A SCHOOLFRIEND of Kevin McGee – the former husband of TV comic Matt Lucas – said bullying had more to do with his suicide than drugs.

Northwich-born musician Jon Tristram, 32, who went to St Nicholas Catholic High School with Kevin, believes bullying at school made his friend develop serious issues that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Jon, who grew up in Winnington but now lives in Spain, said he wanted Kevin’s parents to know the truth about their son’s state of mind when he died.

“Over the last year and a half I had been talking to him on MSN and Facebook and we were talking through a lot of things. It told me a lot about what his state of mind was like,” he said.

“Things that were written in the papers were annoying him but a lot of his problems stemmed back to his school days. He suffered a lot of bullying. He was a quiet one and spent quite a lot of time away from school.

“He said he had spoken to someone on Friends Reunited, one of the bullies, and he had got some kind of closure from it. The drugs were just a symptom of his suffering, in that industry that kind of thing is easy to get into, I just want his parents to know that a lot of what is being said in the papers is wrong.

“They are all blaming the drugs but that’s not the case.”

Kevin grew up in Winsford and attended St Jospeh’s Primary School. His dad Francis has returned from Edinburgh where he sped to when Kevin was found hanged in his home on October 6.

Jon added: “Kevin was up and down a lot of the time, I think he felt alone.

He went up to Edinburgh to try and escape but I think that when he was up there he felt stranded.

“I was trying to get him to come over to Spain for the weekend, I had been hoping to see him so the news came as a massive shock. It was a shame, he was such a nice kid and he didn’t deserve to go through something like this.”