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An inviting volley blazed over the bar, a trademark free kick clattering into the wall, and a showman’s celebrations cut short by an offside goal.

In many ways, the frustrations Cristiano Ronaldo endured in his final match for Portugal reflected his long-altered reality – one of football’s most devastating players had become a liability.

For many, Ronaldo’s fall from grace could hardly be crueller.

The boy from Madeira captivated the world for years with his jaw-dropping talent, age-defying athleticism and larger-than-life personality. Yet the final chapter of his international career had anything but a fairytale ending – a forgettable climax to an otherwise illustrious journey.

Ronaldo has walked away from the national team with individual achievements most footballers can only dream of: the all-time record for international appearances (234) and goals (146).

“Portugal will always be a part of me,” the 41-year-old said in a five-minute video shared on Thursday, bidding goodbye to the team he first played for in 2003.

But his international retirement was hardly a surprise.

In the weeks leading up to his announcement, Ronaldo had been at the centre of a controversy, leaving fans and critics wondering if that was the end of the road for Portugal’s longstanding captain.

The forward’s waning influence on the field, a public rift with Portugal coach Jorge Jesus and a near 2,000-word statement after a dramatic mid-camp walkout were the perfect recipe for worldwide football gossip – and ultimately, retirement.

“He wanted the manager to go out and say ‘I’ve put a player on the bench at the calibre of Pele and [Diego] Maradona,’” ex-Liverpool player-turned-pundit Jamie Carragher said on The Overlap podcast.

“How do you say that about yourself? It’s mad, isn’t it?”

Ronaldo’s declining impact for Portugal

For more than two decades, Ronaldo made himself impossible to ignore in a Portugal shirt. He brought home the Selecao’s first major trophy, the Euro 2016 crown, before adding two Nations League titles in 2019 and 2025.

But the tide had begun to turn in 2022.

After being celebrated as a hero, Ronaldo slowly transitioned into the villain during the World Cup in Qatar. A lack of goals saw him dropped to the bench in two crucial knockout games, while his performances and attitude drew criticism as Portugal were sent packing in the quarterfinals.

The script repeated itself at Euro 2024 before the FIFA World Cup 2026 marked his final appearance on the sport’s biggest stage – the forward scoring three times, including his first and only World Cup knockout goal.

He bowed out of the biggest World Cup in North America as the first player to score in six editions, but those personal landmarks never translated into the trophy he sought. Portugal lost to eventual champions Spain in the last 16, and with that, Ronaldo’s dream of being crowned a world champion remained unfulfilled.

“I won Euro 2016 and, for me, that’s just as important as the World Cup. It will stay with me forever,” the five-time Ballon d’Or winner said this year, seemingly making peace with the bitter ending.

A household name

For much of his career, Ronaldo drew constant comparisons with Argentinian legend Lionel Messi; the duo igniting the debate for the “greatest of all time” (GOAT). It was, thus, rather poetic that Ronaldo followed Messi’s suit in hanging up his boots at the international level.

But there is a striking contrast in their farewells. Messi’s send-off was marked with celebrations after he guided Argentina to a second straight World Cup final. Ronaldo, on the other hand, is leaving the scene after a rather tense span in the Portugal camp, and probably without a proper goodbye on the field.

Nonetheless, Ronaldo’s announcement drew an outpouring of affection from fans and figures across the football fraternity.

Often described as a childhood idol by several teammates at club or country, Ronaldo is one of the most famous people on the planet.

Walk around your nearest park, and you’re likely to spot a kid dressed in a “Ronaldo 7” jersey, kicking a ball around.

A commercial powerhouse for his national team and clubs alike, Ronaldo’s popularity transcended sports.

“Few ‌players have ever touched the heart of football fans around the world quite like Cristiano,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said about him.

“A career defined by extraordinary talent, relentless determination and an unwavering desire to push the boundaries of what is possible.”

Ronaldo has always divided opinions

But with fame comes increased scrutiny.

