Thomas Skinner was said to be ‘suing’ the BBC over his early exit from Strictly and has claimed that the BBC ‘rigged’ the votes to orchestrate his elimination from the dance competition
09:51, 22 Dec 2025Updated 09:51, 22 Dec 2025
Tom Skinner hits out attention over BBC fight in Good Morning Britain statement(Image: PA)
Thomas Skinner has hit back at press attention of his rumoured feud with the BBC in furious statement made on Good Morning Britain. Ahead of the Strictly Come Dancing live final on 20 December, it was reported that Skinner was ‘suing’ the BBC as he believed they had ‘rigged’ the votes to ensure he would be eliminated first, which the BBC strongly denied. The broadcaster made clear that they had not received any legal paperwork and Skinner did not confirm that he was suing.
However, after refusing to appear in the live final, Skinner posted a statement to X where he said he “received an anonymous email claiming to be from a BBC exec with stats, saying I’d received far more votes than it appeared and it wasn’t right”. Following the statement, The Mirror exclusively revealed that Skinner’s voting figures may not be as high as he believes.
A source pointed to an independent exit poll of 125,000 viewers as “clear evidence of his unpopularity.” It showed how Skinner attracted just 1805 votes, which was the lowest of any contestant on the BBC programme. The source claimed: “The poll – which is larger than an exit poll for a general election – comprehensively shows that Skinner was the least popular contestant by a long way. There is no conspiracy. These are the cold, hard facts.”
Hitting back at the article in a statement shared on Good Morning Britain, Skinner said he was “struggling to understand” why his words on X were getting so much attention. He said: “I don’t hate the BBC – they gave me my big break on The Apprentice. I had discussions with my representatives on Wednesday evening which I believed to be private and confidential and I spoke openly with them in confidence.
“I was obviously gutted when I received the email on the evening I left the show, and at first I didn’t believe it was true. When I raised this in conversation, I was advised by the BBC to seek legal advice. I’ve had a difficult year with the press attention I didn’t seek, and I’m honestly struggling to understand why this continues to escalate. “
Similarly, when approached by The Mirror, Skinner said he did not believe the low voting figures were accurate but refused to reveal how he was able to verify the “anonymous email” his information came from.
He said: “Regarding the anonymous email and verification process, I don’t wish to comment further at this time or release anything publicly. As for the voting figures, I know for a fact that the information you have is not accurate. That said, it doesn’t materially matter to me now, and I’m not looking to contest this publicly.”
Despite “not looking to contest this publicly”, Skinner made a lengthy public statement on X where he insisted his elimination was “unfair” and that a BBC exec had told him that the broadcaster was angry over his friendship with JD Vance.
He wrote: “On the night I left the show, I received an anonymous email claiming to be from a BBC exec with stats, saying I’d received far more votes than it appeared and it wasn’t right. I’ve since had the email independently verified.”
“That same email mentioned the BBC was very angry an nervous simply because I had met JD Vance (USA VICE PRESIDENT). Let me be clear, I’m not a political bloke. Never have been. I just love my country and am patriotic. I’ve been made out by the press to be this political figure. If anyone was to get an opportunity like what I did, they would have taken it. I still think it is mad that a man like me who sells mattresses out of a van can call someone that senior in the world ’s politics a friend now.”
“I have asked to see the official voting figures to back up the ones I was sent in the email but was told they couldn’t be shown to me. And have never been shown in the history of the show. I have spoke about the email I had received to senior people and the BBC welfare team, who btw I genuinely respect. And they was the ones who advised me to get legal advice because of how unfair it all was. (This was not my idea).”
However, a BBC spokesperson said Skinner never shared the email he referenced. They told the Mirror: “”In response to Tom’s latest statement, the BBC said: “Strictly Come Dancing’s public vote is independently overseen and verified to ensure complete accuracy every week. Any claims to the contrary are entirely without foundation. Unfortunately, despite requests for it, Mr Skinner is yet to share the email he references with anyone from the BBC so we are unable to comment on it.”
