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So, Jonathan Ross has gone! They’ve got him at last, the great simpering dissimulator.
He’s been outed as one of the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors – a man who has been using the camouflage of his lime-green jackets and outsize bouncy-castle personality to commit murder, cold-blooded murder, on virtually every TV screen in the land.
With a satanic cackle, the pompadoured broadcasting veteran has admitted his crimes and flounced out of the baronial Scottish schloss – and along with the rest of the nation I am asking: what about the other Traitors?
When will they be rumbled? And what’s wrong with the rest of the cast – the so-called Faithfuls?
What is taking these guys so long?
Let me confess that my understanding of the show derives largely from late-night snatches on a laptop propped up on the pillow. But I have seen enough to understand why the nation is obsessed.
Every aspiring politician needs to watch The Traitors; anyone who ever wants to be in a position of leadership, because it is a brilliant essay in one of the eternal and uncomfortable facts of human psychology.
The problem was summed up, for me, in a brief exchange between Alan Carr, the comedian (and Traitor) and Celia Imrie, the much-loved actress (who is, or was, a Faithful). Celia turned to Alan, and said: ‘You’re not a Traitor, are you?’ And he laughed and spluttered, with what seemed to me to be palpable guilt.
At that moment I saw a fleeting but unmistakable shadow of doubt cross Celia’s face – and then it was gone, and the doubt was expunged, and she joined him in his laughter, and I wanted to shout at the screen: ‘No, Celia, you fool! Hold that thought!
‘You know he is a wrong ’un. We could see it in your face.’
What this show has brilliantly illuminated is not so much the devilish cunning of the Traitors, as the moral cowardice and self-deception of the Faithfuls.
At the time of writing, Alan Carr is still in the castle, though his treachery cries to Heaven. Towards the end of Thursday night’s show after the banishment of Kate Garraway (Faithful), when the group were sipping champagne and congratulating themselves on making the final, he was asked to state, for the record, that he was a Faithful – and he laughed so much he could barely get the words out.
Jonathan Ross was surely a blatant panto baddie, and as for Cat Burns-Temison, the other Traitor who goes undetected, it’s as if her status as a kind, talented, reserved and unassuming young woman has protected her from proper thought and investigation.
It’s absurd! Traitors’ experts say that there has never been a series where the Faithfuls have been so slow on the uptake. I’m afraid that we are facing the awful reality of cognitive dissonance – our refusal to call out evil when the facts are seemingly unmistakable, the peculiar habit of allowing bad people sometimes to flourish in plain sight.
It is fitting that this show should be a BBC triumph, because it is in a way an allegory for terrible events at the Corporation. When I was a young child, I remember Jimmy Savile appearing on screen, with his cigars and his hectoring manner, and I found him so scary that I couldn’t watch him – and never understood his appeal. I was not alone.
There must have been dozens of Beeb honchos who knew intuitively that something was up with Savile. They may not have grasped the extent of his depravity, from child abuse to necrophilia, but they surely knew in a deep-down animalistic way that the man was a rotter. Yet they never did anything.
Like the poor paralysed Faithfuls in Celebrity Traitors – who keep brainlessly accusing and banishing the innocent – they never acted on their instincts. Why not?
Perhaps in the case of Savile it was because he enjoyed the halo effect. He seemed to do all sorts of good works – running marathons and raising millions for charity and working as a hospital porter (shudder!). How could he possibly be a child molester?
The same force field of self-delusion probably protected those other BBC stars, Huw Edwards and the late Rolf Harris. There must have been moments when their colleagues had pretty indisputable evidence that something was amiss – but it didn’t fit the story about the men in question.
Edwards was so nationally trusted that he helmed the BBC’s coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. Rolf Harris was the loveable and prodigally gifted artist and musician who sang Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. How could either of these sainted figures turn out to be so different in reality?
How could so many have missed the obvious? But, of course, that is so often the way with evil.
Think of those real-life traitors Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. These men passed British and American secrets to Moscow at the height of the Cold War. They betrayed their own country and probably cost the lives of brave agents behind the Iron Curtain – and many people more or less knew they were traitors.
Both were effectively exposed in the early 1950s, and yet both were somehow protected by the privileged, clubby world to which they belonged.
Philby was pathetically allowed to defect to Russia in 1963, and Blunt was even a member of the Royal Household, serving as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures until 1972.
You ask how the Traitors are thriving on this show, and the answer, sadly, is that the other contestants let them thrive.
The Faithfuls are bonelessly failing to act on their suspicions; and I will be honest and say that I have been guilty of the same dereliction.
I remember during Covid being appalled by some briefings against Kate Bingham, who was then starting the Vaccine Taskforce, and who was doing an outstanding job. The briefings were false, and designed to damage her, and me, and the Government, and I was shocked to find they were coming from advisers close to me (see Unleashed, in all good bookstores).
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be guilty of such treachery, and such dangerous nihilism, at a time of real national difficulty.
So, I dismissed the allegations made against my advisers, even though they seemed pretty well-founded. Well, I paid for that naivety, just as poor Celia Imrie paid for her indulgence of Alan Carr.
As viewers of the latest episode will have seen, he has murdered her – in plain sight – locking eyes, and toasting her with a glass of wine, and saying ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’.
Human beings are hard-wired to trust each other. We have evolved that way. The world is so complicated, and we have to make so many decisions, that the only way to make our lives work is to believe in what other people say.
That is a good thing, that natural spirit of trust – and it has allowed this species to make extraordinary progress.
The only downside is that this evolutionary tendency has left us with an occasional collective blindness to villainy, a refusal to face the facts of treachery even when they are staring you in the face.
That is the weakness that the Traitors are continuing to exploit. So come on, you honest Faithful, former England rugby player Joe Marler! Out them while there is still time!