'Shut the f**k up, a**hole,’ snarled Omarosa Manigault-Newman at me. ‘How are your kids going to feel when they wake up and discover their dad’s a f**king f*gg*t?’

Yes, this is the same Omarosa Manigault-Newman who just spent a year inside Donald Trump’s White House.

I’ve met a lot of vile human beings in my life, from dictators and terrorists to sex abusers and wicked conmen.

But I’ve never met anyone quite so relentlessly loathsome as Omarosa; a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work.

I met Omarosa when were cast on the first season of Celebrity Apprentice. They we are, far left, with Marilu Henner between us. Omarosa, former White House insider, is a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work

Which beggars the question: what the hell was she doing inside the world’s most powerful building for 12 months?

The answer, as we can now see, was amassing a whole mass of damaging information to now use against President Trump and his administration on Celebrity Big Brother.

Well duh!

That’s what Omarosa does. It’s her raison d’etre.

This is a woman who would do anything to get what she wants - however shameless and shameful.

I met her a decade ago when we were cast together in the first season of Celebrity Apprentice in 2008.

I knew OF her, obviously.

She’d become America’s most hated reality TV villain after her diabolical performance in the 2004 season of the regular Apprentice.

But nothing quite prepared me for her opening gambit as we waited for the details of the first challenge.

Awaiting our first challenge, Omarosa sidled up to me and suggested the two of us have sex. 'Then we can make lots of money out of it.’ I stared at her and laughed: 'You must be joking, you deluded woman.' She didn't take it well. 'What are you? Gay?'

Omarosa sidled up to me at the New York Mercantile Exchange and said, quite seriously: 'Piers, do you want a showmance?' 'A what?' I replied. 'A showmance. You know, a romance on the show - we get it on together. Happens all the time on Apprentice. Everyone has sex together. Then we can make lots of money out of it.’ I stared at her grasping, ferociously ambitious little eyes, and laughed: 'You must be joking, you deluded woman.' She didn't take it well. 'What are you? Gay?'

From that moment, she turned on me like a viper.

I can honestly say I’ve never been spoken to in my life like the disgusting, foul-mouthed, homophobic way Omarosa spat at me throughout the weeks of filming.

Because I’d rejected her revolting sex plot, she decided the best line of attack was to repeatedly question my sexuality in the most crude and offensive manner imaginable.

At the time, I was separated from my ex wife, and mother of three of my four children – a fact Omarosa seized on with glee.

‘The mother of your children hates you Piers,’ she giggled on camera one morning, ‘and your children f**king hate you, they’re embarrassed by you. Is there another man raising your children?’

(None of these things was true)

On another occasion, in front of boxing champion Lennox Lewis, she said: ‘Hey Piers, I hear you got caught sucking a gay waiter’s c*ck in a hotel pool?’

This was a lie. I’m not gay and she hadn’t heard that about me. She’d just made it up to smear me and to provoke me into a confrontation.

Eventually, Omarosa took her bigotry to the boardroom, telling Donald Trump accusingly: ‘I think Piers is in the closet.’

She turned. She called me a 'f**king f*gg*t, said I'd been caught 'sucking a gay waiter's c*ck' and told Donald Trump I was in the closet. I responded to her by kissing Trace Adkins, right

‘You’re calling Piers a homosexual?’ replied an incredulous Trump. ‘I don’t think you know him very well.’

He then invited me to come back into the boardroom and respond. So I did, bursting through the doors, racing towards Omarosa, then veering away at the last minute to kiss Trace Adkins, a 6ft 7in country singer, with the words: ‘I’ve always loved a beautiful cowboy.’

Trump laughed, everyone laughed – well apart from Trace, who just looked bemused.

Beneath the laughs though lay a less savoury truth: Omarosa is a reprehensible human being, prepared to offer sex to win a reality TV show and use the most vile homophobic slurs against rival contestants.

She did all this purely so it would bring her more airtime, and more attention.

When I grew angry at the tidal wave of verbal filth she was spewing over me, she threatened me with physical violence: ‘‘Touch me, you’re going to get punched in the face’

When I grew angry at the tidal wave of verbal filth like this, using my then young sons as a weapon, she threatened me with physical violence: ‘‘Touch me, you’re going to get punched in the face.’

I thought of all this over the past few days as the scandal over White House staffer Rob Porter hit the headlines.

It’s obviously completely unacceptable that Porter was able to hold down such a high-level administration job with such serious allegations of abuse from two ex wives and an ex girlfriend hanging over him.

It was also completely unacceptable of President Trump to unequivocally praise Porter after he resigned, given that by then the full details of the alleged abuse including photographs of one of his ex wives with a black eye, had emerged.

I've been thinking about Omarosa since the Rob Porter scandal erupted. It's unacceptable that he was able to hold down that White House job and it's unacceptable that Trump praised him. But why with all the outcry over Porter's employment is there no outcry over the fact Omarosa was allowed employment?

And big questions remain over whom in the White House, in particular chief of staff General John Kelly, knew what, and when, about Porter’s history of alleged domestic violence.

But why is there no such outcry over the fact someone like Omarosa was also allowed to roam free in the White House for so long?

I was aghast when she joined Trump’s campaign team in July 2016 as a the ‘director of African-American outreach.’

I haven’t met an African-American in the whole country who would ever like to be ‘reached out’ to by Omarosa.

‘This is the greatest position in the world,’ she said after her appointment was announced, ‘to be at the centre of political power, of the universe.’

Yes, it is - so why was SHE in it?

My disquiet turned to utter horror when Trump won the presidency and Omarosa was appointed the White House’s director of communications for the Public Liaison Office.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that President Trump is mentally unstable, but this particular decision severely tested my faith.

I was aghast when she joined Trump’s campaign team in July 2016 , and horrified when Trump won the presidency and Omarosa was appointed the White House’s director of communications for the Public Liaison Office

Her tenure went exactly how I expected.

Omarosa achieved nothing but incessant chaos, upsetting all her White House co-workers, and picking fights wherever she went in a manner that was entirely unsurprising to anyone who had met her or watched her on TV.

She called out Fox News contributor Tamara Holder for having ‘big boobs.’

She was accused of physically intimidating and verbally threatening long-time White House correspondent April Ryan.

And after gay CNN anchor Don Lemon cut her mic during a segment, Omarosa told TMZ he should ‘stop being such a queen.’

By common consent, she achieved absolutely nothing to benefit the Trump presidency. In fact, quite the reverse.

Yet there she was, ensconced in her own office in the West Wing, watching, listening, plotting and almost certainly recording.

Now on Celebrity Big Brother, Omarosa’s been singing like a bitchy canary about Trump, Pence and others. No doubt a tell-all book will follow. She is a serial loser and her White House tenure defies logic

On Celebrity Big Brother, Omarosa’s been singing like a bitchy canary about Trump, V-P Mike Pence and others. And this will be just the start of it.

Brace yourselves for the ‘insider’ book, the docu series and the Lifetime movie.

What’s most surprising to me is that Donald Trump prides himself on only backing winners.

Yet Omarosa’s never won anything in her life.

In our Celebrity Apprentice season, she was fired when we were rival project managers, after I destroyed her in a challenge in what Trump called ‘the greatest slaughter in the history of the Apprentice.’

Yet he took this serial loser, and horrible human being, into the heart of the White House to spread her poison.

In its way, that’s just as big a scandal as Rob Porter, yet nobody seems to care.