AMANDA PLATELL: I took great pleasure in Amol Rajan's demise on Celebrity Traitors - after my own dealings with this smug, self-important attention-seeker...

When Amol Rajan became the first star to be murdered on Celebrity Traitors, the cheer from my CT super-fan club – all six of us – was so loud you could hear it from my north London home all the way to Wembley Stadium. Such was our unmitigated joy.

The smug, self-important imposter Rajan – nicknamed ‘Amyl Nitrite’ after the stimulant drug, even by his friends – thought he’d worked out a devious masterplan of how not just to shine on Celebrity Traitors but also win the show.

How misconceived that plan turned out to be.

Insiders say the former presenter of the prestigious BBC Today programme was so cocky and confident of his success that he had resigned from his £320,000-a-year job in anticipation of becoming a social media superstar on the back of his triumph. 

That may be a stretch, but such was his ambition that this summer Amol trademarked his newly formed company and website, The Amol Rajan Connection, which could see everything from sunglasses – not least his trademark Aviator shades (although I think Tom Cruise got there before him) – to kitchenware, glass and porcelain on shop shelves.

Three years old when he came to Blighty from Calcutta, he was raised in what was then the very unfashionable south London area of Tooting. His supreme self-confidence served him well and he went to Cambridge full of big ambitions.

Which explains the YouTube website, and an Instagram account that currently has around 158,000 followers. Sign up to The Amol Rajan Collection and a ‘top tier’ lifetime membership of £999 gives you access to events like the ‘Pina Colada’ experience, whatever that means, as well as events starring Amol and perhaps even a chance to buy his signature sheepskin jacket – available, er, everywhere, in second-hand charity shops.

For the record, Piers Morgan has around three million Insta followers, Jeremy Clarkson more than 11 million. Amol’s a minnow in comparison.

Of his brief time on Celeb Traitors, Rajan reminisces: ‘It’s hard not to watch it and think, obviously with 20/20 hindsight, I played the wrong game and blew a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.'

He sums up his experience saying it was a ‘blessed, brutal and unforgettable appearance’. In truth, he will be the first one forgotten where this record-breaking series of Celebrity Traitors now being watched by nine million folk is already concerned.

Now I may sound a bit mean here, rejoicing in Amol’s untimely TV death, but I have history with this ridiculously bejewelled, self-styled man-of-the-people.

When we first met in 2021, I asked him why he wore so much bling – huge fake diamond earrings in each ear, a gold necklace and matching bracelets. He replied, a bit tearfully as I recall, that they were his comfort blanket, a sign that this poor lad from Calcutta had made it in this world.

At the time, Rajan had asked me to take part in what he told me was a serious and thoughtful TV documentary backed by the BBC that he was making about Princes William and Harry. It was called The Princes And The Press.

He insisted it was to be a fair and balanced appraisal of the way the media had treated the Princes since Diana’s death.

In the end, when it was finally broadcast, it was simply ‘a hagiography of Harry and Meghan’ – as I wrote back then. And the two hours I spent being interviewed by him? They were reduced to less than two minutes of content about columns that I had written which were critical of Meghan.

None of those I had written in support of the Sussexes, about their shining love story and the hope they gave the Royal Family and the nation initially, were included in his documentary.

Meanwhile, Meghan’s then-lawyer Jenny Afia was allowed to speak unchallenged and with the duchess’s approval about her alleged mistreatment at the royals’ uncaring hands.

The duchess’s infamous mouthpiece, super-groupie Omid Scobie, who went on to publish a fawning biography of Meghan focusing on the horrid royals, also appeared and went unchallenged.

When I asked Rajan for sight of the interview, which had been recorded with me six months before it appeared, he replied: ‘Alas, impossible to share: we are still working on the programme. I’m so sorry as always want to be fair.’

Fair? That was an opportunity Rajan declined to offer to the Royal Family who, I later discovered, were so incensed by the biased documentary that they threatened a complete boycott of all future dealings with the BBC.

I wrote an article about it all headlined: ‘How the BBC’s golden boy Amol Rajan conned me into a royal hatchet job.’

This helps explain why my Celebrity Traitors fan club found such pleasure in Amyl Nitrate’s TV demise.

And I’m not alone, as one insider revealed: ‘There are a lot of people who worked with Amol over the years having a little giggle at his early exit.’

Little giggle? In my home it was uproarious, jubilant laughter.