While his tricks and skills earned him the honour of one of the greatest players of all time, Ronaldo’s on-field antics and perceived arrogance divided opinion in the football world.

In a recent interview with The Athletic, ex-Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag discussed his issues involving Ronaldo, alleging that the forward pulled out of training sessions during his second spell at the club and failed to raise his heart rate to the required level when he did train.

“I confronted him with this. Many times, I say, ‘Ronnie, everyone wants to work for you to bring you in the right position, but if you can’t bring yourself in the box, you can’t score’,” Ten Hag said.

“He was not capable to do this. It’s the wrong idea to put this to me that I expected him to do the pressing, that he’s exhausted. But he couldn’t. He ran neither in possession nor out of possession. The reason was because he didn’t prepare himself.

“Every top team has to embrace the top player, but the top player has to work for the team,” Ten Hag added.

While some saw Ronaldo as the icon who transformed Portuguese football, others questioned his individualism.

The debate over how best to define him will continue for years, but one thing is certain: Ronaldo’s complex legacy is perhaps summed up by his former club Man United’s famous slogan: “Hated, adored, never ignored”.

Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died. She was 96.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, told The Times on Wednesday that Huerta died in Bakersfield, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.

“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”

Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.

The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petitemother of 13 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.

Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical César Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became apparent late in her life.

The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March 2026, when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls, with Huerta telling the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in a pair of pregnancies.

Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement. But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Some wished Huerta had spoken out earlier, at least within the insular union, in order to prevent others from being victimized. But her many champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected badly only on Chávez, who for decades before his fall from grace had been an American civil rights icon and a virtual secular saint to the political left.

Some historians insist that Huerta be given full recognition for teaming with Chávez during much of the early foundational work that produced the UFW, from its founding in 1962 in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Delano through her leave from full-time work with the union in the late 1980s.

It was Huerta who hurried from pickup truck to back stoop to pool hall, to recruit many of the union’s first members; Huerta who stormed up and down the picket lines to keep striking workers out of the fields; Huerta who helped negotiate one of the first contracts ever for farmworkers in North America; and Huerta who struggled to keep the union relevant, as its membership and clout faded. She turned the phrase “Sí, se puede!” into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century.

Complications and byzantine controversies helped stymie the union in its adolescence, with Huerta usually supporting Chávez, even as he became distracted from the union’s central work and demanded absolute power. Their obsession with loyalty and often-imagined conspiracies ended with purges of some of the UFW’s most dynamic leaders and organizing stagnation, even as field hands continued to labor under abysmal conditions.

Huerta later devoted much of her time to women’s rights, Democratic Party politics and community organizing.

In 1999, the 69-year-old great-grandmother helped obtain extra government benefits for workers who lost their jobs in a citrus freeze and stared across the contract bargaining table at lawyers for the giant Gallo wine company. Even late in life she still toured the nation as a public speaker and used her foundation to register voters and campaign for progressive causes. Liberal groups clamored to have Huerta at the front of their marches. Often sporting a jaunt red beret, she locked arms with activists one-quarter her age.

Her Dolores C. Huerta Foundation supported endeavors as diverse as a performing arts camp for children, higher education mentoring for high school students and food distribution to victims of floods that inundated the Central Valley in 2023. The foundation became something of a family business — headed by her daughter, Camila Chávez, and supported by legal advice from her son, Emilio Huerta, while four other relatives served on the board.

In another step to cement Huerta’s legacy, one of her nonprofits broke ground in 2025 for the Dolores Huerta Peace & Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, the San Joaquin Valley city she called home. The $35-million project, paid for largely by the state of California, will include an academy to teach future generations how to become community organizers. “They are the ones who are going to guide us forward,” the 95-year-old told a crowd, which stood under a scorching sun for the groundbreaking.

Through it all, Huerta insisted her primary loyalty remained la causa — the struggle to win better wages, working and living conditions for poor people, particularly farmworkers.

