April is a former Ms Great Britain… so why does she claim it’s impossible to find love?

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For an ’empowered, super-successful woman’ (her words), 2020 Ms Great Britain April Banbury can be rather daft when it comes to men.

She’s met goodness knows how many online in the past few years, dated ‘more than 100’ of them and slept with ‘the ones I felt I might have a connection with potentially’. Then . . .

‘They just ghost me,’ she says with a look that’s part fury, part hurt on her very pretty face.

‘They’ll feed you all this information — ‘I’m looking for a serious committed relationship’ and ‘I do want to settle down now’ or ‘you’re everything I want in a partner’ — all this and then, before you know it, you’re texting, ‘Did you forget to pay your phone bill? Because I haven’t heard from you.’

April — height: 5 ft 5 in, bust size: 32E (‘my boobs are real. I developed really quickly. I’ve got stretch marks everywhere’), Ms GB mission: ‘to empower other women never to give up’ — turned 33 on Sunday.

With that ‘super-successful’ career as a gown designer — her frocks fetch £1,500 a piece — a swish bachelorette flat in South-East London and the Ms GB sash draped on her bedroom mirror, she stands as something of a poster girl for Millennials and is rightly proud of her achievements.

But she is, she confesses in this astonishingly honest interview, terribly lonely and thoroughly disillusioned by the predatory world of online dating in which women are, in her experience, expected to ‘give it up’ on the second date. 

‘I haven’t slept with all of them. In the past few years, there’s maybe been five,’ she confides, leaning forward in her chair

‘But the dates never come to anything because they ghost me or there’s red flags.’ Red flags?

‘When they’re dating multiple women or when they start cancelling dates and they blow hot and cold. 

‘You don’t hear from them for weeks and then they’ll pipe up and say, ‘Oh, I was thinking about you the other day.’

‘I think, ‘well, you weren’t thinking about me two weeks ago. You didn’t have time for me then.’

‘They pick you up and drop you when they please. I never ghost guys. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t feel a connection.

‘I don’t know why they can’t do the same. I guess they don’t like the confrontation. It’s easier for them to bounce from one girl to the other, say nothing and hope you don’t go crazy on them.

‘It makes you feel used — that you’re not good enough. You think, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do they not want me? Why are they treating me like this?’ After a period of time it wears you down. It makes you question yourself.

‘But there’s not actually anything wrong with me. It’s the fact men just can’t keep it in their pants and stick to one woman. With online dating it’s too available for them now.

‘If you don’t give it up on the first or second date, they’ll just go and find someone who does. Online dating has messed everything up.’

April is actually a funny, likeable woman with the sort of natural beauty that makes you gasp. 

She was crowned this country’s first Ms Great Britain two years ago, shortly before the first Covid lockdown, when she impressed judges with her talent for fashion and commitment to helping young girls with eating disorders as an ambassador for the charity SEED.

Indeed, you’d think most red-blooded males would consider themselves the luckiest man on the planet to have a lasting relationship with her. 

Not so, it seems, in April’s experience in the world of ‘disposable’ (her word) online dating.

‘We no longer talk to people we meet in real life and build a connection. Even on the Tube or the bus, no-one speaks to anyone any more.

‘If a guy wants to talk to you, he’s not going to chat you up in a bar. That’s too much effort. He can go on an app, swipe right and hide behind his phone pretending to be someone he’s not.

‘I’ve had a catfish before.’ She means a dating app user with a fake identity. ‘I’d been talking to him for a few weeks because he’d been away on holiday so we hadn’t had a chance to meet up.

‘We really got on personality wise. I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is the one. He’s amazing.’ I went to a bar to meet him but couldn’t see him. I texted him saying, ‘You’re not here.’ 

‘He said, ‘I’m over here in the corner.’ I wrote, ‘I can’t see you. Wave at me or something.’ So he’s waving and no-one else is waving. I thought, ‘Oh my god, that can’t be him.’

‘He didn’t look anything like his profile. He was shorter — probably my height — and very skinny. He could have been a different person. 

‘It could have been his brother’s profile he was using — his adopted brother.’ 

Her eyes widen in indignation. I can’t help but laugh. ‘It gets worse,’ she warns me.

‘I’m thinking, I’ll give him a chance because he’s got a good personality. Maybe that will grow into a physical attraction or whatever.

‘I sat down and he’s sneezing, then he’s wiped his nose on his hand. I’m so OCD with things and the snot was on his hand. He just left it there.

