There’s a long-standing joke among the junior ranks at ITV that Lorraine Kelly spends more time cutting ribbons than she does hosting Lorraine, the morning show named in her honour.

They may well have a point. In March, for example, she opened a new branch of clothes shop Bonmarché in High Wycombe’s Eden Centre, while last July she unveiled a new studio for Marlow FM in Buckinghamshire.

Given that she presented fewer than 60 per cent of the editions of Lorraine broadcast in 2024, leaving the likes of Christine Lampard and Ranvir Singh to cover for her, the optics were poor.

Her absences didn’t go unnoticed by her bosses either, with some taking an increasingly dim view of the woman who was once seen as ITV’s top female presenter.

Meanwhile, they all admire the consummate professionalism of Good Morning Britain’s Susanna Reid, 54, who dutifully hosts her show week in, week out.

And yesterday, ITV bosses made it clear who they rate highest by sensationally cutting back Lorraine’s five-days-a-week show to 30 weeks from 52.

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Adding insult to injury, it also slashed the running time from an hour to 30 minutes, handing the extra time to Susanna’s GMB, meaning that her programme will air from 6am to 9.30am during the weeks Lorraine is on air, and 6am to 10am when it’s not.

‘Susanna is the favoured one,’ says my snitch inside ITV. ‘The bosses are besotted with her and they wanted to give her more and more. At the same time it was increasingly obvious that Lorraine wasn’t there.

‘She had a show named for her which has been going for 15 years but it actually became more hassle than it was worth to keep having to sort out cover for her.

‘Thankfully Christine and Ranvir love doing it and would often be available at short notice. In fact, if Christine would ever take on the role full-time then maybe it would save the slot but she just doesn’t want to. So we are left with a situation which in the end wasn’t a great look for Lorraine.

‘She’s the grande dame of ITV, or perhaps she thought she was. She used to rule that show with an iron fist and what she said went, but recently she hasn’t been there.’

It is not known if she will have her pay slashed but one insider assures me that it is unlikely her salary will remain the same.

Lorraine, 65, isn’t the only victim of the axe being wielded by the bigwigs. Loose Women, the long-standing panel show which last year celebrated its 25th anniversary, was also cut from 52 weeks per year to 30 – though the good news is its running time will stay at 60 minutes.

While ITV has insisted the changes were nothing to do with the performance of either show, both have a growing number of critics. Lorraine has long been seen as the ‘unloved sister’ of the ITV daytime roster, while Loose Women is sometimes referred to as the ‘black sheep’ of the channel because of regular controversies generated by the behaviour of its high-maintenance roster of panellists.

‘They are always falling out, despite what they try to tell you,’ says one insider. It’s tiring for the bosses, they are grown women.’

Lorraine’s ratings have been falling too and neither show is said to be making the sums of money that ITV expect and, indeed, need, at a time when making television has become more expensive than ever.

In fact, ITV bosses yesterday stressed that they were going to put the money saved by the cuts into improving the output of other departments, such as drama.

This Morning, which runs from 10am to 12.30pm, with presenters including Alison Hammond, Ben Shephard, Cat Deeley and Dermot O’Leary, remains untouched.

Indeed, insiders tell me that, despite the drama surrounding Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby’s departures, it’s still seen as the jewel in ITV’s crown and is regarded as a ‘success story’.

It was also announced that ITV Studios will no longer make Good Morning Britain, which will instead be produced by ITN, the organisation behind ITV News.

The studio will be moved from the broadcaster’s White City studios to Gray’s Inn Road in central London where the news bulletins are made and one team will work across ITV News and GMB.

For many, it has come as quite a shock that GMB, which has a big ‘magazine show’ element to it, will merge with ITV News.

The architect of the change is believed to be the highly rated Andrew Dagnell, ITV’s new director of news and current affairs, who was promoted from editor of ITV News. He took up the role at the start of the year, replacing the veteran incumbent Michael Jermey. Dagnell, who spent his early career at the News Of The World and the Sunday Mirror, once worked as a producer on GMB and sources say that he was able to see the benefits to be gained by merging the shows.

Some GMB staff are hoping that Dagnell will axe Ed Balls, the former Labour MP and husband of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who often co-hosts the show with Susanna Reid.

Many take the view that his political connections mean that he’s not someone who can be relied upon to provide impartial news coverage.

Under the new arrangement, it is thought ITV News anchors might be given try-outs presenting GMB alongside Susanna. The announcements were made in front of 500 staff at an emergency meeting chaired by ITV’s managing editor daytime, Emma Gormley, at TC1, the studio where Saturday Night Takeaway and BBC1’s Graham Norton Show are filmed.

The first staff knew of the gathering was on Monday afternoon when Gormley sent an email to everyone working on GMB, Lorraine, This Morning and Loose Women. She insisted they all attend in person as she didn’t want to use Zoom – presumably to avoid it being filmed and leaked.

I’m told that the unveiling of the plan for the ‘new look’ schedule by Gormley and her senior colleagues came across as ‘totally chaotic’. They refused to take questions from anxious workers, instead insisting they would have to return today for a second Q&A session because they weren’t sufficiently well briefed.

As one insider tells me: ‘It felt like it had been patched together in a couple of hours. It’s pretty obvious they weren’t really ready to announce it but news is already getting out about the cuts. There is no getting away from the fact it’s going to be a bloodbath.

‘There will be one team working across what’s left of Lorraine and Loose Women as well as This Morning. At the moment there is a huge staff, there are people there literally to put headphones on guests. Now things are going to be streamlined – and then some.

‘Being told you couldn’t ask questions at the end didn’t help. What’s coming just around the corner is clearly going to be pretty brutal and they’re anxious about speaking out of turn and slipping up. Everyone is worried – from the bottom to the very top.

‘There is so much panic and so much worry. For such a long time ITV was seen as a safe place to work but, right now, there are very few people who are actually not going to be affected by the cuts.’

Meanwhile, sources at the network tell me that at least 220 of the staff will be made redundant and will leave by the end of the year when a new schedule will be launched to much fanfare.

ITV went to great pains yesterday to insist none of its biggest stars will be sacked, which is likely to prompt even more anger among the behind-the-scenes staff who are under threat. To make matters worse, shortly before an email was sent to all staff on Monday evening, ITV chiefs updated their redundancy policies on internal systems, a move which alarmed employees.

The word is that the roots of today’s problems lie in the past. One source says the daytime schedule never fully recovered from the axing of The Jeremy Kyle Show in 2019 – often its highest rated show – following the death of participant Steve Dymond.

The network suffered a further blow to its image more recently when long-standing This Morning presenter Philip Schofield departed after rumours he had engaged in an extra-marital affair with a young male colleague who first joined the show as an intern.

The host initially denied the affair but later admitted it in a mea culpa to this newspaper.

‘If the bosses had handled each of those situations better, they may not be in quite such the mess they’re in today and not so many people would be worried for their jobs,’ said one source.

‘But as always in these situations, the chiefs are always OK.’