Beginning with the early organizing days in the 1960s, Huerta inspired passions almost as intense as her own. She won almost breathless admiration from followers for the way she faced down sometimes violent anti-union forces, worked for days with little rest and negotiated late into the night, while others faded. She alienated others with a waspish temper, an unwillingness to forgive even small slights and inattention to some of the details that make a union work.

To the union faithful, she was the “Madonna of the Fields.” Some said Huerta reminded them of the soldaderas, a handful of women warriors who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into battle during the Mexican Revolution. The growers, whom she almost always scorned, had another name for her: “the dragon lady.”

A woman of frenetic energy who lived in a world of myriad contradictions, Huerta was one of the only women in many board rooms and union halls full of men. She was a jet-setting, president-schmoozing pragmatist, who in unguarded moments spoke mystically about her two youthful encounters with UFOs. She was the devout Catholic who had the last four of her children with a man she never married, Richard Chávez, Cesar’s younger brother. (Only in 2026 did she acknowledge having two other daughters, given to others to raise, fathered by César Chávez.)

Her relationship with Cesar Chávez was as complex as it was volatile — a fact acknowleged by UFW regulars long before Huerta’s charges about his sexual misconduct.

The two met through their work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a progressive group that sought better government services and equal rights for poor and minority people. Both were called to the cause by the organization’s founder Fred Ross Sr. — Huerta in Stockton and Chávez in San Jose — and later united over their common concern for farmworkers. But even when he became statewide leader of the CSO, Chávez could not persuade the group to focus its energies on organizing field workers.

It was 1961 and Chávez was living in East Los Angeles when he called Huerta to his home one day and said, “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will,” Huerta once recalled. He left the CSO, and Huerta followed.

Both soon moved their families to the Kern County farm town of Delano. Chávez relied on Huerta for nearly everything. When she wasn’t going door-to-door to recruit new members, Huerta negotiated with growers and created union hiring halls. She formed farmworker ranch committees and moved to the East Coast for months to promote the union’s national grape boycott.

But Chávez and his right hand also clashed routinely during their decades-long collaboration. The two would explode in shouting matches over strategy, while other union leaders shrank from the room. In audio recordings of one 1979 confrontation reviewed by the New York Times, Huerta fought back and demanded respect as Chávez called her a “stupid bitch” and accused her of stealing. Huerta might quit, or be fired. Inevitably, she would be back in the fold within a few days or weeks.

“Their commitment to the cause trumped all else and grew into a mutual dependence that survived decades of discord,” wrote Miriam Pawel, a former Los Angeles Times editor, in the biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chávez.” Asked by ABC News if she tried to protect Chávez, Huerta replied, “Always. Always.”

During a wine grape strike in the Central Valley, Huerta and other UFW women once locked arms in a human blockade between the union’s male picketers and replacement workers wielding two-by-fours. She blocked one worker’s car with her own, to prevent him from going to work and breaking a 1965 strike against rose growers in McFarland.

Chávez never doubted Huerta’s resolve. He once called her “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

Her years of community organizing in Stockton taught Huerta how to inspire even the most humble of her poor constituents.

In the union’s founding days, Huerta helped recruit a 19-year-old grape picker named Eliseo Medina to perform a one-man picket at the Port of Los Angeles — supposedly to stop the loading of a shipment of non-union grapes. The grapes never materialized. But Medina recalled how Huerta’s spirit and determination galvanized him.

“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina said. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”

An Echo Park mural features Dolores Huerta alongside artist Frida Kahlo.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Medina left the Chávez-Huerta led union, believing it had strayed from its core work. He went on to become the international secretary treasurer of the more than 2-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — just one of many UFW acolytes who fueled the labor movement as it staged a modest resurgence in the 21st century.

Huerta was at the center of many of the union’s landmark achievements, including the negotiation of a contract in 1966 with the Schenley Wine Co. It was the first labor agreement obtained by farmworkers themselves with an agricultural company, according to the union’s history.

