The Dagenham Diva: Single mum Stacey’s wowed the X Factor with her ditzy witterings, but is she the ingénue she seems?

Last time Stacey Solomon went shopping at Lakeside, she slipped through the crowds unnoticed, just another young mother with a toddler in a buggy. This week, when she emerged from the X Factor house and returned to the Essex shopping centre with her 18-month-old son Zachary, she virtually brought the place to a standstill. Flanked by her sister Jemma and mother Fiona, she hurriedly bought make-up before slipping out through a back door to be whisked away by car. Back home in Dagenham, where Stacey lives with her mum in a street dominated by dreary pebbled-dashed post-war terraces, relieved only by the occasional off-licence or chip shop, net curtains twitched as she arrived home – a welcome flash of glamour.

Friends and neighbours are delighted that the 20-year-old single mother is one of the clear favourites to win this year’s X Factor crown. Aside from her self-deprecating manner and her so-called ‘Staceyisms’ (‘I think TV is real. I forget other people are watching’ ; ‘There was a picture in the paper of Peter Andre with a girl that looked exactly like me but it wasn’t me and I opened it and thought “What am I doing with Peter Andre?” but it can’t have been me because I’ve never met him.’), Stacey is a PR dream.

She also likes to wax lyrical about how she wants to win Britain’s greatest talent show for her little boy, Zachary. ‘My audition was for Zach. I would love to win this for him. It would mean everything. I’d be able to get him into a good school and get him all the things he needs.’

In part, she is representative of what many young single mothers in Britain believe today: that the only way out is if someone waves a magic wand. In Solomon’s case, that someone is millionaire X Factor judge Simon Cowell.

In a sense, she is the perfect modern-day Cinderella. From the rag-trade of Whitechapel where her great-grandparents lived at the beginning of the century to the riches of X Factor, she has become the nation’s sweetheart.

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