“Why did she do that?”

Fans of The Apprentice have suggested that tonight’s fired candidate came undone with one bad decision in the boardroom – which happened after a very decisive loss in a flower selling task.

Vanessa Tetteh-Squire became the fifth contestant to be axed by Lord Alan Sugar after her team made a profit of £564.59 – not too shabby, but much less than the £2172 achieved by Rothna Akhtar’s team.

Vanessa has been popular with fans on social media across the series so far, but her eleventh hour decision to bring Pascha Myhill back into the boardroom as a contender for elimination was seen as a fatal misfire.

Even Lord Alan Sugar told Pascha: “I don’t quite understand Vanessa’s choosing you to come back here… I can’t see what you did wrong in this task.”

One fan on X said: “Pascha?! Why on Earth did Vanessa bring back Pascha?! Karishma was WAY more at fault for the failure for the task than Pascha was. I hope Vanessa is fired.”

BBC

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Someone else said: “Pascha?? It’s not her fault you lost, easy way to get fired Vanessa.”

“Vanessa shouldn’t have bought pasha back why did she do that?!” wrote a third viewer.

Yet another posted: “The way Vanessa just came with vim out of nowhere to throw Pascha under the bus like that. CRAZY.”

Speaking after being eliminated, Vanessa said: “I was gutted. Absolutely gutted. I don’t believe it was my time to go.

“I kind of just feel like my fate was already decided from when I put myself up [for Project Manager] because nobody else wanted the job, and we know from Apprentice history that the PM will always get the blame should anything go wrong.

Photographer://BBC

“So, I was really gutted that my risk of putting myself up for a task, that I knew nothing about, wasn’t seen as me being a risk taker, or willing to do whatever it took to get the result. It was taken as though I decided to do something I knew nothing about.”

Asked who should have gone instead, she said: “It’s hard to say because I was up against some notable candidates.

“Honestly, I just believe it’s one of those tasks where the odds were against us because we had one less person than the other team and it was a task no one had any idea about. Anyone who put themselves up was quite literally up to be fired.”

The Apprentice airs on BBC One on Wednesdays at 9pm, and is streaming on iPlayer.