British politics has become as stressful and unpredictable as ‘Celebrity Traitors’ | Conservative Home

I’m taking a punt here, as I suspect some of our readers are not altogether au fait with ‘Celebrity Traitors.’

However I’m ploughing ahead regardless. If you haven’t been, you should watch it.

I was a refusenik, until my wife and adult children nobbled me and told me not to be such a stuffed shirt and watch some honest to goodness addictive reality TV. Having worked in television, nothing about it is ever very real, but I have reluctantly dabbled.

I say reluctantly, I remember a story from my school days of a sensitive Roman author being persuaded to go to the Colosseum when Emperor Titus staged a hundred days of free events who could not bear to watch the bloody spectacle, and yet when he did he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

That’s me and Celebrity Traitors.

For those uninitiated, a team of people are invited to, and isolated within, a Scottish castle, where three of them, unbeknown to the others are designated ‘Traitors’. It is their role over a number of days, challenges and round table meetings to mingle with the ‘Faithful’ and either ‘murder’ them (the killer weapon a letter informing them of the fact – don’t panic) or get them voted out by those faithful, by pretending to be one of them and pretending they too are as innocent.

Watch and you won’t regret it.

As a social and psychological experiment it is fascinating and remarkably stressful both for the conniving and concerned ‘players’ but also the audience, albeit they are in on the big secret of who is who, from the start.

The series has been going for a few years but this autumn’s ‘celebrity’ version is subtly different and has had me thinking about parallels with recent politics.

The Celebrity ‘players’ are the likes of Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Celia Imrie, David Olusoga, Claire Balding, Alan Carr, Kate Garraway and a number of other singers, actors and comedians.

On paper they are all ‘smarter than your average bear’. They are all famous for being quick witted, intellectual, well read, experienced and able to dissemble. Without snobbery they are cleverer than the normal everyday public that have been seen in previous series.

But here’s the kicker – it turns out these clever clever stars are spectacularly rubbish at the game. All that intellect and they’re making mistake after mistake about who are the traitors and who are not. For the record singer-songwriter Cat Burns is amazing at being ‘innocent’, yet deadly.

Watching smart people make seemingly obvious mistakes is when I started looking at the parallels with our current politics – and not just because of the ‘voting out’ element.

So many people, smart on paper, sometimes in fact, wander the current political landscape and yet there are so many wrong calls, misdiagnoses. Bad ideas held up as good ideas, good ideas ignored, and slowly people are whittled down to a paranoid  group desperately asking the same as the electorate:

“Will someone please, tell me what the hell is going on?”

I honestly believe that’s a question now heard regularly in Downing street.

Labour started this game thinking it was unquestionably they who were the ‘good guys’ and buoyed that they’d just seen off ‘the bad guys’ in of the last game.

After fifteen months of juddering false starts, and unexpected missteps they are now throwing out new policy almost as regularly as Starmer eliminates aides and the Tories scalp Labour Ministers. Increasingly, fewer people believe Starmer has the right ideas, but as they are still the designated people ‘in charge’ everyone has to watch in shock as their actions drive up immigration, strangle the economy and murder growth.

It’d be a stretch to brand them traitors, but after the Chagos give away and fawning before China you get quite close.

What of the Conservative though?

The Tories of course are hampered by having played the game before, and for some observers, very badly indeed. They’re haunted by past mistakes, meaning despite genuinely internally learning from them, far too many don’t believe they have yet, and so judge them on their past team performance. Thus the struggle to be heard whilst actually having some good new ideas is both real and frustrating. They are struggling on, despite continued suspicion, and accusations of being too quiet. On the upside and having looked sidelined in earlier episodes, despite the best efforts of others, they aren’t dead yet. Not by any means.

New entrants Reform have the loudest lone-ish voice at the table, and are very adept at pulling the herd towards their position. Brash, brazen and often effective, they can seem the pantomime villain you love to hate. However, for those taking them more seriously the audience are starting, very slowly, to ask questions about whether what they are being told is as easy or as simple as Reform make out. Questions are now coming that they struggle to answer or ignore – preferring to deflect by pointing the finger of blame rather than engage with their own game plan.

Over cook it, and that confidence they have may see them turned on unexpectedly by the rest of the group.

The Lib Dems are ‘the faithful’ in plain sight. Not ruthless enough to see, or want, the difficult choices, wedded with others to old ideas, and led by the ‘character’ in the show who most viewers see as ‘mostly harmless but a bit irrelevant’. So far, however, they are still in the game, though it’ll take more than cunning stunts, to move into contention for the main prize.

The Greens have thrown in a new face, who makes an excellent job or articulating an argument and a theory in an engaging manner. The one flaw is it just happens to be utter ill thought through balderdash. We watch with interest to see how many buy into it, whilst most sit back rolling their eyes. The hypnotism challenge became far bigger than the audience bargained for one ‘Zack’ made a clean breast of it.

Now the political ‘series’, like the TV version is not nearly over yet, it has – bar utter implosion of Labour  – a few more fraught years to run. The ‘obvious’ winners right now, need to stay the obvious winners for another three years, and as we know ‘a week is a long time in politics’.

So far Labours numbers keep falling, Reform stay out in front, and the Tories seem frustratingly glued to 17 per cent. Everyone else is close but a tiny bit behind – though within the margin of error. It can all completely change, trust me.

And in this game trust is everything.

We are all now well aware of Kemi Badenoch’s preferred strategy to win that back is to come out methodically with new policy. It’s got to be different from the recent past, but based in historic Tory values. She wants it focused on areas her team think will be both deliverable, costed and effective in breaking the UK out of its Labour induced doom loop – whilst simultaneously accepting the party’s past in fomenting, or neglecting some of the problems Labour are now making worse.

The brand new players of the game, Reform are appealing to the audience successfully, so far, to let them take victory, the prize money and take charge – since their message is all the others who’ve played before have ‘messed it up.’ You just have to believe they’d do better, but can you trust that?

Maybe they win, maybe they don’t but like the TV equivalent the outcome is not as certain as we might think right now, and front runners can fall even as they reach out their hand to grasp victory.

There is still all to play for – but away from reality TV and in our all too real current political drama nobody wants to end up with ‘traitors’ of any party coming out on top.

Celebrity Traitors can be found on the BBC iPlayer with new episodes on Wednesdays and Thursdays