Big Bother eviction on the cards for housemate Bertie

IT’S day 870 in Bertie’s Big Bother house.

The housemates are gathered around the witness box where the former Taoiseach is performing this week’s task entitled: “How do I get out of this mess with a shred of credibility intact?”

His shopping around for a new job depends on how he fares and the pressure appears to be getting to him.

The large open-plan living area of the Big Bother castle basement feels strangely claustrophobic as all eyes turn to Bertie.

He’s been to Brian Dobson’s Diary Room, pleading to be allowed to go home, with tears welling in his eyes, but all to no avail.

Only three housemates, Judges Mahon, Keys and Faherty are allowed to nominate Bertie for eviction from the Revered Elder Statesmen Club and he is doing all he can to sway their favour.

Bertie is desperate to make a new career out of his exposure, ideally a plum presenting job for the United Nations or the EU, and not end up scrabbling around to make ends meet with tacky modelling shoots for Charvet shirts like former evictee Charlie Haughey.

Luckily for Bertie, he has earned a reputation among the other housemates as something of a storyteller.

Bertie’s relationships with female housemates has dominated this week’s episodes even though the romance with sultry siren Celia has now cooled.

The pair remain close though, and it emerged in Celia’s chats with the tribunal’s lawyers that Bertie had lent her €40,000 earlier this year to pay back a mysterious “loan” she had taken with Bertie’s Fianna Fáil pals 15 years ago.

His attitude to fellow housemate Gráinne Carruth has also seen a slide in Bertie’s long-standing appeal with the ladies.

Bertie went into Dobbo’s Diary Room in May, fuming at the way Gráinne had been treated by the Big Bother judges.

He swore that if they had let him know in advance they had proof Gráinne had put sterling in the bank for him, and not punts, as he always claimed, then he would have stepped in and stopped her being interrogated and reduced to tears over the matter.

Viewers then found out that Bertie had lied about this as he admitted he was told the tribunal had proof of the sterling lodgement 11 days before Gráinne was subjected to her ordeal in March, yet he did nothing to save her and was dubbed Bertie the Betrayer by the tabloids.

Though unlucky in love with the ladies, Bertie found he was lucky in cards — race cards.

He let rip with one of his great stories about how when he was Finance Minister in the 1990s men would just come up and pin money on him as if he was a bride at a Greek wedding.

Not only had two sets of friends, separately and spontaneously, decided to force him to take two “dig-outs” from them and Manchester businessmen pushed an £8,000 “whip around” into his hand, now it emerged those most generous of people, the bookies, were regularly stumping up winnings for him on the gee-gees.

Despite never being known as a lover of the horses before, Bertie announced to amazed housemates that he was a famous follower of the racing form and scooped a string of wagers big enough to help explain those strange sterling lodgments in his bank accounts all those years ago.

While marvelling at his tale-telling skills, fellow housemates have become increasingly concerned about his lapses in memory, such as forgetting he actually had savings of £80,000, not the previously stated £54,000 when he was supposedly so on his uppers in the early 1990s that he had to take those embarrassing, and untraceable, “dig-outs” from pals to help him put a roof over his head.

Big Bother was very interested in Bertie’s trips abroad and called him into the witness box to ask if he had ever opened a bank account on these travels.

Bertie was adamant he had not, insisting there was no “post office savings account in Timbuktu” with his name on it.

Bertie has said a number of things during the 870 days of Big Bother that he later had to admit were not true.

Which goes — Bertie’s reputation or the cloud hanging over it? Judge Mahon: You decide.