On Wednesday night Sir Alan Sugar will at last utter the words, “You’re hired” to either Michelle Dewberry or Ruth Badger, the finalists of the reality TV show, The Apprentice.

But The Times has learnt that, since September, both women have been secretly working for Sir Alan — Ms Badger as a sales manager for his company Viglen and Ms Dewberry for Amstrad — and their performances will be taken into account in his final decision.

The climax, which will be filmed on Tuesday in a TV studio that doubles as “the boardroom”, will be tacked on to the main part of the final, which was filmed last September and features Ms Dewberry, 26, and Ms Badger, 28, leading two teams of fired apprentices in a party task set at Tower Bridge.

Intrigue swirls around the two finalists. In the semi-final on Wednesday night, two teams of interviewers queried the women’s CVs and ambitions. Ms Dewberry, a former Kwik Save checkout girl turned self-employed telecoms consultant, earns about £100,000 a year. She will take a pay cut to work as Sir Alan’s apprentice but claims that she wants to learn from the Amstrad boss.

And there was suspicion over Ms Badger’s boast that she had been “a fundamental part of the management team” at Compass Finance Group that had overseen a rise in turnover from £3 million to £13 million. She said that she was offered £250,000 in share options and would not return to her job even if she did not become “the apprentice”. She has already set up two companies, and is selling herself for dinner dates via her website.

This weekend Christopher Smith, the millionaire founder and former chief executive of Compass Finance, said that Ms Badger had been telling the truth. Ms Badger, who has seven GCSEs, said that “money and recognition” drove her. Ms Dewberry has two GCSEs, two NVQs and an HND.

The two women, who are good friends, could not outwardly be more different. Where Ms Dewberry is quiet, Ms Badger, who refers to herself as The Badger, is a volcano of emotion and profanities (“She’s playing to the cameras a bit — she’s very calm and collected,” Mr Smith said). Margaret Mountford, one of Sir Alan’s “eyes and ears”, said that Ms Dewberry was as “cold as a fish”. Ms Badger is one of the best salespeople on the show but has found herself on the losing team on many occasions.

Ms Badger’s estranged husband, Ian, has given embittered interviews claiming that she had two women lovers and was more interested in her career than sex with him. In the semi-final Ms Dewberry spoke fleetingly about having “lost people close to her”. She was referring to her sister, Fiona, who, aged 19, fell to her death from a tower block.

Her first boyfriend, Lee Appleby, who featured in a lurid tabloid kiss’n’tell, has said: “Michelle wanted bigger and better things and was determined to get them.”

Read Times Online's Enterprise weblog for coverage of The Apprentice in the final week, and post your views on Sir Alan Sugar's decision

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