BRITAIN: Michael Barrymore's hopes of a television comeback were dealt another lethal blow yesterday when his former drugs counsellor said he saw him swim in the pool in which partygoer Stuart Lubbock was found dead.
Essex police confirmed their perjury inquiry was ongoing as Mr David Benson - who met the former Strike It Lucky and My Kind of Music host at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting in Malibu, Florida - became the third person to challenge directly Mr Barrymore's evidence to last month's inquest into Mr Lubbock's death.
The inquest recorded an open verdict on the death of Mr Lubbock (31), who was found floating in the swimming pool of Mr Barrymore's home in Roydon, Essex after a drug-fuelled party. Post-mortem examinations showed Mr Lubbock, from Harlow in Essex, had a combination of drugs and alcohol, including ecstasy and cocaine, in his system. He had also suffered serious internal injuries which may have been the result of a sexual assault.
The award-winning entertainer has always insisted he played no part in the death of Mr Lubbock, and specifically denies having given him cocaine or rubbed the drug into his gums. Mr Barrymore also told last month's inquest that he could not jump into the pool in an attempt to save Mr Lubbock because he could not swim.
That was flatly contradicted by his estranged wife Cheryl, who told the inquest that her former husband could swim and that she had regularly seen him administer drugs to other people. Mr Barrymore's truthfulness was also challenged by a former bodyguard, Mr Stephen Gilby, who claimed he had seen the star doing the front crawl for the width of a pool and back.
Confronted with this in a GMTV interview last Monday, Mr Barrymore insisted: "I cannot swim. I cannot float. I don't know why Cheryl's doing this. We haven't spoken in five years since the divorce. It ended nastily unfortunately. It's sad she's had to lie, and I don't know why she's lying. I know what the implication is: why didn't I jump in and get Stuart out? Then there'd be two of us dead. Or is that what everybody wants?"
But the charge of lying was thrown back at Mr Barrymore yesterday when Mr Benson said he had seen him swim in his pool while staying with the star at his Roydon home after Mr Lubbock's death: "He had a bathrobe on and took it off and jumped in the shallow end and went up to the deep end . . . I saw him swimming in the pool."
Mr Benson told GMTV yesterday that the entertainer had remarked he was "the first person to get into the pool since Stuart died." Confirming that he was willing to talk to the police - whose perjury investigation was requested by the coroner in the light of Mrs Barrymore's evidence to the inquest - Mr Benson said he was "disappointed that he stood up in court and lied." Explaining his personal embarrassment, and that he was in fact motivated by concern for the entertainer - who is an addict and an alcoholic - Mr Benson said: "The only thing Michael wanted from me was my sobriety.
"The way it's going now is that he's acting the way he was when he was using. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we do things behind people's backs, we run away. And these are all the things he's doing now. If we want to stay clean and sober and face up to responsibilities we don't run away to Mauritius and Dubai and Malibu."
Mr Barrymore's solicitor, Mr David Corker, hit back at the latest allegations, saying that his client had repeatedly and consistently told him he could not swim, adding that in any event: "Whether he can or can't swim has nothing to do with how Stuart Lubbock died."