After all the heartache, the press speculation, it has been confirmed: Konnie Huq will carry a torch today in London’s Olympic parade.

What a performance. First the 32-year-old former Blue Peter presenter was in, then she was “wavering”, then she was calling the Chinese regime “despicable,” and then she was in again – but only because she supported “Olympic ideals”.

Now a pro-Tibet activist tells me that Huq may be participating only so that she can spring a surprise at the parade. Can this be true?

Huq is not what one might call a rebel. Ten years of sticky-back plastic – she was a Blue Peter presenter for a decade – have left the impression that she is simply too much of a good girl to risk upsetting anyone. Certainly, a fake-blood-spattered Tibet protest would seem somewhat out of character.

“No, I’m just going to do the run – I don’t want to cause any more problems,” she says. “People have suggested that I should wear a T-shirt or the Tibetan flag, but I’ve made my views clear. Obviously, I’m doing it because I support the London Olympics in 2012, but I don’t condone China’s actions.”

She is not the only one. When Huq carries the torch from Lad-broke Grove to Notting Hill in west London at 11am today – one of a number of eclectic personalities, including Sir Trevor McDonald, Kevin Pietersen and Sir Steve Redgrave, involved in the run – she is likely to find it tough going.

Human rights protesters and supporters of Tibetan independence have made extensive plans to disrupt the progress of the torch, just as they did in Athens at the torchlighting ceremony a couple of weeks ago.

Having stated her views on China, doesn’t she wish she were chanting slogans rather than burning calories? “I’ve got misgivings,” she tells me with her trademark wide-eyed earnestness. “But the Olympics is about more than one country – it’s about global values. You know, my doing this is not about condoning China in any way. China is a bad egg. A lot of the people who are doing [the parade] feel the same way.

“Maybe I’ll write ‘Free Tibet’ on my wrist very small, so only I know I’m protesting.”

This gesture would be scant consolation to those under Bei-jing’s cosh, but it might perhaps be a significant step for a TV presenter who is used to being scrupulously nonpartisan.

Despite, or perhaps because of, her sexy-school-prefect appearance, small scandals have a habit of sticking to Huq.

Remember, for instance, the stink caused when she dared to support a pro-cycling rally with Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, and was accused of endangering the BBC’s impartial-ity? Remember Blue Peter’s phone-in fakery row, when a child was wrongly announced as the winner of a charity competi-tion? But Huq’s CV shows she is ambitious and by no means the bluntest spade in the shed.

As a 17-year-old she interviewed Neil Kinnock for News-round – although, she admits, she didn’t “get anything ground-breaking” from the then Labour leader – and she later studied economics at Cambridge.

Her second crack at interviewing a Labour leader last year – this time the outgoing prime minister Tony Blair – met with less acclaim. Newsnight, in particular, mocked her questions about what kind of food he could cook (spaghetti bolognese) and whether he wanted more privacy (“sometimes”). But she thinks her accusers missed the point.

“We were there to make a film about the history of Downing Street, not to interview the prime minister,” she says. “It was about the history – the nightwatch-man’s chair, the famous staircase, the cabinet room.”

Children’s television seems to do strange things to some of its presenters; her ex-boyfriend of six years, Richard Bacon, was kicked off Blue Peter when a tabloid caught him taking cocaine. Last week a coroner’s report on the death of Natasha Collins, another children’s television presenter, revealed that she had died in a scalding bath, probably from heart failure, but that the volume of cocaine she had taken would have been enough to kill her on its own.

Huq did not know Collins. However, she does knows a little of the pressures of being a children’s presenter. “We have to be whiter than white. But I’m not the sort of person who’d be photographed throwing up in the street anyway.” She says she saw no evidence of drug-taking among her CBBC colleagues, adding: “Perhaps that’s because I’ve got blinkers on”.

Indeed, she’s teetotal and has never taken drugs. Her parents, who moved from Bangladesh to west London, in the 1960s are Muslim, as is Huq – although, she admits, a “relaxed Muslim”.

Maybe it’s time she relaxed her wholesome image just a little bit more.

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