Every two or so months, Carol Vorderman got together with a group of friends. The “Gays and Girls” lunches started late, so everyone could get their work done. Then a group including her, Alan Carr, Gok Wan, Paul O’Grady and more met, ate, and then went “on to whatever time, going around doing ridiculous things”.
The imagination races. Exactly what, I want to know, did Carol Vorderman get up to on her big, boozy nights out with the late, great Paul O’Grady?
“Some of the things I can’t tell you,” Vorderman says. “Oh, but it was hilarious. When O’Grady was on one you’d absolutely cry laughing. I absolutely adored him and he wouldn’t hold back.”
Nowadays, lunches are a more sedate affair for Vorderman, 63. Come the end of the night, she’ll be nursing cups of tea. “I think I’m allergic to alcohol now,” she says. “It’s post-menopause – something you will never experience. Literally, I can’t remember the last time I had a drink.”
Like her lunches, Vorderman’s interview with Big Issue runs long – and is good value. We sit out on the balcony of her opulent Central London members’ club – it’s cheaper than a hotel, and she feels far safer. The Countdown host-turned Tory folk devil is dressed in a new oversized black blazer she proudly tells me she’s treated herself to. Minutes before we meet, Vorderman shared a Big Issue article on social media about women in the north dying earlier and being more likely to be in poverty.
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“And there, in one headline, is the truth of Tory so-called Levelling Up for you,” she posted on X. “Lying, robbing bunch of charlatans.” It’s the kind of anti-Tory salvo her 985,000 followers have grown accustomed to. So I’m surprised to learn she most recently voted for the Conservatives in the 2010 general election. She had grown tired with the scandals: MPs’ expenses, the loans for honours scandal and Blair’s police interview.
“There was this murkiness,” she says. “Obviously I hadn’t got a clue what was coming, did I? I mean, I had no idea what David Cameron would be introducing a matter of months later. But that was probably it. It was a bit like a load of people loaned their vote to Labour this time, because half of them were just pissed off at the Tories. So I think it was a similar thing to that.” Fast forward 14 years, and you could make a decent case that Vorderman is now the Tories’ biggest nemesis.
Carol Vorderman lives her life in chapters
If you put Vorderman’s life into chapters, they’d look something like this:
Childhood was in Rhyl, where she grew up in poverty in one of the poorest areas of Wales, her mum working five part-time jobs. She had cousins living two doors away, and another set three doors away. Her grandad, a tenant farmer, came round every week with a sack of potatoes and a tray of fresh eggs, and they’d live on the homecooked egg and chips.
Carol Vorderman in 1986. Image: David Hickes / Alamy Stock Photo
“What we didn’t have in north Wales was posh people. There were a couple but they were English. So we didn’t have a class system as such,” she says. “Because everyone was poor. Everyone got the bus, hardly anyone had a car. You didn’t have that sense that you were inferior.”
Education was the way out. With odds she compares to winning the lottery, Vorderman went to study engineering at Cambridge. Post-graduation employment came firstly in the form of a pea factory, where Vorderman learned to drive a forklift. All while living out of the back of a “rust-bucket” old Datsun. Her mum, now in her 50s and having left Vorderman’s stepdad, was living in a student house in Windsor.
“That was the closest, I think, that I’ve ever felt about homelessness,” Vorderman says. “What would have happened if my mum had been ill? What would have happened if I was ill? What would she have done if I hadn’t looked after her? So that’s the closest, and sometimes you could just feel the desperation.”
A few other jobs followed, then Countdown. The big time. Carol Vorderman became one of those people everyone in the country knows and recognises. She earned a lot of money – more than host Richard Whiteley. But in 2008, she says, she was “forced out”. After 26 years on the show, her contract was due to end that December, she explains now, with a renewal usually discussed about six months before.
“I sort of vaguely discussed it and suddenly it was ‘90% pay cut, you’ve got 48 hours to make your mind up’. It’s like, what?”
So that was the end of that chapter. New Countdown isn’t appointment viewing for her: “I’d be a bit of a saddo, wouldn’t I, if I was clinging on to something all these years later?
“I’m sure I’ve caught it, the early morning edition. If it’s on Channel 4 and I switch the telly on in the morning, because I’m an early riser and there’s a numbers game, yeah I’d watch it. It’s not a thing.”
With Richard Whiteley on the set of Countdown. Image: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Much of Vorderman’s politics is evidently born of experience. Take one particular episode, a decade ago. She met a number of “super-rich” people, who asked her to be a part of their gang. After a couple of events, including one in Monaco, she decided it wasn’t for her.
“It was the way they spoke about people. I just, this is not who I am,” she says. “The super-rich who I have known, they laugh less and they moan about everything.”