But the UFW’s fortunes would rise and fall. One low ebb came in 1973 with the loss of many contracts to the Teamsters Union, which struck sweetheart deals with growers. But some union insiders also complained that the UFW had failed by not winning enough concessions for the workers it represented. The union’s membership plummeted.

Two years later, momentum swung again, as the union helped persuade California Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. to impose the toughest farm labor regulations in the nation.

The union’s membership would spiral downward until Chávez’s death, at 66, in 1993. There was a sense among many insiders that the union became overly insular, with repeated purges designed to promote absolute fealty to Chávez.

In one incident, students graduating from English classes at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, ended a slide show with the words: “The Union is not César Chávez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers.” Huerta, fuming, demanded to know which of the teachers had planted this message, which she viewed as an act of treason against Chávez — an episode detailed by one of the teachers, Jeffrey W. Rubin, who went on to become a history professor at Boston University.

“Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called ‘chicken s—’ by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union,” wrote Rubin, who kept the episode quiet for years.

At the same time, the UFW lost contracts and sometimes failed to provide the benefits it promised to workers. Huerta was one of many union leaders unable to set Chávez, and the UFW, on a better path.

Dolores Huerta at rosary, standing next to the body of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) at rest in the pine coffin in Delano, Calif., on Wednesday, April 28, 1993.

(Jose Galvez/Los Angeles Times)

As Chávez’ son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez took control of the union in 1993 and began clawing to regain members and clout, Huerta remained the UFW’s most public persona.

At hundreds of marches across the nation that she attended with regularity throughout her life, parents would push forward, telling their children they were witnessing a historic figure. Asked for an autograph, she would boldly scrawl: “Sí, se puede.”

The phrase — “Yes, it can be done” — had been part of the union’s fabric since 1972, when some doubters suggested the union would fail in its campaign against an anti-union law in Arizona. Huerta responded, “Sí, se puede,” creating a mantra for the American left.

Born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Dolores Clara Fernandez moved to Stockton when she was 3, along with her mother, two brothers and two sisters. Her father and mother had divorced, but Juan Fernandez’s legend had been fixed — a brawling union leader and New Mexico state legislator. Her mother, a hotel operator, believed in public service and would not let the poorest guests go hungry.

Dolores thrived on a middle-class upbringing of Girl Scouts, violin lessons and tap dancing, describing her mother’s generosity as a guiding force. She was bright and popular and even founded a teen center where she and other kids hung out.

But Dolores would recall her high school years as a time of slights and rewards not received — injustices she linked to her Mexican American heritage. When police ordered her teen center shut down, it became clear it was because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican American, Black and Filipino kids.

Those setbacks would not be forgotten.

Dolores Huerta in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.

(Associated Press)

After community college in Stockton, Huerta became a teacher. But she left after just a year, because, she said: “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Soon she met Ross and Chávez and her life’s path would be set. Even her name seemed to brand her for the work. When she divorced her second husband, Chávez advised her to hold on to her last name. Dolores Huerta means Sorrows of the Orchard.

Along the way, there would be great personal heartache.

In 1968, she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The Democratic presidential front-runner had just finished his California primary victory speech — thanking Chávez and Huerta — when an assassin gunned him down.

Twenty years later, her politics thrust Huerta even more directly in the path of violence. A television camera captured the images of a San Francisco police officer clubbing her as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The blows ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.

She later won an $850,000 settlement from the city for the attack. Some in the union said that Chávez‘s insistence that Huerta give the money up to the UFW created another rift that caused her to leave the union.

Huerta would struggle, as well, to find time for her expansive family — which in the end included 13 children, counting the two fathered by César Chávez.

Among her greatest heartaches grew out of the struggles of her oldest daughter, Celeste, a schizophrenic who, on occasion, would leave the institutions where she lived and wander the streets.

Huerta’s union zealotry would inspire a range of emotions from her other children.

