Simon
"(all the while oblivious to the notions that he may be masturbating) If you're a young child you can do this, if you're an adult you can have fun!"
- Have a Gay Old Time: His infamous QVC spot in Week 10, where he held a very phallic-looking trampoline leg over his crotch, all the while spouting phrases like "If you're an adult you can do this, if you're a young child you can have fun."
- Professional Butt-Kisser: One of very few candidates to have done this the right way. He made it clear that he wanted it to work for Sir Alan, and knew a lot about his companies and background, but never resorted to the type of outright ass-kissing that Syed did the previous year.
Kristina
"The French are cheese connoisseurs and we're going to sell them something from Makro?"
- Crack Defeat: Not as glaring of an example as Ruth the previous year, as Simon was more of a risk-taker and more knowledgeable about Sir Alan's lines of work, but she was regarded by nearly everybody as the clear favourite to win. Sir Alan even admitted in his autobiography that she took the news of her loss hard, and initially refused to take part in the post-series You're Hired show.
- The Rival: With Katie. In a rarity for this trope, the two were actually able to work together pretty well in tasks, but there was zero love lost between them outside of that.
Katie
"I could not have put more effort into yesterday! I fragged myself to the bone yesterday to try and make this thing work. Your reasons for bringing me in here just do not stack up. One, on a personal level; two, on a business level. Sir Alan says he does not know about my personal stuff. He knows about it, because you talked about it and Kristina talked about it. Fine, been there! But if you want to go personal, I'll go personal. I'd very much strongly advise you not to take this down a personal route. At a business level, you have one speed setting, and that setting is slow slow slow! Someone put the wrong speed dial in when they created you, sweetie, which is why when the phone rings, I always drop, because I know that phone call will take forever, to tell me something either I already know, or I could get done quicker myself. So you know what? You're just barking up the wrong tree!"
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Downplayed when Ghazal bought her into the boardroom in an attempt to get Naomi fired. While Katie refused to go along with the plan, she didn't actually do much to throw Ghazal under the bus either... not that Ghazal really needed much help in that regard anyway.
- Romance on the Set: With Paul, which ended up blowing up spectacularly in his face when he failed to bring her back in Week 6.
- The Runner-Up Takes It All: For a while she had easily the highest-profile post-Apprentice career of any UK candidate, albeit as a right-wing political commentator rather than anything especially related to her time on the show. Ultimately, however, a series of social media controversies and a costly loss in a lawsuit would see her media career largely peter out by the late 2010s, with Season 1's Saira now generally regarded to have surpassed her in that regard.
- Taking the Bullet: Sacrificed her place in the final, as she was worried that actually taking the job would have torn her family apart.
Tre
"Paul, if you fucking do as you're fucking told, then it's not about taking the buck is it?"
- Achilles' Heel: He was the strongest (alongside Kristina and to less of an extent Kate) of the final five, but his argumentative personality didn’t get him support from the interviews and prevented him from moving into the final.
- Badass Boast: When Rory was giving his infamous "I am your boss" speech in Week 2, Tre curtly responded "You're nothing to me right now."
- Elimination Houdini: As Lord Sugar pointed out, he should have been fired for the disastrous Week 9 task, but survived due to his more convincing statement and his strong track record, along with Jadine having clearly become too stressed to continue in the process.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: As Rory found out, he showed no mercy to anyone who showed the slightest sign of weakness.
Lohit
" Hello, we have some specialities of Britishness... are you interesting?"
- Butt-Monkey: A minor example, but Sir Alan never really seemed especially keen on him, even going so far as to say that Lohit would have been fired in Week 9 had it not been for Jadine being too stressed out to continue. Bear in mind that Lohit single-handedly brought in nearly half his team's sales that week, while also helping nurse Jadine through her problems.
- Nice Guy: He was about the only person from this season who everyone got along with. Unfortunately, the interviewers were very much believers that Nice Guys Finish Last.
- Straight Gay: Only vaguely alluded to during the actual show, but he confirmed to being this post-firing.
Naomi
"All of her paintings have got parts of the body and you're excluding them 'cause there are tits on them."
- The Generic Girl: A consistently decent performer, but never really stood out, which played a major part in Sir Alan firing her over Simon in Week 10, despite the trampoline fiasco.
Jadine
- Achilles' Heel: Her major one was not being able to cope away from her daughter for an extended period of time, which resulted directly in her being let go. After the series ended, Sugar said that this not happened, she would have had a very good shot at winning.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: She did get legitimately upset at people more than a few times, but also tended blow up at people over the slightest thing, and hold grudges on similarly thin grounds.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: In the first episode she seemed under the impression that she was the Only Sane Woman leading a team full of boorish, sexist pigs. In actuality, while she did do an overall very good job as project manager, the men (barring only Tre, and even his grievances were somewhat legitimate) were nothing but co-operative toward her throughout the task.
Ghazal
- Horrible Judge of Character: Allied herself closely to Paul and Katie, which proved as bad of a decision as you might expect.
- No Social Skills: The smug, snappish way she tended to speak to Sir Alan and his advisers — even after she won as project manager — was downright suicidal. The first time she did it Tre quickly jumped in to prevent her from digging her own grave (not that it mattered, since she was on the winning team anyway), but the second time was when she was in the final boardroom with Katie and Naomi, neither of whom were much inclined to help her.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Decided to bring Katie back as an advocate, which proved ill-advised not only on general principle, but because Katie had to focus on defending her own track record and so didn't have the time to advocate for Ghazal to stay over Naomi.
