Andrea McLean says a business venture she launched after leaving Loose Women collapsed so badly that she lost her home, her pension and every penny she had. The broadcaster, who walked away from the show live on air in November 2020 after 13 years, says the failure left her owing hundreds of thousands and forced her family into rented accommodation.

McLean said the platform, This Girl is on Fire, was meant to combine wellness, retail and life coaching. Instead, she said it ended with bailiffs at the door, maxed-out credit cards and furniture being sold to buy groceries. She said she applied for jobs in coffee shops, clothes shops and office work on Indeed and did not even get a response.

The scale of the fallout is what gives her account its force. McLean said she was forced to sell her £1m Surrey home, and that the collapse left her in what she described as “excruciating shame” after financial ruin. She said an investor told her that her star had faded and that nobody was interested anymore. For a presenter who spent more than a decade on daytime television, the speed of that fall has clearly stayed with her.

Her comments land more than five years after she stepped away from Loose Women, when she became one of the programme’s most familiar faces. By then, This Girl is on Fire had already been set up as her next chapter, built around the kind of personal reinvention that television personalities often try after long runs on screen. What McLean describes now is not a smooth reinvention but a painful reset, with debt, lost savings and the loss of the home she once shared with her husband.

That is where the story sharpens. McLean said she and Nick Feeney have stayed together through the collapse, and described their marriage as stronger for it. “We’re still together throughout it all. We’re still friends. We still love each other,” she said, adding that they learned to appreciate “the free things in life, the little things.” The same period that stripped away her financial security, she said, also stripped away any illusion about status.

McLean has been married three times. She was married to Nick Green from 2000 to 2005, then to Steve Toms from 2009 to 2012, and married Feeney in 2017. Reflecting on those earlier relationships, she said: “When my last two marriages ended, there was a lot of laying on the floor and crying.” But she also said the current one has held: “This one is going to stick.”

Now, McLean says she has no appetite for another reinvention in public. Asked about what comes next, she said she is “not interested” in returning to the kind of work that came with the pressure of being in the spotlight. “This is clearly not what I’m cut out to do. I’m just gonna focus on my garden,” she said. After the business collapse, the debts and the years of trying to recover, that sounds less like retreat than a verdict.