Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips opens up about daughter’s funeral on air to challenge guest about Matt Hancock breaching lockdown rules

Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips opened up live on air about burying his daughter Sushila after her death in April this year.

Sushila, a freelance journalist, was 36 when she died following a 22-year battle with anorexia.

In a powerful moment during an interview with Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis on Sunday, the broadcaster challenged Lewis on lockdown rules in the wake of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s resignation for breaking his own social distancing guidelines.

Phillips said he wanted to put forward a ‘personal question’ before speaking about the day of Sushila’s funeral.

He said: ‘Over the past two days cabinet ministers, including you, have come out to essentially defend the prime minister and Matt Hancock. The pictures of what we saw were of an encounter on May 6.

‘On May 11, my family buried my daughter who died not of Covid but during the lockdown. 300 of our family and friends turned up online but most of them were not allowed to be at the graveside, even though it was in the open air, because of the rule of 30, because of the instructions by Mr Hancock.

‘Now the next time one of you tels me what to do in my private life, explain to me why I shouldn’t just tell you where to get off?’

Not offering any form of condolences, Lewis said: ‘I absolutely accept and understand the frustration, even the anger that people have having been through the situations they’ve been through.

‘As you say, Trevor, people across the country, I’ve lost friends whose funerals I’ve not been able to go to over the last period. That is such a tragic situation for any of us to be in. That’s why it’s so important all of us do what we can to keep ourselves our families our friends, our wider community safe.

Trevor Phillips with his daughter Sushila (Picture: Nigel Howard)

‘What Matt did was wrong. He acknowledged that, he apologised immediately for his behaviour and acknowledged what he did was wrong and it’s obviously why he’s taken the decision that his position was untenable and distracting from the wider work we’ve all got to do to move forward out of the pandemic.’

He added that in resigning, the health secretary had ‘put his family and all of us across the UK first’ in order for the focus to stay on ‘getting us out of the pandemic as quickly as we can’.

Phillips, 63, wrote an article for The Times about his daughter’s struggle with ‘a severe eating disorder’ for more than 20 years.

Hancock released a video explaining his decision to resign after breaking lockdown guidelines (Picture: Twitter)

His comments came after the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle spoke to Oprah Winfrey about her own mental health since marrying Prince Harry.

‘Hours before writing these words she and I bade farewell on a familiar threshold: the specialist unit to which she admits herself periodically when the daily struggle against her demons proves just too exhausting,’ he wrote.

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;I do know what it feels like to have to pin your teenage child to the floor of a speeding car to prevent her throwing herself out of the door.

‘I understand what it is to hear that she may not live long enough to go to university. I have met the girls with whom she shared the hellish wards reserved for the most distressed, and learned not to look away when she tells me that I’ll never see one of them again because she has taken her own life.’

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