“We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” said son Emilio, the lawyer, a Central Valley activist.“She sort of belonged to the farmworker movement. And it was our job to support her.”

He and several other of the Huerta offspring devoted their lives to the UFW and related causes, basking in a sense that their family played a part in history. That did not always make up for the personal slights — the times their mother would fob them off on union allies or neighbors, or miss a birthday.

In a bittersweet essay, Dolores’ daughter Juanita once recalled how her mother forgot to pick her up from junior high school. She compared Huerta to a train “rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward.”

At a 69th birthday party in 1999, Huerta told a large dinner gathering that her own sacrifices had been overblown.

“It was our families who sacrificed,” she said. She then told a story about driving a carload of children to school one day in an automobile limping along because a tire had been slashed by union opponents. “That,” she said, “was kind of how we made it through life.”

Approaching her 90th birthday in 2020, Huerta spent a day that might have been more typical for someone half her age. She protested at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for increased pay for home healthcare workers, who made just $12 an hour. Huerta hadn’t planned on being arrested that day, but when she felt police used excessive force on one of the protest leaders, she changed her mind. Take me too, she said, according to USA Today. Officers cinched a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and led her away.

More typically in her later years, she supported her foundation. In one moment, she might be campaigning for a bond measure for a middle school gym in the poor San Joaquin Valley community of Weedpatch; in seemingly the next, she would be stumping via Zoom for Joe Biden, during his fight to take the White House from President Trump.

In 2020, USA Today named Huerta one of the 100 women “who’ve made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years.” By then, at least half a dozen schools across America bore her name. Others considered taking her name after they removed Chávez’s following the sexual abuse revelations.

President Obama presented Huerta with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012; the one-time community organizer, who made his way to the White House, honoring a woman still doing the work.

“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized and took direct action,” Huerta said in accepting the honor. “It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today.”

Olvera, the family spokesman, said Wednesday that Huerta’s relatives would be announcing the details of a public memorial in the coming days.

A NINETIES chart-topper has revealed she has undergone further surgery to ease pain caused by breast cancer treatment.

The singer, 55, whose catchy debut single topped the UK charts in 1994, told fans she was recovering in bed ahead of her next gig.

Whigfield, whose real name is Sannie Carlson, shared the hospital update on Instagram.

She wrote: “Last Wednesday I underwent a second surgery to fix pain in my breast caused by scar tissue from breast cancer operations and radiation therapy years back.

“I’m now on bed rest so I can heal quickly for my next gig.”

She tagged the 90s Supershow, where she is due to perform in Germany in early November.

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The star signed off with “Happy Saturday night” — a nod to the song that made her famous.

Whigfield underwent treatment for breast cancer in 2014 and has previously urged women to get checked.

Reflecting on her diagnosis in an earlier Instagram post, she wrote: “Fighting breast cancer was a strange thing.”

She continued: “One moment I was living my best life making new music in London, the next I was stuck in a bubble of numbness.”

The Danish singer described the operations and radiotherapy as tough, but said she drew strength from fellow patients, including children, at Milan’s San Raffaele hospital.

She also recalled that many of those being treated for the disease never left the hospital.

Whigfield, who has previously spoken about living on the outskirts of Milan, shot to fame with Saturday Night, which reached Number One in the UK in 1994.

Her other hits include Another Day and Think of You.

THIS 90s pop icon has shown off her timeless beauty and looks like she hadn’t aged a day since finding fame 30 years ago.

Back in 1996, the singer, now 67, released a HUGE hit single – but do you recognise who it is?

The star in question is Welsh singer Donna Lewis who shot to fame in her mid-30s when she released her song, I Love You Always Forever.

But 30 years after she unleashed the smash hit song onto the world, the singer looks like time has stood still.

Sharing a video on TikTok, Donna could be seen lip-syncing to the hit that made her famous.

