A storyline is only as good as its main villain. And no lech has ever come so fully formed as Made In Chelsea’s cheating, orgy-having, bad boy, Spencer Matthews, who Ollie Locke once charmingly declared ‘lives and breathes vagina’ after he stole his girlfriend from under his nose.
Yes, from 2011 till 2016 Spencer was the beating greasy heart of the constructed reality drama Made In Chelsea, as he cheated on every girlfriend he had and blamed them for being so stupid as to let him. ‘It’s f**king hard to respect you when you allow me to cheat on you,’ he famously told Louise Thompson as they broke up next to Millennium Bridge. ‘You’re gonna go home after this and cry your f**king eyes out and I hope you do.’
Obviously unkind and misogynistic, Spencer was also TV gold. Whether taking a slap from Millie Mackintosh for cheating on Louise with Funda (‘this is what you’ve f**king done to her!’), having an orgy with Alex Mytton who was trying to reconcile with Binky (‘you don’t give a sh*t!’), or shagging around behind Steph Pratt, Lucy Watson and Lauren Hutton’s backs, no bar was too low.
Yet despite each snide comment and slimy smile, we couldn’t bring ourselves to loathe him. Spencer’s antics won him fans for life because he used charisma and wit to charm. The highs of his punchlines (remember when he sent Lucy Williams and her new boyfriend a bottle of champagne as they argued while he laughed in the background?) shot through the lows of his emotional unintelligence and made him irresistible as he left behind a romantic war zone.
Spencer knew he was E4’s bad guy, so he played the part well. He was an awful role model and even worse boyfriend, but he pushed the series's plot on with impressively wily tactics before completing his narrative arc with the ultimate post-therapy f*ckboy claim: ‘I’ve changed!...I can sleep in my bed alone now.’
And there’s nothing better to lure you back into the clutches of a lothario than the carrot-dangling claim that they’ve gone through self-improvement. It was Spencer’s final masterstroke before dipping out of the series after five years and leaving a great gaping hole in our Monday nights.
Many Chelsea boys have since tried to become the next Spencer Matthews. Sam Prince slept with someone else in Toff’s bedMiles Nazaire dated half of the borough while still managing to keep his flame with Maeva D'Ascanio alight. But nobody has ever come close to the love-hate balance of outrage and entertainment that has kept us talking about Spencer Matthews for over a decade. He is simply, simultaneously, the best and worst Made In Chelsea character of all time.