EUGENE, Ore. — Perhaps it was James Madison going for it twice on fourth down on its first drive of the game.
Or, maybe it was coach Bob Chesney calling for a wide receiver pass on the Dukes’ second series of the evening. Even 12th-ranked James Madison successfully pulling off a fake punt could have adequately explained what the scoreboard failed to convey.
It was clear that the fifth-ranked Oregon Ducks were in a different class than their visitors in a 51-34 win in a College Football Playoff first round matchup Saturday at Autzen Stadium. Oregon led 48-13 midway through the third quarter before the Dukes added three late touchdowns to make the final score appear closer than the game really was.
“I think the scoreboard itself, every time we got down there we kind of shot ourselves in the foot,” said Chesney, who takes over as UCLA’s head coach after the JMU loss. “If we did not do that, if we did not end with 13 penalties, is this a little bit of a different game? Maybe. But at the same point in time, that’s a tough offense to stop, and I think it’s tough for a lot of teams in the entire country to stop.”
With James Madison’s loss, Group of Five teams fell to 0-4 all-time in CFP games. No. 17 Tulane fell 41-10 to No. 6 Mississippi on Saturday, too, while Penn State beat Boise State 31-14 in last year’s Fiesta Bowl. Alabama topped Cincinnati 27-6 in a 2022 CFP semifinal at the Cotton Bowl.
Following their loss to Ole Miss, Green Wave head coach Jon Sumrall brushed aside any notion of his team not belonging among the last 12 standing.
“We’re our conference champion and the rules are what they were, and I think there should be access for at least one G5 team moving forward,” Sumrall said. “I do. I think you should have given the American champion an opportunity before the ACC champion this year because we beat the ACC champion. So Duke won the ACC Championship; we beat them.”
To Sumrall’s point, Tulane beat a pair of Power Four teams in Northwestern and Duke, but those schools combined to go 14-11 in 2025.
James Madison, meanwhile, lost to its only Power Four opponent this season, with Louisville beating it 28-14 in a game in which the Dukes mustered just 263 yards of total offense. Most of the season, James Madison ran with the ball with ease against its opponents, rushing for over 300 yards in a game five times and over 200 yards in a game nine times.
But on Saturday, the Dukes mostly abandoned the run after quickly falling behind, and instead often turned to Sun Belt player of the year and quarterback Alonza Barnett III, who attempted a career-high 48 passes in the contest. Even so, Barnett was confident his team belonged in the CFP over other Power Four schools.
“I believe people saw that we were meant to be on this level. When you look at the Power Four teams and whatever, the destiny is really — the ball is in your court. You control your own destiny,” Barnett said. “Most of those teams that didn’t make it, they controlled their own destiny, and we handled what we could handle and we didn’t give into outside noise.”
Among Group of Five schools, James Madison did fare the best of any of them on offense in the CFP. The other three programs scored a combined 30 points in their respective playoff games, a total James Madison eclipsed against the nation’s eighth-ranked scoring defense.
But where the Dukes fell flat was slowing down the Ducks’ ninth-ranked scoring offense. Oregon ran the ball with ease, averaging more than 7.7 yards per attempt against James Madison’s run defense that entered the contest allowing the second-fewest yards per game in the country.
As has often been the case in matchups between Power Four and Group of Five teams, the greatest discrepancies existed in the trenches. To a man, James Madison could not adequately match up with Oregon, just as Tulane couldn’t with Ole Miss and many other Group of Five programs before them both failed to do.
“I think there were moments today where I feel like we could play with them,” Chesney said. “ And I think that today, the complimentary football, and us playing in the way we needed to just did not exist.”
When Wura Hope paints her nails, she paints her prosthesis too. Pink glows on her dark skin like fine art. But her right foot is pale, yellowish-tan, the generic colour of many imported prosthetics. It contrasts with her melanin-rich skin and does not offer the aesthetics she desires.
