Meet the gypsy influencer giving Nigel Farage a run for his money

Trewley Precious Sunshine Temple, one of Britain’s biggest gypsy influencers and proud lifelong resident of Clacton-on-Sea, doesn’t think Nigel Farage or Count Binface are the Essex town’s only political options.

“Maybe it’ll be me,” she whoops. “Maybe I’ll be the next MP!” The 26-year-old has amassed more than one million followers across TikTok and Instagram – where she’s been posting since she was 17 – thanks to her hilarious, warts-and-all videos about everyday life on a deprived Clacton estate. She walks everywhere barefoot and makes regular trips to the corner shop for crisps and baked beans in her dressing gown. One day her content will feature a glamorous influencer event or make-up tutorial, the next she’ll be cooking 200 hot dogs to hand out to hungry local children on Hallowe’en.

Now she’s set to make a splash on television as the star of Channel 4’s new docuseries, Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives. We’re meeting at her pastel pink-painted family home a few days after Farage resigned, triggering a by-election. She’s made me pizza and onion rings and urges me to make myself comfortable on the sofa as her mother, Tina, fusses around. The walls are covered with photographs of Temple and her four siblings, her army of nieces and nephews, and her late father, Sidney.

Is she a fan of the Reform leader? “People that should be repping Clacton are people that will fix it,” she replies. “That’s not me cussing [Farage], that’s just if anyone who is rich, and in politics, went to a poor area for a year or so and nothing’s really happened. It’s like, ‘Babe, what’s going on?’”

Blonde and deeply tanned with a gleaming smile worthy of a Colgate billboard, Temple is warm, funny and prone to sweary exclamations. She also doesn’t hold back on politics, poverty and why she’s chosen to eschew “traditional” gypsy values.

In Clacton, 49 per cent of state school pupils are eligible for free school meals, compared with the national average of 27 per cent. Walking around the estate, with its simple houses and numerous potholes, it’s evident that this is a community that has been left behind. But Temple is intent on improving her “scummy” area’s reputation through her videos and the new show.

“Sometimes people get on this high thing – not even just in politics – and they’ll forget the reality of being deprived. When I was younger, there were kids that were abused: physically, sexually, emotionally. There were women that were abused; men would get nicked,” she reflects.

Unlike other gypsy women her age who embrace domesticity, Temple isn’t married and has no children. She’s broken out at a time when UK social media is filled with videos of gypsy wives cleaning caravans, chalets and houses or cooking elaborate meals for their families. It’s the British equivalent of the explosion of Mormon content creators in America, where figures such as Hannah Neeleman (AKA Ballerina Farm) and Nara Smith share an idealised vision of womanhood online. It doesn’t take a genius to note the similarity between the title of Channel 4’s docuseries and the Hulu/Disney+ mega-hit The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

But Temple – born to a gypsy father and “gorja” (meaning non-traveller) mother – offers a different perspective. Two of her four sisters, Pearlygirl and Honey Peaches, had multiple children by their early 20s; her other two siblings, sister Ruby-Anne and brother Jamie, who “rebelled” by finding conventional work as an estate agent, went against the grain.

“I’m not cussing anyone that wants to do that [traditional] route,” she says. “My sisters are married. My cousins are teenagers, and they’re married with children. I always felt a bit like a black sheep because I would think, ‘I don’t want that yet’, and everyone else around me had it. So I want other girls to know, like, it’s OK. You don’t have to be shamed because you don’t want to follow that [way of life]. You can choose something else.

“Like, why can’t I have a career and business then children? Why do I have to have a child then find out who I am?”

Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives isn’t Channel 4’s first foray into life in the travelling community. Big Fat Gypsy Weddings was broadcast between 2010 and 2012, nominated for a Bafta and, at its peak, attracted nearly eight million viewers. Did she watch it?

