Claudia Winkleman revealed her favourite moment in Traitors | TV & Radio | Showbiz & TV

She set the “cat amongst the pigeons” in an explosive Traitors showdown that became one of the most watched TV moments of the year, before daring fellow contestants to vote her off Claudia Winkleman’s hit gameshow – which they duly did. Now she’s publishing her devilishly twisty new courtroom drama, which taps into themes of falsehood, deception and, most fittingly, the perils of sitting in judgement upon others.

But criminal defence barrister turned bestselling author turned standout Traitors star Harriet Tyce creases up at suggestions she planned it all. In fact, she insists, it’s been a “bonkers” series of happy accidents coupled with her growing confidence as a writer having ditched binge drinking, of which more shortly. “There’s been a lot of synchronicities with regards to the show and me and the book and everything else,” she admits with a smile.

«Everything about this book has been gloriously bonkers. I handed it in on Halloween 2024 and my first contact with The Traitors was December 13 before months and months and months of auditions then filming in early summer. But in a way, there have been thematic similarities with my experiences of the last year… I feel this book has a life of its own!”

Despite having four bestselling novels to her name, Harriet, 53, whose 2019 debut, psychological thriller Blood Orange, became a major lockdown hit, was an unknown quantity when series four of the TV phenomenon arrived in January.

(If you’ve been stuck on the International Space Station for the past six months, the show features 22 contestants in a Scottish castle divided into traitors and faithfuls – the latter of whom have to attempt to identify and banish the former, who can «murder» everyone else one at a time.)

By the time Harriet, a faithful, was banished in episode seven after blowing her top at breakfast in a jaw-dropping showdown, following a series of startlingly accurate interventions, she was a household name. And a slightly fearsome one at that.

Today Harriet is warm, chatty and mortified about losing her cool in front of ten million viewers when, having correctly fingered (ultimate joint-winner) Rachel Duffy as a traitor, she shouted down fellow faithful Roxy over coffee and croissants – telling her it was all about setting “the cat amongst the pigeons».

The run-in was TV gold, as was the moment she correctly called out Rachel after being picked to take part in a confessional box. No wonder The Traitors has been one of the few genuinely blockbuster shows in recent terrestrial television history.

“I hadn’t lost control but I had lost a bit more control than I’d like,” she admits today of the breakfast showdown. “I don’t like criticism, though I obviously put myself out there every time I write a book or open my mouth, but people were upset with how I spoke and I was upset too – I didn’t like watching it back.

“Since then, I’ve been asked a lot about whether I’d have done things differently. The answer is no, it is what it is – it’s a cliché but you can’t change things – but I feel happy I’ve apologised because it is only a game, even though, while you’re in, it feels very real.”

Despite her meltdown, having voted four out of four traitors, she left the show with an enviable record and a lot of fans. “The whole confessional thing, the moment I told Rachel, ‘I know you’re in there…’, a lot of people say that was my favourite moment in the show and Claudia said it was her favourite moment across the whole series.”

Harriet blames lack of sleep and the show’s high-pressure environment for sending her brain “whizzing” and talks warmly of fellow contestants, with whom she’s become good friends, having travelled to Northern Ireland to hang out with Rachel. And it’s worked out well timing-wise for her stunning new novel, Witch Trial, published on February 26 and already enjoying rave reviews.

“It isn’t the book of the show, and the show was not the book,” she insists, having applied on a whim to appear on the Traitors, one of more than 300,000 hopefuls. “They didn’t have a round table where they said, ‘We’re gonna have a police officer, we’re going to have a barrister’,” continues Harriet, who gave up practicing the law two decades ago after becoming a mother-of-two. “For whatever reason, they liked me.”

Witch Trial – focussing on a juror, respected heart surgeon Matthew Phillips, sitting on the murder trial of two Scottish teenagers who think they’re witches (it’s hard to reveal more without spoilers) – had an equally storied creation. Having been fascinated by the idea of people thrown together by chance on a jury to make a momentous collective decision, she set the story in Scotland where juries are 15-strong and there are no opening speeches – all the better for keeping readers guessing.

She also developed an interest in witches. “You can buy spells on Etsy, you can buy hexes, it’s genuinely a thing,” she says. “I can’t pretend I didn’t think, ‘Well this feels like it’s a topic of current interest’, but it wasn’t a deliberate marketing decision.”