Wura is a model, fashion designer, and vendor of Ankara fabrics. She also interns at a bank. Sometimes, she doesn’t want the spotlight that comes with being an amputee. But with a prosthetic foot so different from the rest of her body, curious eyes are unavoidable. As a result, she fully covers up her leg.
The unease Wura feels today traces back to when she was 11. One of her daily chores was filling the water tank of the large generator her parents used at their home in Abuja, in Nigeria’s North Central. One day, the propeller caught her long dress and badly injured her right leg. An infection followed, and the leg was eventually amputated.
The 28-year-old barely remembers life with two legs. She has lived with one for so long that she even forgets she has a physical challenge.
“Like, I literally forget,” said Wura.
Every word she says seems to arrive with a smile. And when her lips spread, they show her teeth like fresh corn peeking through a half-opened husk. She’s grateful to be walking again after many years on crutches.
Her current prosthesis is her third. The first, donated by an Indian charity in 2014, was heavy and rigid. The second caused blisters around her stump that took days to heal. The one she uses now is lighter and has a knee joint that makes walking easier. But it is far from perfect. In hot weather, the liner squeaks against her sweaty stump and sometimes threatens to slip off. When that happens, she has to find a restroom, take it off, clean it, let it dry for a few minutes, and put it back on.
“Sometimes in the market, I’ll be looking for somewhere private to clean my liner,” she told HumAngle.
Moments like this remind Wura of her disability, turning long-distance walking into a nightmare.
The struggle is not just Wura’s; it is a shared reality for many who wear devices designed for colder climates. Thirty-year-old Eva Chukwunelo knows it well. She finds her stump in a pool of sweat after walking just a few metres. But in March this year, she walked seamlessly from Washington Park to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, a distance of more than two kilometres. Back home in Abuja, she would have stopped multiple times to pull off her prosthesis, drain the sweat from its liner, and wait for her stump to dry.
In Abuja, March is one of the hottest months, but it is cold in New York, giving chills rather than sweat. Most advanced prosthetic devices come from temperate countries, where they may be designed with little consideration for Africa’s heat and humidity.
Silicon liners, the technology used by both Wura and Eva, were invented in Iceland and initially called the Icelandic Roll-On Silicone Socket. Made from medical-grade silicone RTVs, they do not absorb sweat. As moisture gathers inside, it simply coats the stump, making every step increasingly uncomfortable. The material is soft and generally reliable, but it does not match Africa’s weather realities.
“So I felt like if you’re wearing a silicone liner, you cannot do so well in a hot environment,” Eva said.
As for the skin covers, they are either too black or not black at all, wrote Eva in the Nov. 5 dispatch of The Amputee LifeStyle, the newsletter where she documents the lived experiences of amputees.
“Somewhere between ‘too white’ and ‘too black’, African amputees are left underrepresented,” she noted. “So yes, we walk again. But sometimes, we walk in discomfort.”
The more money you have, the lighter it becomes. Photo: Eva Chukwunelo
Eva was also born with two legs. As a child, she was always running, climbing trees, playing football, or dancing. Even after she was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a severe bone infection, she stayed active in school and continued playing with friends. But her left foot soon developed ulcers, prompting concerns about activities that could expose her to germs. The leg began to decay right from between the big toe and the second. When gangrene—the death of body tissue due to lack of blood flow or severe bacterial infection—set in, the only option was amputation.
Eva was just 16. She imagined a future spent on crutches, or confined to a wheelchair, or, even worse, reduced to begging like the lepers who often took shelter under the flamboyant trees outside her parents’ house. She had never heard of prosthetics, a life-changing technology that dates as far back as ancient Egypt. But everything shifted the day her doctor invited a prosthetist into the room.
“The first time I walked again, it felt like a miracle,” she wrote in her newsletter.
