There is a sense in which it is fair to say that Carol Vorderman won the 2024 general election. Clearly, the radio host and former Countdown maths wizard is not the prime minister – or at least, not yet. But the swing towards Labour on 4 July was 1.6 percentage points; the real change was the 20-point swing away from the Conservatives. This force, the inchoate anger of a country that was not choosing a new government but sacking an old one, is embodied in Vorderman, who has become one of Britain’s most popular political commentators. She regularly makes furious denunciations of government incompetence and greed to an audience of almost a million followers on X (more than the Conservative Party, and several times any of the Tory leadership contenders), perhaps a million more on other platforms, and a weekly audience of around 270,000 listeners on her LBC show.
I met Vorderman at a private members’ club in London’s Marylebone. She has the stage presence of someone who has, by her reckoning, appeared on TV more than 10,000 times. Her hair and outfit – black, shiny trousers, a crisp, white shirt – were immaculate despite a busy day that had started 12 hours earlier (she lives in Bristol, and had risen at 4.30am to catch the first train). She grinned as we spoke of the election. The Conservatives “were eviscerated”, she said, enjoying the phrase. “That has become one of my favourite words.” In the introduction to her new book on politics, What Now?, Vorderman celebrates this moment in capital letters: “WE WON.” But the “we” who won is not a political party: “I mean everyone who’s not a Tory. I don’t mean Labour.”
Vorderman – the first woman to speak on Channel 4, which began regular broadcasting with an episode of Countdown in November 1982 – has a history with policy. In 2001 David Blunkett appointed her to the Home Office taskforce that created the UK’s first Online Grooming Act. In 2009 Michael Gove asked her to lead a maths education initiative for the Conservatives. This was acceptable political involvement, as dictated by what Vorderman calls the “unwritten celebrity rule book” and its leading principle, “Do nice things.” To the public she was “Mrs Numbers” or “Auntie Carol”.
Then came the pandemic, and the anger. She did not see her daughter for a long time. Her mother had died a few years earlier, and in What Now? she reflects that this was in one sense a mercy: “She would have been terrified by it all.” The electric smile faded as she recalled the “pure anger” she felt in 2022 when she began reading about the VIP lanes that had accelerated government spending with certain companies, in particular PPE Medpro, which was awarded contracts worth more than £200m in June 2020 to supply masks and gowns to the NHS (many of which were later found to be unsafe and unusable). Medpro was connected to a Tory peer, Michelle Mone. Vorderman knew Mone; they became friends after meeting on a charity version of The Apprentice in 2009, and in the years following met repeatedly at drinks and other social events. This personal connection seems to have given Vorderman license to cross a threshold. In November 2022 she penned a political tweet which linked to a Guardian report on the millions Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, had made: “Slam them in jail,” she wrote. No more nice Auntie Carol.
Mone didn’t contact her again after she began tweeting. More serious were the implications for Vorderman’s career at the BBC, where she had a weekly radio show. Her tweets broke the corporation’s social media rules and a year later she was sacked. LBC saw the opportunity.
Something about Vorderman – working class, unapologetically glamorous, irreverent – seems to enrage a certain kind of man. Johnny Mercer tweeted her about her “s*** lonely life”, adding that, “No one normal really cares about your view. They think you’re mad.” (Mercer was a cabinet minister at the time.) The Tory MP Marco Longhi took time out from representing his constituents to tell Vorderman that “no amount of plastic surgery or Botox” would cure her of her “bitterness, arrogance and envy”.
“Women generally don’t speak out,” Vorderman reflected, “because they’re taught not to. If you’re a woman like me, from a poor background, you’re a troublemaker.”
The volume of abusive tweets and messages she receives has risen since the election, but she told me this is part of the fun. “It doesn’t touch me, in terms of emotion.” She enjoys provoking those who despise her; in June she posted a video showing the far-right thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known as Tommy Robinson) being arrested, and joked, to the outrage of his followers, that he should be deported to Rwanda. “I have to admit” – she leans forward, her shiny trousers creaking conspiratorially – “I sometimes tweet out stuff that I know will wind them up. It gives them something to do, bless them.”
In May 2023 Vorderman became “very actively involved” with a group of volunteers, unaffiliated to any political party, who had set up a voting website called StopTheTories. It is this group, more than anyone, that Vorderman feels “won” the election earlier this year, but she wanted more from the results. She was “praying” for the Conservatives to lose to the Liberal Democrats: “It would have changed the whole face of politics. As it is, it’s” – she gestures dismissively – “red-blue, still.”
Would the Lib Dems be an effective opposition? “I don’t think in normal terms,” she said. “I think the whole system is corrupted. That genuinely is my belief. So it isn’t about fiddling around at the edges. It’s more about” – she pauses, weighing her words – “exploding a system that is no longer fit for purpose.”
This is also how populists such as Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance portray politics: better dynamited than restored. She nodded. “Farage says Westminster’s out of touch. I say Westminster’s out of touch.” For her, the most concerning result in the election was the turnout: “After the D-Day debacle, after the election-betting scandal, after the VIP lanes and partygate and three prime ministers and a cost-of-living crisis… Still, only half the people chose to vote. There’s never been such a disconnect.”
Where Vorderman and Farage differ is on the question of what should “fill the space” left by the absence of a responsible and transparent politics. The far right (in which she includes Reform and the right wing of the Conservative Party) “fill that void and bamboozle people, as they did with the Brexit vote, with lies. That has been allowed to happen because our faith in the system is so low.”
In recent weeks Vorderman has been relatively quiet on social media, leading some to question if she will be as forthright a critic of the new government. She says this is due to her schedule. She has been a vocal critic of Rachel Reeves’ plan to cut the winter fuel allowance (she believes the threshold for means testing should have been higher) and told me she is “concerned” by reports that Yvette Cooper will defend the controversial anti-protest laws brought in by Suella Braverman. She worries about the optics of making the winter fuel cut before measures to address inequality, such as change to the “carried interest” tax loophole (which benefits wealthy financiers) or a revision of council tax bands. “It’s about, ‘Where’s your heart?’”
She does not, she assured me, plan to show the new government any more leniency than its predecessor: “I’m coming back, full throttle.”
[See also: The man who fixes broken councils]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble