'PREPARING THESE MEALS ISN'T A GAME, IT'S SERIOUS — LIVES ARE AT STAKE

As our campaign hits £2.6m, Ian McKellen and Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev get stuck in with peeling apples.

- David Cohen

Ian McKellen sits at a trestle table in a London East End church and begins to peel his third apple of the day. Looking dashing in his colourful scarf, he flashes his trademark devilish grin and chats to the other volunteers about "the art of peeling" as they prepare a hot roast with apple crumble to feed around 130 of the most vulnerable people in Tower Hamlets.

On his left is Phil, 52, a chartered accountant whose story of dramatic downward mobility is a salutary reminder of how poverty can happen to any of us — even middle-class people with white-collar professions. Phil earned a hefty £250,000 a year before the wheels fell off in 2022 due to severe mental health issues, including anxiety and depression, and he now has to feed himself on just £1.25 a day. On McKellen's right sits Ausra, 48, a single mother who suffers from depression, and who must get by on an impossible food and utilities budget of £10 a day for her and her two children, aged five and 10. Both Phil and Ausra, and many of the dozen or so volunteers who have come along, say they would not survive were it not for the weekly food provided by this resilient little charity, Neighbours in Poplar - which in turn is supplied by one of the funded partners of our winter appeal, The Felix Project.

McKellen has come down to this uncelebrated corner of the East End to show his support for our joint campaign with Comic Relief, accompanied by his friend Evgeny Lebedev, proprietor of The London Standard. Their friendship goes back more than 15 years to when McKellen was playing Estragon in Waiting for Godot and Lebedev met him to propose the idea of taking the play to the Moscow Art Theatre. Although the transfer never materialised, it led to them becoming friends and business partners, buying a historic Limehouse pub together - The Grapes - where Charles Dickens used to drink with his godfather.

'A formula for success'