Her first two prosthetic devices were heavy, rigid, and, in her words, ugly. They helped her walk, but she was never comfortable enough to let her live freely. Until she got her third device, which came with a silicon liner, she never felt confident leaving her left leg uncovered in public. The fourth was lighter. The fifth, lighter still and more advanced, each upgrade was a small step toward ease, though never quite the perfect match she longed for.
“I think the more money you have, the lighter it becomes,” Eva told HumAngle.
Africa’s difference is not just in climate and skin tones. Like Nigeria, most African countries trail far behind Europe in minimum wage and purchasing power. And for many amputees across the continent, this means the most advanced and most comfortable prosthetic devices are far beyond reach.
On the day 18-year-old Adeola Olailo lost one of her legs in an accident in Ekiti State, South West Nigeria, she had hoped to hawk groundnuts after school. Selling groundnuts and fried pork was how she supported her parents, who struggled to make ends meet. And she was good at it. But when a car veered off the road and ploughed into the students walking home, Adeola lost a limb on the spot, and her family lost a vital source of income. It took repeated media reports and the state government’s intervention for her to receive a locally made prosthesis, one she has now outgrown.
For amputees like Adeola, a matching device must be affordable, too. She dreams of a waterproof leg that aligns with her height, matches her complexion, and lets her jump, walk without pain, run, and dance again, especially now that she is preparing for university. But a prosthesis that can do even a fraction of these may cost up to ₦5 million, an amount far beyond the reach of her household. And like most imports, when the naira slips, the price soars.
Taiwo Akinsanya, founder of Dynalimb, a Nigerian company working to expand access to quality prosthetics, said there are still many barriers to creating truly Nigerian or African-centred devices. One of the biggest, he explained, is the education system that does not encourage home-grown innovation, often producing graduates who take pride in their ability to apply foreign products rather than pioneer new ones for local realities.
“We were taught in medical school to take the approach of what is currently being done in the current market and keep applying it to a number of patients,” he said.
Access and affordability, he added, are also limited by Nigeria’s heavy reliance on foreign manufacturers for key prosthetic components.
“We were trying to develop a locally made prosthetic device here in Nigeria. We did it, and it worked. The major constraint we had was that the raw materials, such as steel, used to produce the metallic part of the prosthetic device, were imported, which made European products more affordable than we wanted to achieve here.”
Every imported part raises the overall cost, making locally assembled devices expensive and out of reach for many amputees. Meanwhile, Dynalimb’s mission was to make prosthetic devices accessible and affordable. They had to scrap the innovation.
Of the estimated 65 million amputees in the world, about five million live in Africa. Many are victims of diabetes, road traffic accidents, industrial mishaps, congenital conditions, and conflict-related injuries. Yet most struggle with prosthetic devices never designed with their bodies, climates, or lifestyles in mind. An even larger number have no access to prosthetics at all.
Amid numerous infrastructural constraints and inadequate government support, African innovators are working hard to adapt foreign inventions to local realities and, in some cases, to build African-centred devices from scratch. Earlier this year, South Africa’s Prosthetic Engineering Technologies launched silicone liners “engineered for the unique challenges of African terrain and climate”. The liners, according to the company, are locally manufactured to reduce costs and improve access. In Nigeria, Immortal Cosmetic Art is creating hyper-realistic prosthetic skin covers for people of colour, an innovation that has already been celebrated both locally and abroad. But the effects of these breakthroughs are yet to be felt at scale. And African amputees, tired of struggling in devices not made for them, want even more.
“My leg is black, but the prosthesis is not,” Adeola said about why she always wears knee-high socks.
“I think it’s time we start designing prosthetics that understand Africa. Products that consider the climate, materials that can breathe, and sweat and heat. Products that match our tones, so people stop asking why your leg looks ‘imported’,” Eva wrote in her International Prosthetic and Orthotics Day newsletter.
