‘The Traitors’: A Real Housewife and an Ex-Parliament Member Are Now Feuding

(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of The Traitors Season 2.)

In the early days of any Traitors season, contestants are bound to find themselves grasping at straws. Faced with lots of anxiety and zero concrete evidence, players tend to latch onto each body motion and every micro-expression, teasing them out for signs of treachery. This, dear readers, is how a former Speaker of the House of Commons—Season 2 contestant John Bercow—found himself facing the suspicious wrath of a Real Housewife.

Could a career in U.K. Parliament prepare anyone for ongoing interrogation by the one and only Tamra Judge? In the coming weeks, we’re about to find out.

On this season of The Traitors, 21 reality stars are competing to collect money and share a $250,000 prize pot. Their secondary mission, however, is even more crucial: While most of the players are Faithfuls, there are also a few Traitors among them, each of whom will run off with the money, should they make it through the final elimination. Each week, the Traitors “murder” one of their fellow contestants while everyone gathers at the castle’s roundtable and votes to “banish” one suspected Traitor.

John started getting side-eye from the group after host Alan Cumming went around the table picking Traitors. While all of the players were blindfolded, Big Brother alum Janelle Pierzina heard him breathing heavily. Could that be a sign that he’d been selected? In this castle, any hunch is good enough. Tamra took things from there and, much like an English foxhound, she’s proven relentless in pursuing her prey.

John blamed the wheezing on his asthma, but not everyone was buying that bit. In the following physical challenge, John and Tamra were paired up. As the two sprinted side by side, a wheezing Tamra requested John’s inhaler—if he’s asthmatic, Tamra figured, he should have one on hand.

“At that time in the game, we’re all trying to figure out who’s telling the truth and trying to find breaks in their stories,” Tamra told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “I was really sick at that time and I was on an inhaler. I had left it and I didn’t have it. It’s stupid, I’m doing this mission, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. John is on my team. I’m going to see if he’s lying.’”

There was no inhaler in sight. In fact, John denied even having an inhaler at all, which suggested to Tamra that the asthma was a straight-up lie. Is it OK to point fingers at someone’s health to accuse them of lying? Probably not. But it sure makes for good TV, says Tamra.

“To me, that was a Housewife move for sure,” she said.

John, however, took everything in stride. Following the fiasco, he wasn’t too offended by Tamra’s accusation.

“I mean, the whole thing was a little surreal,” John said. “But of course… you’re operating in an atmosphere in which, and at a stage of the competition in which, there is no significant evidence. So people are picking up scraps.”

The Traitors is a game full of untrustworthy folks, after all, so it’s only logical for people to start pointing fingers at any potential target. This is something John understood, although he now thinks the asthma line may have thrown a wrench in his strategy.

“I suppose I knew that I made a mistake [in revealing he’d been asthmatic] and that it would have been better to preserve an inscrutable look, because it gave people something to latch on to,” John said. “But I knew that I was innocent. I knew that I was a Faithful.”

In the end, John told Tamra to stop barking up the wrong Traitor tree—he was being honest about everything, including the asthma.

“The truth is, I was historically asthmatic,” John told The Daily Beast. “I’m not asthmatic now; I don’t use an inhaler. But I don’t breathe particularly well. And it was the sheer sort of release of tension, I think, at the end [of the Traitors selection process] that I breathed heavily. But I mean, it was to be honest, in the end, or a piece of what I call ‘stuff of nonsense.’”

Still, Tamra doesn’t regret making the accusation. The Traitors need to be found out one way or another, and any clue is as good as the last.

“At that point,” Tamra says, “you’re grabbing onto whatever you can to try to figure out if someone is lying or if someone’s story changes to break them and expose them.”

So, to sum things up: John was coughing, he lied about being currently asthmatic to make himself look as innocent as possible, Tamra caught him in that white lie, but neither one of them was a Traitor. Everyone was a little bit right and a little bit wrong in this situation, leaving the actual Traitors safe for another day at the manor.