Piers Morgan has claimed Dale Winton once snogged him with "tongues and all" for "several very long, lingering" seconds in a posh restaurant in London.
The ‘Good Morning Britain’ host has recalled a time when he got up close and personal with the ‘Supermarket Sweep’ presenter – who tragically passed away last week at the age of just 62 – while eating dinner at celebrity haunt in Covent Garden.
Speaking on the breakfast show today (25.04.18), the 53-year-old journalist explained that Dale had marched over to his table after he read a paragraph Piers had written about him in his book ‘The Insider’ following a telephone conversation.
Piers said: "He rang me up once – it was hilarious – and said ‘Piers, I think you’re wonderfully talented and handsome and I love you’. And I put this in my ‘Diaries’ when I left the paper world. And I put at the end that I felt slightly unnerved by this. "About three months after publication, Dale was in the Ivy and I went in there with my literary agent. He then stormed over and said, ‘All my friends are talking about nothing else apart from that paragraph you put in your diary, laughing.’
"I said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t start kissing me in here, Dale,’ at which point, he grabbed me in the middle of The Ivy in front of everybody and started snogging me! Tongues and all! It lasted for several very long, lingering seconds."
Piers was understandably shocked when he found out that Dale had passed away at his home on April 18 because he had only seen him two months prior.
He explained: "He was a very nice chap. He seemed very fragile. Tormented really. His childhood was very traumatic. His parents both died when he was very young. He seemed like quite a lonely guy, for someone so gregarious and loved."
A post-mortem into Dale’s death has been ordered by Scotland Yard but police have confirmed that they are not treating his passing as suspicious.