Lawyers make for great reality TV fodder, coming as they do with a (unfounded, of course) reputation for ruthlessness and duplicity.

So it was almost inevitable – SPOILER ALERT – that host Claudia Winkelman would touch the shoulder of barrister Hugo Lodge and select him as one of her three traitors in the new series of the wildly popular BBC show, which started on New Year’s Day.

Lodge, 51, had told Winkelman he would love to be a traitor, seeing himself as a ‘psychopathic teddy bear – there’s a hug in my name, but get too close and there’ll be a dagger in your back’. He was less thrilled by the show’s new twist: the selection of a red-cloaked traitor who has overall control of who can be murdered. Lodge said he did not want ‘middle management’ interfering in his business.

Lodge, called to the bar in 1998, is a regulatory and financial sanctions specialist with 2BR chambers. Inevitably, The Sun has labelled him a ‘big time barrister who’s represented murderers, fraudsters and drug-smugglers’. The paper went on: ‘As well as advising companies dealing with potentially dodgy characters, Hugo also defends them in court.’

It remains to be seen how far Lodge can go in the show. Obiter suspects he may not last as long as his fellow traitors, but we wish him well, particularly as he has pledged to donate some of his winnings to Amnesty International. The show continues tonight.

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