“I actually liked Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. The only thing I thought could have been a bit different is adding the new traditions in. Like, not every traveller lives in a chalet or a caravan – even though I do have a chalet and a caravan.”

The show presented a vision of gypsy life that was obsessed with image and glamour. While Temple agrees that looking good is important in her community, she insists it’s not the be-all and end-all. “We are very glam,” she says. “But there is more… With us, you’re gonna get everything you haven’t seen. Like even with the Furys [the family of boxer Tyson Fury, who currently have their own Netflix reality show, At Home with the Furys], they’re amazing, I think they’re very funny, but not every traveller is a multi-millionaire. Not every traveller is famous. Some of them are just from a deprived area.”

She tells me that her personal “maintenance” costs run into the hundreds each month: highlights cost £57 and hair extensions £105, while her nails, redone every 10 days, clock in at £80. It’s striking how similar the women in the family look: Temple, her mother, and two of her sisters (Pearlygirl and Honey) have lips obviously puffed-up from filler. “We’re like the Kardashians,” she giggles in the show, “but if the Kardashians were fat and broke on benefits”.

When she was 19, Temple left home to move in with a boyfriend, a decision which, in the eyes of her community, constituted a marriage in all-but-legal terms. “If you give yourself to a man, they see it as you gave yourself over to them,” she says. “So you’re their wife. Whereas someone not from that community would just see it as I gave my virginity to my boyfriend. But I wouldn’t have given it to him if I was gonna break up four years later – I would never have done that. Life happens. It is what it is.”

She expresses relief that the relationship ended. “Can I swear, or no? You ain’t got a f---ing clue,” she laughs. “Thank God I’m out of that. Listen, I could have been a young mum, been a wife. Oh my God! I think, ‘No, I can’t’. Babe, I’d rather get my nails done than wipe a baby’s bum.”

Her love for her estate, where her mother has lived for 40 years (her father, Sidney, died from cancer in 2023), means she wouldn’t consider moving even if television turns her into a celebrity. She tears up as she talks about how the local community rallied around her family following their bereavement.

“When he was dying, and you couldn’t leave the house [because of Covid lockdowns], we were his nurses, so we was with him all the time,” she says. “People were waiting for – I’ve got chills on my legs right now – their benefits to hit to drop milk at the door, to drop cereal and food that they didn’t have in their house to make sure we had it in ours, so that way we didn’t have to leave him to go and get food. That is what you call loyalty.”

When Channel 4 first approached her, she was concerned that the show would exploit her community in the quest to make “poverty porn”, similar to previous series such as Benefits Street and Benefits by the Sea, filmed in nearby Jaywick, which is classified as the UK’s most impoverished neighbourhood. But, she says, the production team understood them, and became like family.

Her quest for fame and fortune is nothing new: while choosing her GCSEs, she asked her teachers: “Have you got anything for fame?” She had her first taste of celebrity at 22 when she starred in the Paddy McGuinness-hosted game show Tempting Fortune, where she won £20,000. “I’m very rich in life, in the sense of, like, I’ve still got a home over my head, I still – thank God – have my siblings, I’ve got my mum, but I want them to be OK,” she tells me. “I don’t want my mum to worry. I don’t want my sisters working 10 hours at a dump to pay a phone bill. I don’t want that. I want to help them and keep them afloat.”

I ask whether she’s worried about people on the estate’s reaction to the show – whether they think she’s getting “above herself”, or whether they’re jealous of the money she’s making (she says she’s turned down certain TikTok opportunities worth “thousands” because they don’t align with her values). Those who criticise her are either plagued by “insecurity”, she tells me, or simply don’t know her well enough.

“I don’t know why anyone would be jel [jealous]. Like, babe, in reality, I’m a tramp from a council estate that’s got lip filler. So everyone that’s like, ‘Oh my God, who does she think she is?’. What do I think I am?” she says, gesturing to her inner thighs. “Please, I’ve got chafe.”

Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday, July 20

[Source: Daily Telegraph]