‘I’m thinking, ‘OK, well you’re not the right person. You’ve got snot on your hand and I’m going to have a meltdown.’ I had to make my excuses and leave.’

She rocks with laughter but her mood turns on a sixpence and she looks inexorably sad.

‘Back in the day, my nan and grandad met on a walk. They talked. That’s how you find a connection.

‘People don’t want to do that because they hide behind a dating app. You don’t know who you’re talking to. They can pretend to be anyone, sell you the dream and then…’ 

She shakes her head.

‘I was in a relationship with someone — a guy who was so gorgeous and stunning. I couldn’t believe my luck. We saw each other for about 18 months but he would flirt with girls and I didn’t like it. 

‘Call that insecurity or a jealousy thing or whatever but I believe that wasn’t right. It didn’t make me feel good about myself.

‘I suggested breaking up. I really wanted him to fight for me and he didn’t. He bloody didn’t.

‘Afterwards, I was an emotional wreck. About a year after, he’d met someone else. On his Instagram he’d had a romantic dinner with her on a holiday. I thought, ‘How dare you meet somebody else and commit to them when you didn’t commit to me.’ It made me feel awful. I became a serial dater after him.

‘I’d go on so many dates it was shocking but I knew the feeling I had when I met him. You know, that fuzzy tummy? 

‘You really fancy someone. You want to spend time with them. I knew that feeling existed, so I was chasing that. I’ve been on dates with so many men and I’ve never had that.’

As well as designing frocks for pageants, April, who was raised largely by her much-loved grandmother Dorothy after her mother left her father, Olympic cyclist Ian Banbury, when she was eight years old, works as a VIP luxury bridal stylist ‘for higher-end brides, celebrities and things like that’.

When I raise an eyebrow, given her own disastrous love life, the irony is lost on her. For a super-successful woman, April can be beguilingly ditsy at times.

Take her early ambition to become a beauty queen. She pursued ‘my dream’ through anorexia as a teen and horrible bullying at school ‘which pushed me to transform into someone else essentially — a confident person who was ready to take on the world. I’d put in my rollers, curl my hair, set it and my confidence grew.’

When she won Ms Great Britain her father, who always impressed upon her that second best is not an option, you have to be the best at everything you do, was ‘elated’.

‘It was the first Ms Great Britain, so I’d made history,’ she says. ‘My dad was so proud because he’d represented Great Britain in cycling in the Olympics, and then I did in this competition. He said, ‘champions run in the family’.

‘Getting on stage in a bikini isn’t about doing it to flaunt and show off and get compliments. It’s about showing you’re happy and confident enough in your own skin. It’s empowering other women to make them believe they can achieve anything.’

But not, it seems, a happy-ever-after? Has she tried building a relationship upon friendship, I suggest. She looks truly aghast.

‘Guys don’t want to be friends, do they? They want sex. If I said to a guy on a dating app, ‘let’s just be friends’ it would never happen. 

‘If we went on a night out they’d try it on. You go on first dates and guys are trying to kiss you in the restaurant even when they can’t be bothered to speak to you.

‘There was one guy who took me to a nice restaurant — I think it was Hakkasan [the Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant in Mayfair]. 

‘He was successful, career-driven with a real estate company on the side. I think he was maybe used to women throwing themselves at him.

‘He wasn’t really talking to me. He’d pick up his phone and have a conversation with his friends or his business partner. I didn’t want to say anything because . . . well, you know, business is business. 

‘Then he came over, sat next to me, grabbed my thigh and said, ‘so tell me about you’. Then the phone would ring again. It was his mum, and he’s really grabby and gropey next to me. I thought, ‘whoa’.

‘I had dinner and told him I had to be up early in the morning.

‘I’ve not had a one-night stand on a date. The second date is probably the earliest — the second or the third or the fourth. 

‘I don’t know why they treat us like that. Is it because we’re independent and powerful and men don’t like that?

‘I’ve had men saying, ‘Well, if you don’t want to be treated like this you shouldn’t dress the way you do.’ I’d say, ‘I’m empowered.’

‘Female empowerment is such a strong thing. We should be able to do and say whatever we want without men sleazing on us and telling us who we can and can’t be.’

To hear her speak, though, in her one-bedroom flat where a bunch of red roses bought a while ago has wilted in a vase on the table, none of this feels like empowerment.

‘I want someone who respects me, who supports me, who’s kind — just a nice person — and has your best interests at heart. But it’s hard to find nice guys — so hard. They’re all such a nightmare.’