly suggest the bikini didn’t truly explode until Brigitte Bardot wore this one in 1953.

Footballer Raheem Sterling backs a campaign fighting ‘hygiene poverty’ so those who can’t afford basics such as soap and washing powder don’t ‘suffer as he did as a child’. Crikey, that means we Platells lived in hygiene poverty – washing-up liquid being our go-to for cleaning not just the dishes but our clothes, bodies and hair, often all at the same time in the shower. And we never left home dirty.

A Bridget too far, Renee 

Renee Zellweger says that when her dead screen husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) appeared as a ghost in the fourth Bridget Jones film: ‘I shed some tears.’ Not as many tears as we Bridget Jones fans will when Mad About The Boy is out, with her in her mid-50s dating a hot rocker half her age – in a bid to keep the franchise alive. 

Strictly head judge Shirley Ballas swooned over Pete Wicks’s skin-tight, pink latex trousers. ‘Your hips swinging left and right…I don’t think I’m going to forget this evening for as long as I live,’ she squealed. A 64-year-old salivating over a dancer half her age? It’s just cringeworthy.

New ads for Jaguar cars feature, let’s say, extravagant, multi-cultural folk. The LGBTQ-loving brand boss Santino Pietrosanti says he’s ’embracing the full spectrum of human potential’. How does the maths work? Jags can cost £80,000. Those folk in the ad look as if they couldn’t afford an electric scooter.

Hugh’s sorry now? Older dad Grant 

Hugh Grant reveals that as a dad aged 64 with five youngsters, he believes he had his kids ‘much too old in life’, wishes he’d started a family earlier and sometimes feels he needs a long stint in a sanatorium or an abbey.

It rather endeared him to me. A salutary message to older dads who think having kids late in life will keep them young, when all it does is make them feel exhausted.

I was worried about the social media abuse millionaire Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg would suffer when his new reality TV show Meet The Rees-Moggs appeared.

But then I recalled that in my many encounters with him, Jacob had the old-fashioned manners of an angel – and the skin of a rhino.

It’s Sheer nonsense

What a ninny Ed Sheeran is kicking up a fuss about his vocals being included in the new Band Aid 40 single, and saying it was demeaning to Africans or some such woke nonsense.

Hate to break it to you Ed, but alongside the voices of Bono, Harry Styles, George Michael (yes, his voice is in it), Sting, Chris Martin and with Paul McCartney playing, we wouldn’t have noticed your whining little vocals anyway.