Then she took her son, Freddy, 22, to see a production of The Crucible, which used the notorious Salem Witch Trials of 1692 as an analogy for the pursuit of Communists in fifties America. Arthur Miller’s iconic play felt utterly relevant in the midst of modern cancel-culture, social media pile-ons and general groupthink.

“I went away thinking you can see ‘witch hunting’ across the board,” says Harriet. “There are people who manage to avoid being infected by the hysteria, but it’s definitely something we’ve seen in modern times. So I read about Salem and the pieces fell into place.”

In a slightly nutty twist, having learned to use a ouija board and tarot cards for research, Harriet asked the spirits if the omens were good to start writing. “I’m really bad at it, but the three-card hand basically said, ‘Absolutely not. Move away, go nowhere near this!’,” she chuckles. “I asked again the next day and the conditions were slightly more favourable. But I’d done 100 words or something and I took the dogs for a walk and fell over and smashed my elbow.”

In too much discomfort to type, the book on hold, she read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, an iconic gothic crime novel from 1824. It inspired the final bits of the jigsaw for her own story.

“I grew up in Edinburgh and the whole history of witch trials is something that’s so fraught in that part of the world,” she says. “I remember as a child going to the then Museum of Scotland and they had a calf’s heart full of lead nails which was some kind of talisman against witches. I’d never gone near ouija boards or tarot cards before and I can’t read horror. I scare myself so easily that even looking into all of this was quite nerve-wracking.”

Following the extraordinary success of her debut Blood Orange – a “Marmite book” she calls it – had been hard. “It is a bit of a poison chalice,” she admits. “Though I appreciate that sounds a bit like, ‘How hard is my golden throne?’”

An entire second novel was thrown away after disagreements with her US publishers – “I was calling it The Rose Garden and they said it had to be titled The Body in the Rose Garden, and I was like, ‘But there isn’t a body… and that sounds like Agatha Christie’. In the end, I had a pile up of five bodies which was indirectly a ‘f**k you’” – before she found her métier again with The Lies You Told.

Now on her fifth novel, she’s growing in confidence as a story-teller. “I think Witch Trial is my best book by a long stretch,” she says. “If I never write another one, at least I’ve got this. And I hope that it reaches readers. It entertained me hugely. By the end, I was cackling.”

Cutting out drinking, which she now believes she abused as a young barrister, has been key to her current contentment.

“When they’re drunk, people are boring, angry and repetitive – it doesn’t do anyone any good – but at the same time I’ve derived a huge amount of pleasure from it. It was good until it was bad. Some people can drink in moderation – I’m not one of them – and I didn’t like how I was when I drank too much and I drank too much all the time. If I went out for lunch for a glass of wine, it would turn into three bottles.”

Did she consider herself an alcoholic?

“I think it depends how you define it. I couldn’t control how much I drank, so that would say I was an alcoholic. But if you think an alcoholic is somebody who has lost everything then I was very high-functioning. There wasn’t a physical dependency, but there was a psychological dependency and a social dependency.”

She pauses: “I was just an arse when I was drunk.”

Having stopped, she’s delighted to have lost five stone in weight and the difference in photographs from five or six years ago is extraordinary. “I feel like myself again. I’d lost sight of who I was. But I have worked hard to lose five stone. The ambassadorship I’ve been offered off the back of TV exposure was for diet food. I’m like, ‘Yeah, f**k off. Give up drinking, mate!’”

As a former barrister, Harriet, who lives in London with her financier husband Nathaniel, is appalled at the state of the criminal justice system. «Lack of money, lack of investment, lack of care, people don’t see, until it actually happens to them, why people should get Legal Aid or whatever, but it’s brutal.”

She’s also concerned about moves to end the automatic right to jury trials.

“Obviously, it’s time consuming and if you’re accused of having a forged travel pass and you elect trial by jury, given you would only ever be able to get six months and you wouldn’t go to prison, is that really a good use of money? On the other hand, for the defendant personally, it’s going to have a catastrophic effect on their future reputation. I see both sides, but it’s been a cornerstone of our justice system forever.”

Witch Trial is dedicated to her father Bill, a former High Court Judge in Scotland who also pops up in a cameo. Was he disappointed she left the law? “I think he understood. It’s really hard if you’re the primary carer for kids… I’d be going off and staying in a Travel Lodge for three weeks at a time and that was just not a runner. I think he’s pleased I’ve ended up with a fulfilling career.”

And you can’t get more faithful than that.

• Witch Trial by Harriet Tyce (Wildfire, £18.99) is published on February 26 and can be pre-ordered now