Before there was The Traitors castle, there was a Moscow University dormitory in mid-Eighties Soviet Russia: a huge, 16-storey building housing around 3,000 students. Dimitry Davidoff was a psychology professor at the university when he created the premise of what would become the party game Mafia. The game, he told Vulture, spread fast around the building, and then the world, as exchange students took it with them across Europe. By the mid-Noughties, it had made it to my Church of England youth group, where it was played every Tuesday night.
Davidoff learned early the first lesson of success on The Traitors: “Since I was the one usually bringing the Mafia game to the party, everybody assumed I was very good and always killed me first.” In other words, don’t be seen to be a good player. Don’t be lured by admiration of your own sly tactics into overconfidence, or believe you are in any way intelligent, or you will crash out. If you have a job that might be seen by the group to give you some advantage (it won’t) – a barrister, a chess instructor, a diplomat, a former police detective – keep it to yourself. (I might also add, based on the latest series, don’t be a middle-aged woman; do be a brown-haired man under the age of 40.) To be a promising player in some way is to stand out, and if there’s one thing you don’t want to do on The Traitors, it’s stand out. This is why the final ten on any series is at least half made up of the unthreatening and the useless.
But anyone who spent too many of their teenage years playing Mafia knows that the real MVP of the game isn’t the mafiosi at all, but the narrator. The narrator does not play the game and so cannot win, but they have more control – and arguably more fun – than any other player: setting the scene and tone of the game, selecting who will be villagers and who mafiosi, controlling the day and night cycle, deciding when play needs to be shaken up with the introduction of a new power or role. A game of Mafia lives or dies on how good its narrator is.
Of course, most of these powers on The Traitors are held by the show’s producers, but if anyone has emerged victorious from its five seasons, it’s Claudia Winkleman, The Traitors’ High Priestess (stop trying to make Queen of Darkness happen, Hugo). Like any good narrator, she is fully invested. She understands that while it’s a game, the emotions it provokes are real. She knows just how seriously to take it; when to camp it up, when to break character to scream with joy on contestants’ behalf, when to break the tension with a joke.
She returns from Inverness the most beloved woman on British television. At the end of last year it was announced she’s soon to have her own chat show, produced by the same company behind Graham Norton’s. This, I think, makes her the first woman to have had a primetime chat show since Davina McCall’s in 2006, which was deservedly cancelled after a single series. The Telegraph even thinks she could save the BBC.
Brands speak of “the Claudia effect” like they used to “the Kate effect” – the simple fact of her wearing an oversized knit is enough to transform the fortunes of a small British label. According to the Times, her stylist, Sinead McKeefry, is the most powerful woman in fashion thanks to Winkleman’s Traitors wardrobe: a preppy-gothic blend of wax jackets, giant jumpers, tartan kilts, stomping boots, fingerless gloves and anything shaggy.
Her look is patently, purposefully, ridiculous: a fondness for fake tan rivalled only by Donald Trump; the panda eyes and deathly pale lips; the fringe, so long there are whole Reddit threads dedicated to how she can see out; the jet-black Lego hair, just the right side of Halloween wig. She hates exercise, hates fruit, hates water, refuses to go to the dentist and says her fringe means she doesn’t need to get Botox.
She rejects almost every societal expectation about what women should look like – except the one other women really care about: the way she dresses. It’s all an act, of course, but somehow, this demonstrably unreal exterior only serves to make the interior authentic. We even forgive her for being a nepo baby – her mum’s a former newspaper editor, her sister royalty. What is it that makes this unlikely visage – in her own words, “a walking fringe”, “a tiny orange lady” with “the body of ET” – a hero to so many women?
Compare her with her former Strictly Come Dancing co-host Tess Daly, the stooge to Winkleman’s bonkers act – or to Holly Willoughby or Cat Deeley. All are beautiful, polished, compliant, perhaps a little bland. There is, ultimately, little to aspire to in such figures: so you want to be like Tess Daly but you don’t look like Tess Daly? Good luck. Winkleman, by contrast, is aspirational for her character, rather than any physical traits. She is confident, drily funny, gloriously offbeat – if the most used phrase on The Traitors is “throw them under the bus”, the most used phrase about Winkleman is “mad as a box of frogs” – and, by extension, gives other women permission to be so, too. She calls out a boys’ club when she sees one, such as when the all-male traitors of series two kept murdering women and recruiting men (“It’s like the olden days”). She has opted out of the expectations that tell us women should be precise, inoffensive, agreeable.
Tess Daly is who women believe they’re supposed to be; Claudia Winkleman is who they actually want to be. Daly is a Barbie; Winkleman is Barbie after you’ve cut her hair with children’s craft scissors and drawn all over her face in Sharpie. I know which I had more fun with.
[Further reading: Robbie Williams didn’t need Britpop]
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This article appears in the 21 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe is back
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