Adam
- Butt-Monkey: Aside from Kristina and to some extent Natalie, not one person in the house liked him. The sad thing was, there was very little evidence as to why anyone felt this way about him; Paul, Katie and Rory have accused him of being a Jerkass off-camera, but Kristina and Lohit denied that this was true.
- Four Is Death
- Medal of Dishonor: It's one thing to be brought into the boardroom four times (something that Paul Torrisi of Season 1 and Ruth Badger of Season 2 (who was actually ''runner up'' of the competition) had managed to achieve already), but it's another to be brought into the boardroom four times consecutively.
- Oop North: Caught no end of crap from the other candidates for this.
Paul
"So, just to recap, we're trying to sell pork sausages to a Muslim, and offering him a taster in the middle of Ramadan. Other than that, I think it's all going perfectly well!"
- Epic Fail: The Week 6 task, which he was project manager of, was a fiasco of legendary proportions, leading to the team making a loss of over £200 (something exceeded only by the losing teams in the previous season's Thames Festival task and Season 7's cosmetics task, and only by a small margin in the latter case). Aside from that he was actually one of the best candidates from this season, but he didn't have a prayer of surviving after that.
- Fatal Flaw: While he really blew the Week 6 task too badly to have any realistic hope of survival, his complete refusal to take any fault for the loss and misplaced loyalty to Katie completely doomed any slim hope he had of remaining in the competition. Adam's own poor track record and mistake with the banner allowed Paul some sliver of hope, but Paul's own actions in the boardroom quickly extinguished it.
- MacGyvering: His decision to try cooking sausages on a baked bean can with some flammable petroleum jelly. Adam wasted nearly the whole morning trying to use the burner, and Kristina eventually had to get them cooked at a nearby hotel.
- Never My Fault: Tried to claim that the only reason his team lost in Week 6 was because Adam spent £117 on a banner. Even though the team made a loss of £220 (and finished around £650 behind the other team), and Adam had nothing to do with the purchasing decisions.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Earned one of legendary proportions from Sir Alan right before he was fired:"Paul, I sent you to sell the best of British to France. You spent half the bloody day frying sausages on some stupid contraption that the Boy Scouts could have made, and worse than that, Paul, you went out and lost me money! You're a total shambles. You're fired!"
Natalie
- Blatant Lies: Tried to pull this on Adam twice, firstly when trying to blame him for a labelling screw-up that she made in Week 4, and then falsely accusing him of lying about his artist choice in Week 5.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: When she and Adam weren't tearing strips off each other, they actually seemed to get along pretty well.
Sophie
- Genius Ditz: She has a doctorate in quantum physics, yet somehow failed to realize that milk froths up when you heat and stir it. On top of that, she really had no clue about how the world of business really works.
- Suicide by Cop: Like Ifti, she didn't put much effort into defending herself in the final boardroom, having seemingly all but conceded that she wasn't suited to the show's environment.
Gerri
- Apathy Killed the Cat: Despite her claims to the contrary, she never really seemed to step out of first gear.
- Bystander Syndrome: Sir Alan's main reason for firing her despite Naomi's dismal performance as project manager, and Jadine's blatant lack of respect for Naomi; she did very little on the first two tasks, and even less on the third.
- Epic Fail: In the first task she managed to sell eleven cups of coffee (from a mobile stand, no less) in two hours, and clearly thought this was something to be proud of.
- Running Gag: Screwed up on location on the first task, and only got away with it because Andy was such a weak leader. She made the same error on the week three task. This time she was not so lucky…
Rory
"I am! Your boss!"
- Epic Fail: If not for the complete shambles of Paul's leadership in Week 6, he would have been the worst project manager from this series by a country mile.
- Never My Fault: Insisted that the team got clobbered in the second task because Tre was a Spanner in the Works, rather than Rory designing a horrible product and ignoring all the feedback.
- Pointy-Haired Boss: As project manager, he insisted that all the other candidates remove their jackets while he kept his on, to clearly show that he was boss. On top of that, he insisted on leaving market research until after they had designed their product, and then told the research team that their feedback wouldn't be taken into consideration.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: His declaration that "I am! Your boss!" to Tre in Week 2.
- Wall of Blather: Kept offering up this in a vain attempt to defend himself in the final boardroom. Against Tre's far more pointed and aggressive defence (and with Ifti having already been fired), he really didn't have a prayer of survival.
Ifti
"I'm just being honest with you, Sir Alan, because I'm not going to be going into tasks and not giving 100%. You saw me on the first task, you saw what I'm capable of, but I just found myself in a mental block, and if I can't tell you the truth, what can I do?"
- Apathy Killed the Cat: During the second task he admitted openly admitted that despite his product design background, he just didn't feel like contributing to the task. Jadine was pissed off and attempted to pick a fight with him, but Ifti didn't even want to do that.
- Badass Boast: Despite his firing, he nonetheless vowed in his taxi ride that he would become a billionaire by the age of 50.
- Spear Counterpart: To a degree, he was this to Jadine. Like her, he ended up getting fired because he was missing his son so badly that he couldn't focus on the competition.
- Suicide by Cop: He didn't outright tell Sir Alan to fire him during the boardroom (we wouldn't get an instance of that until Lindsay in Season 10), but he openly admitted that he couldn't keep himself focused and didn't see the situation improving, causing Sugar to immediately fire him, with Ifti's subsequent reaction indicating that he knew perfectly well this was coming.
Andy
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: After being told that he was fired, he tried begging Sir Alan for a second chance. Naturally, it got him nowhere.
- The Determinator: Very much a hard worker, but discovered all too quickly that alone won't get you anywhere in the competition.
