Hugo Lodge

YOU are probably told not to tell anybody that you’re going to be a contestant on The Traitors, until the show has actually aired.

It’s hard to think that a full-blooded yaposaur like Hugo Lodge was able to keep it a secret, but we’ll go with that idea if we must.

Instead, we can at least try to picture his post-banishment return to work as a barrister ­at the 2BR chambers in Chancery Lane. Presumably he had various lines ready for colleagues to somehow style out his official ranking as the quickest-rumbled Traitor the show has ever seen.

It had taken the players the time it takes to consume half a breakfast croissant to see through his bluster.

Of course, it’s also difficult to imagine that he did not go into “the castle” without thinking that his brilliant courtroom experience would see him safely sail through to the latter stages of the BBC’s gently sadistic parlour game. This is, after all, a man trained to dominate rooms, interrupt people mid-sentence, and look pleased with himself while doing so.

The fact he was effectively rumbled by Harriet Tyce, a former barrister without apparently realising it may be another reason to lie low for a bit. In legal circles Tyce, now a novelist, is apparently very well known.

Perhaps old Hugo was just being terribly kind and didn’t want to out her as fellow member of the wigged community, so pretended graciously he had never noticed the successful female lawyer with the well-documented and interesting career twist.