Once, Wura received a dark prosthetic foot from a company that imported devices from China. When she painted the nails, it looked “very, very pretty.” It felt like it truly belonged to her. But the joy didn’t last.
“I don’t know what they sell to us here,” she told HumAngle. “I don’t think that foot lasted six months. I like it when the colour of my socket is dark. Because I’m a dark person, my foot should also be dark.”
When she painted the nails, it looked “very, very pretty”. Photo: Hope Wura
Taiwo said there are no perfect prosthetics. An artificial limb, he said, will always be an artificial limb. But for amputees like Wura, Eva, and Adeola, progress begins with a limb that matches their skin and survives their weather.
Authorities in Gaza have warned that stormy weather could spur more war-damaged buildings to collapse and heavy rains are making it more difficult to recover bodies still under the rubble.
Authorities sounded the alarm on Monday, three days after two buildings collapsed in Gaza, killing at least 12 people, during winter rains that have also washed away and flooded the tents of displaced Palestinians and led to deaths from exposure.
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A ceasefire has been in effect since October 10 after two years of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, but humanitarian agencies said Israel is letting very little aid into the enclave, where nearly the entire population has been displaced.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abou Azzoum said despite a shortage of equipment and fuel and the weather conditions in the enclave, Palestinian Civil Defence teams retrieved the bodies of 20 people on Monday.
The bodies were recovered from a multistorey building bombed in December 2023 where about 60 people, including 30 children, were believed to be sheltering.
Gaza Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal called on the international community to provide mobile homes and caravans for displaced Palestinians rather than tents.
“If people are not protected today, we will witness more victims, more killing of people, children, women, entire families inside these buildings,” he said.
Father mourns children killed in building collapse
Mohammad Nassar and his family were living in a six-storey building that was badly damaged by Israeli strikes earlier in the war and collapsed in heavy rain on Friday.
His family had struggled to find alternative accommodation and had been flooded out while living in a tent during a previous bout of bad weather. Nassar went out to buy some necessities on Friday and returned to a scene of carnage as rescue workers struggled to pull bodies from the rubble.
“I saw my son’s hand sticking out from under the ground. It was the scene that affected me the most. My son under the ground and we are unable to get him out,” Nassar said. His son, 15, died as did a daughter, aged 18.
Exposure warning
The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Monday that more aid must be allowed into Gaza without delay to prevent putting more displaced families at serious risk.
“With heavy rain and cold brought in by Storm Byron [late last week], people in the Gaza Strip are freezing to death,” UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.
“The waterlogged ruins where they are sheltering are collapsing, causing even more exposure to cold,” he added.
Lazzarini said UNRWA has supplies that have waited for months to enter Gaza that he said would cover the needs of hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s more than two million people.
UN and Palestinian officials said at least 300,000 new tents are urgently needed for the roughly 1.5 million people still displaced. Most existing shelters are worn out or made of thin plastic and cloth sheeting.
Gaza authorities, meanwhile, were still digging to recover about 9,000 bodies they estimated remain buried in rubble from Israeli bombing during the war, but the lack of machinery is slowing down the process, spokesman Ismail al-Thawabta said.
Azzoum reported that Civil Defence teams said they require a surge in heavy machinery to expedite the work.
“They are saying that they are still in need, initially, for 40 excavators and bulldozers in order to achieve some slight progress in the whole process on the ground,” Azzoum said, reporting from Gaza City.
Israel’s continuing ban on the entry of heavy machinery into the Gaza Strip is a violation of the ceasefire, he added.
Earlier on Sunday, Hamas said Israel’s continuing violations of the ceasefire risk jeopardising the agreement and progress towards the next stage of United States President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war.
Since the ceasefire began, Israel has continued to strike Gaza on a daily basis, carrying out nearly 800 attacks and killing nearly 400 people, according to authorities in Gaza, while blocking the free flow of humanitarian aid.
“There is no real sense of safety nor protection for families,” Azzoum said of the ongoing violations.
