Inside story behind Sharon Osbourne's diatribe against Amanda Holden

Waking up at her Cotswolds home on Saturday morning, Amanda Holden let out one of her famous cackles.

What made her laugh was not the interview she had given to the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine in which she labelled Sharon Osbourne ‘bitter and pathetic’ for ‘dissing’ talent show impresario Simon Cowell.

No, the source of her hilarity was Mrs Osbourne’s lengthy riposte posted on Instagram. In it, she described 53-year-old Ms Holden’s comments as ‘ill-informed’, ‘sycophantic’ and ‘factually incorrect’.

To recap, for those not up to speed on this spat between two of Britain’s best known TV talent judges, it began when Mrs Osbourne and her X Factor co-star Louis Walsh appeared on Celebrity Big Brother earlier this year. 

On the ITV show, the pair cattily disparaged their former boss Cowell: Walsh for his apparent use of Botox and Mrs Osbourne for supposedly not renewing her contract. The star, who was reportedly paid £500,000 for just over a week’s work in the Big Brother house, said she was ‘furious’ at the slight as it meant she missed out on another major TV gig.

Ms Holden, meanwhile, has been a firm ally of Cowell since 2006 when he hired her as a fellow judge on the nascent series of Britain’s Got Talent. So it became her turn to be furious when she heard the indiscretions of Walsh and Mrs Osbourne.

‘I hated seeing certain people in a reality show dissing Simon - he’s the person who’s given them all the chances, given them a lot of money and a lifestyle they probably wouldn’t have had,’ Ms Holden told Weekend magazine.

‘It’s bitter and pathetic. It was like Cinderella with her two sisters in the background - just stabby, stabby, stabby.’

Mrs Osbourne is not known to be a shrinking violent, and came out swinging as soon as she read Ms Holden’s words in the early hours of Saturday morning. Her personal assistant alerted her to the interview when its MailOnline version appeared as a Google alert on her phone. From her £10million Beverly Hills mansion, Mrs Osbourne, again apparently ‘furious’, began writing her response. Its fruition was an 675-word screed, penned by herself, unvetted by her PR guru Gary Farrow, and posted to both Twitter and Instagram with the help of a young member of her team.

Mrs Osbourne explained how she had been a music industry executive for decades before Cowell began his small screen empire of various talent shows.

In a dig at Holden’s husband, Chris Hughes, who is Cowell’s manager at talent agency YMU, Mrs Osbourne began: ‘Amanda, I am responding to your interview with the Daily Mail on April 12th, I respect the fact that you feel the need to defend your good friend and employer, Simon Cowell, who is also your husband’s employer, or so I’ve read.’

Mrs Osbourne went onto claim that Cowell ‘NEEDED ME for musical credibility on X Factor’, adding ‘I delivered for him and together all of us made a great team’.

‘The truth is, you don’t know me, Amanda or any of my close friends. You know nothing about my family history in the music industry, my achievements, the artists I have worked with, the shows that I’ve produced and my global celebrity.

‘Unlike you, the brand of Sharon Osbourne is known worldwide. There are many countries that I could work in if I choose to, however, I don’t have the ambition or time to do so.’

It is at this point that Mrs Osbourne becomes particularly personal, bragging that: ‘Before you were born, I was living in a mansion in Beverly Hills and continue to do so today and continue to have my country estate in England as well.’

Mrs Osbourne, 71, managed the likes of Queen and Motorhead before appearing on seven series of the X Factor and six seasons of Cowell’s stateside show American’s Got Talent. In her riposte to Ms Holden, she suggests she was paid more for her appearances on X Factor, than Holden has got from Britain’s Got Talent. Her greater earnings, she said, were spent on expensive designer handbags.

As if the letter itself wasn’t enough, friends of Mrs Osbourne warned that the row could become even more vicious if Ms Holden fights back.

‘Next, you can see Sharon raising things about Amanda such as the fact she flaunts herself on Instagram.

‘Sharon thinks Amanda is a right madam and she isn’t scared to go back for more. There will only be one winner,’ they warned.

While many a celebrity would be cowering under their duvets, terrified by Osbourne’s trademark acidic tongue, Ms Holden told friends that she ‘stands by every word’ and that she thinks Osbourne is ‘awful’ for critiquing Cowell so publicly.

‘Amanda doesn’t care, she will always stand by Simon and if she did the interview again she would say the same,’ says a friend of the star.

‘They are friends and she is loyal to him. Amanda doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her for Sharon’s response, she’s not moping around at home. She is pleased that Sharon noticed it because she meant every word.

‘Yes, Sharon was successful before she did the X Factor but Simon paid her a lot of money and gave her work for years. Amanda simply thinks you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you.’

The two women have known each other for years, though, it can be revealed that Ms Holden has long taken a dim view of Mrs Osbourne for how she treated her friend Dannii Minogue on the X Factor in 2007.

At the time, Ms Minogue, younger sister to pop icon Kylie, revealed that Mrs Osbourne screamed abuse at her in her dressing room and reduced her to tears just minutes before she was due on stage.

A source close to the situation said: ‘Amanda and Dannii have been friends for years and they are very fond of one another.

‘While Amanda has met Sharon a few times and Amanda has been fond of her, she knows what happened between her and Dannii and she doesn’t particularly like it. Sharon was mean to Dannii, Amanda was aware of that.’

What remains to be seen is what Cowell makes of his television wives scrapping in public.

‘Oh he will be absolutely bloody loving it,’ an insider said.