The star’s trademark blonde hair flowed around her shoulders and she sang along to I Love You Always Forever in her stunning garden.

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Writing over the video, she penned: “POV: You wrote a song everyone knows 30 years later.”

Donna’s fans went wild for the video, with one writing: “One of the best songs ever written, and would fit any decade.”

I Love You Always Forever was such a smash hit that it not only charted in the UK, the song also did well in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, and the U.S.

In fact it was such a huge hit in America, the track reached Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100.

Following the success of the song, in 1997, Donna enjoyed success at the Brit Awards, and was nominated for British Female Solo Artist.

The singer initially signed with Atlantic Records, but after releasing her second album, decided to go independent.

Over the years Donna has continued to release new music and can often be found touring.

Away from the spotlight, the singer lives in New York with her business manager husband, Martin Harris, and their son, Archie.

Ross Kemp has feared being killed in plain sight since the very first day – but when it finally happened, he didn’t have a clue

Ross Kemp has admitted that “fear of failure” was what drove his intense paranoia in the Celebrity Traitors castle, which proved highly entertaining for viewers.

The actor and presenter was killed by the Traitors in plain sight last night, after he was the first to yawn in the library, breathing in a deadly perfume sprayed by King Kenny under orders.

But having been fearful of being bumped off in public since the very first day – after Bella Ramsey put a hat on his head and Leigh-Anne Pinnock touched his arm – when it actually happened he was none the wiser. Speaking just after he left the castle Ross, 62, said: “I lived every day thinking I was going to get killed, and now it’s actually happened.

“The fear of failure on this is not comparable to anything. Whether you’re an actor, or in a hostile environment where you could get killed, you don’t let people down. Yes, no one’s going to get killed here, but the wish of not wanting to let yourself down or the people around you, was quite the drive.

“I was under a considerable amount of pressure by my children to do this, and you can’t really say no to it. It’s so popular. I think it’s the cleverest show on British television.”

Ross bowed out on TV with some sinister words for those who had killed him. “Well played Traitors,” he said. “But you’re always going to bee Traitors. And I know where you live…”

Stressing that he had “enjoyed it immensely”, Ross explained: “The whole environment just makes you paranoid. If you’re a fan of the show, you know that murder in plain sight happens. So when someone puts a hat on you, or touches your arm, however innocently it might be, I don’t think I’m wrong in suspecting it.”

Tipping “very clever” Maya as a potential winner, along with fellow Traitor James Acaster, Ross insisted: “I don’t feel that bad that I’ve gone when I’ve gone.”

And having put his absolute all into the Missions, in which money is raised for the prize fund, he’s hoping that he’ll now be missed. “I think it’s just in my nature to take on a physical challenge and want to succeed at it. I hope the next three or four Missions involve really heavy lifting across water, hopefully with some poo involved. I’ll watch it with great glee,” he laughed.

Jerry Hall said that being banished because she was “an icon” had come as a surprise, with Miranda Hart wrongly suspecting that the producers and host Claudia Winkleman wouldn’t have been able to resist putting Jerry and Richard E Grant into the turret together.

But Jerry – who recognised that she’d “made mistakes” in her exit speech – said she hadn’t laughed so much in years. Insisting she’d given it her all, she said: “Oh, it’s so much harder than the catwalk – it’s a very competitive world, and there’s some ruthless people, I should have been better prepared. Apparently the reason I got voted off was because I was an icon, which didn’t sound like it was a very factual reason. I think they saw me as a threat.”

But the 70-year-old said she’d even enjoyed her banishment, declaring: “It was kind of fun, and they were all so sweet. It was a lovely ending.”

The model, originally from Texas but now living in London, has no idea who the real Traitors are. “I’ve suspected James Blunt for quite a while, and Joanne, and even Leigh-Anne, and Miranda too. And Romesh, so there you go.”

Nevertheless, she was proud of what they’d achieved. “We caught two Traitors and we’d made quite a bit of prize money, I thought we were on a roll.”

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