Why Nella Rose was booted from I’m a Celeb

Farewell Nella Rose, second to be voted out of the jungle on the 2023 series of I’m A Celebrity… 

As always, it’s hard (at least for a soft-hearted chump like me) not to melt and mellow when an evicted campmate returns to the real world via the recivilising medium of an Ant and Dec exit interview. And, though I can hardly believe it, Nella was my favourite campmate on day one.  

At the start the YouTuber seemed lively, funny, and refreshingly unconcerned with how she came across. And she is all of these things. But she has other characteristics that swiftly undermined the positives.  

Taking part on a reality show means that your tiniest flaws are magnified, particularly when there is some kind of flashpoint. Nella deserves the same sympathy we’d have for anybody else. But here is the problem – she thinks she deserves more. This was illustrated vividly in her spats with both Nigel Farage and Fred Sirieix, maitre d’ of Channel 4’s long-running First Dates.  

Fred saying to Nella, in casual campfire conversation, ‘I’m old enough to be your father’ led to a bizarre delayed tantrum from her. Several hours later, out of nowhere, Nella decided to pretend Fred’s comment was grossly insensitive, as her father died four years ago. She went into one of those exaggerated public humps for which only a six-year-old can be excused. Inevitably, ‘trauma’ was mentioned.  

This was the kind of passive-aggressive, goading territorial display that we are so often expected to genuflect to nowadays. It is an exploitation of people’s kindness and better nature and a way of asserting dominance.  

Where might Nella Rose have got this tactic from? Take your pick. In politics we had, fairly recently, the absurd pretend reaction to Boris Johnson using the word ‘surrender’ during EU withdrawal negotiations, or to Farage himself talking, obviously metaphorically, about ‘picking up his rifle again’. Deliberate bad faith reading of words is everywhere, and it works.   

Then there is the far-spreading poison of identity politics. This erupted in the camp when a conversation with Farage turned inevitably to immigration.  

Nella was not able to calmly respond to any of the points made laconically by Farage. This is understandable, because she has been raised in a society where nobody has ever been straight about the implications of mass immigration. It is, to her, straightforwardly ‘good’ that a million people arrive in Britain every year. Any other view is simply unsayable and unthinkable. So she couldn’t ‘believe anybody thinks like this’ and jumped straight to a bad-faith interpretation. ‘I am one of those people!’ she shouted at Farage, as if he was planning to deport anybody who had come to Britain in 2004.  

What really did for Nella Rose in the jungle, however, was her election (by her fellow campmates to ‘lift her spirits’, not the public) as camp leader. Her decision to stir the pot by moving Sireix from chef duty to washing-up – out of pure spite for his criticism of her – was astonishingly selfish, making life markedly more difficult for everybody. (Though hilariously, the campmates have been trying to convince themselves that This Morning host Josie Gibson has superior skills to a man trained in a Michelin-starred restaurant.)  

It seems inevitable that the extremely effervescent DJ Sam Thompson will take the jungle crown. He is what we used to call a live wire, which now comes with a diagnosis of ADHD. He is like a puppy that can talk, and we all love puppies. Such ‘Labrador boyfriends’ are said to be popular but here is a warning. I have twice been in relationships with these kind of men. It looks fun from the outside, but you will inevitably be reduced to comic foil, your life an endless series of Matthew Corbett shrugs to camera. 

Tragically, pop star and TV presenter Marvin Humes was in the bottom two next to Nella in the vote. He is everything she is not: dependable, strong but emotionally honest. He’s a treasure, and overlooked, like most treasures. Our future should be Marvinist, but I fear we are all living in Nellaworld now.