She made an active choice to turn away from it, but learned something. “I think in many ways, when I comment about the super-rich, I sort of know what I’m talking about there,” she says.
During all this time, politics wasn’t a dominating force in her life. “You see the ebb and flow. Even though politics wasn’t uppermost in my mind through many of these years, you see the scandals, the corruption, the lies – and not just from one party.”
In Vorderman’s telling, 23 November 2022 was the start of the next chapter in her life. That day was her first political tweet. The Guardian published a story revealing Conservative peer Michelle Mone secretly received £29 million from a “VIP lane” PPE firm. Vorderman’s rage with the Tory government boiled over. But why this? It goes back to her politics coming from experience: Mone used to be her friend.
Working in London four or five days a week, staying alone in a grand hotel, company was scarce. “You kind of need someone that you can see,” says Vorderman. If Mone was in London that week, they’d hang out.
Carol Vorderman with Michelle Mone in 2012 at Cheltenham Festival. Image: PA Images / Alamy
“I don’t deny, sometimes we had a good laugh. I don’t deny that, as I would if I go, ‘Right Greg, I’m taking you out’, you’d have a laugh, because I have a laugh. I live my life like that,” she says.
They were good friends, but the friendship lasted about a year. “The reason I dropped her as a ‘friend’ was the scale of her lying. She was, in my opinion, a con woman,” Vorderman writes in her new book. She hasn’t heard from Mone since 2012. But that tweet set Vorderman’s life on a new trajectory.
That’s why we’re speaking: she details this and the rest of her social-justice-by-social-media crusade in her new book, Now What?. Part-diary, part-politics explainer, part-memoir, it’s “a book for people who feel as though politics isn’t for them,” she says. Now What? is an attempt at “explaining to people very simply why it’s about them, why virtually every decision you make in your life, other than who to snog, is about politics, or politics has had a huge effect on”. The first boy she kissed, by the way, was Steven Jones, aged seven. Vorderman chased him round the playground until he gave up.
Social media has torn up the rulebook for female celebrities and given them more of a voice, Vorderman says. There has also been a cost. In early 2023, as her tweeting continued, and controversy mounted over Gary Lineker and a new social media policy, she became convinced the writing was on the wall. It was only a matter of time before she was sacked by the BBC from her presenting job on Radio Wales. The final straw – the thing that made her give up trying to follow the policy – were Suella Braverman’s comments describing homelessness as a “lifestyle choice” and pushing to fine charities for giving tents to rough sleepers.
It made her think back to her earlier life – the poverty of her childhood and the precarity of her and her mum’s situation after graduation. “It was just the contempt that the government felt for the public. I still can’t get over it. And I won’t get over it,” Vorderman says, looking back. “It just touched a nerve really.”
So she tweeted: “@SuellaBraverman What I want to stop, and what the law-abiding majority wants to stop, is your vile government clinging onto power for a day longer. You don’t speak for us. Every week you debase democracy further. We’re ashamed of you. Go now.”
That day, 4 November 2023, her diary reads: “The countdown to leaving the BBC starts now!” Within three days, she had been sacked by the BBC, with five tweets cited as the reason.
Image: Dan Kennedy
There are no regrets about her new direction. “I’m very lucky because I made a lot of money. If I was still worrying about paying the mortgage, would I have done what I’ve done? Probably not,” she says. “And that’s another thing I’ve learned, that I’ve got the freedom, and therefore for me I feel the responsibility of that.”
Before the election, one newspaper heralded Vorderman as “the real leader of the opposition”. So now they’re in government, have Starmer’s crew been in touch? “I have spoken to many of them over the years, and as you know got actively involved in some of the issues. I don’t want to be involved in politics,” she says.
“I have met a number of them, it would be wrong to say anything was offered. I have made it abundantly clear I don’t want to be offered anything. The answer would always be no, because I want to do things from the outside. I want to remain independent, and like having a voice and being able to criticise the current government as well.”
Instead, she’s firmly fixed on 2029. If Labour don’t get it right, she says, something even worse than the dark days of the Conservatives will come. That’s the next chapter. Would she ever vote for the Tories again? “I can’t see it in my lifetime,” she says.
She has, true to her brand, put a number on that lifetime. “My best guess is 85. So that gives me another 21 years and a few months. And you think ‘How many elections is that’?” she says.
Not that death scares her. “It’s a good life. Not remotely worried about dying,” she says. “I’m slightly claustrophobic. I am definitely going to be cremated, having read those stories about people scratching the coffins.”
Even talking about death is fun with Vorders, I think, as she adds: “Put me in that fire baby.”
Now What? On a Mission to Fix Broken Britain by Carol Vorderman is out now (Headline, £22)
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