First published on September 9
A few months ago I wrote a column calling for a national “Carol Vorderman Day” so we might celebrate Carol Vorderman for the fearless warrior queen she has rather unexpectedly become. Is Carol Vorderman, I asked, the only thing preventing us from becoming Italy circa ’92? Who else is calling out government lies and corruption so loudly and assiduously?
At that time, having just thought it up, I was vague as to how Carol Vorderman Day would work exactly, but having now met Carol Vorderman I can be more detailed. The date, we have agreed, will be November 24, which is when the initial revelations about Michelle Mone broke and Carol, in her fury, first went on the attack via her X (née Twitter) account.
There will be balloons on this special day as well as bunting and bubbles — “Carol has the brain of Einstein but the liver of Ollie Reed,” her friend Alan Carr has said — and a dress code that will be fitting. I had been thinking a skintight leopard-print jumpsuit or, because not everyone will feel comfortable in that, a full-on latex get-up teamed with heels. I did fret whether this was the right choice, but when these very garments were offered to her for the photographs and she did not demur but responded with enthusiasm and expertise — “You have the baby powder for the latex?” — I knew I’d nailed the look. We hope you will join us. It’ll be a great day. There will be games. We will play Pin the Tail on Boris Johnson, If He Doesn’t Hide in a Fridge. Chances are he will hide in a fridge, so don’t set your hopes too high.
We meet at the photoshoot. She is 62 and amazingly foxy. I am younger but of the same generation — Blue Peter or Magpie? “Magpie!” — yet not so amazingly foxy. I only hope that on a good day, in a good light, I would at least pass as her nan.
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Your appearance is important to you?
“It would be less important if I weren’t on the telly,” she says, “but it’s part of the job. I have Botox and a lot of treatments to my face and neck. Everyone does.” You think of yourself as amazingly foxy? “Ha. No. I know where I sit.”
I had arrived early but she had arrived earlier, and we go on talking for hours. She is warm, funny, clever, stays way beyond the allotted time without complaint, and preferred Donny Osmond to David Cassidy, which is excellent, as so did I. She is looking forward to Carol Vorderman Day, although wonders if it’s a bit over the top. “I’m just an old bird with an iPhone,” she says. I talk her round. You’re practically the leader of the opposition now, I tell her. And I’ve put a lot of work into Carol Vorderman Day. She says, “If I see something that is patently wrong then I feel I should show it to people. Because no one else is.”
She uses her social media profile not to raise issues “but to amplify them”, as she puts it. Her posts are full of rage but she is not an angry person ordinarily. I wonder how she copes with the tirade of abuse that comes her way from the Tories and the right generally. “It doesn’t bother me,” she says. “I’ll tell you why. I’m knocking on 63. I’ve made my money. I’ve been through it all. What’s the worst that can happen? That I’ll lose some jobs? Fine by me. Bring it on. They can sling what they like at me.” Even Edwina Currie has got in on the act, calling her “nasty” and “vicious”, which makes us both hoot, because what makes a decent person? One who nobs a prime minister behind his wife’s back? “You do have to laugh,” she says.
Elsewhere, her business with Michelle Mone has been framed as a “bitchfest”, with Carol as the “bitch”. Felicity Cornelius-Mercer, wife of veterans’ affairs minister Johnny Mercer, has called her “a celebrity attack dog”, while he’s sent throwing-up emojis her way, which is always classy. She is often called a “raging leftie”, while the fact is she’s worked with both David Cameron and Michael Gove (on maths in schools) and, “I don’t even know what my politics are. This isn’t about politics. It’s about corruption. It’s about a code of conduct. People’s faith in politics is at an all-time low. In the past we might not have agreed with someone’s politics, but we weren’t being abusive while creaming off the top.”
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I ask her if she thinks the Tories can separate fact from fiction. Nadine Dorries’ resignation letter was a fantasy from top to bottom. Is that wilful, or part of a mass delusion of the type Oliver Sacks would have written about? “I think even the people who say the Tories are bloody marvellous know it’s not true.” Yet they keep imagining we’ll buy into it? “They tried to persuade us we weren’t bothered about Partygate, and we were bothered and are not forgetting it. And also the VIP lane [where some companies with links to politicians were fast-tracked for PPE contracts during the pandemic] is massively emotional, as it bloody well should be.”
I say they must know, deep down, they’re up the spout, otherwise why get so rattled by the lady off the telly who had to keep a straight face when the letters on Countdown could spell “willy”? She says, to be fair, her favourite moment from that show was when her beloved co-presenter, Richard Whiteley, wore a tie with “Countdown” written vertically down it, handmade by a fan, and when he sat behind the desk it obscured the “down” and the microphone hid the “o”. That’s the consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant combo she is least likely to forget. Whiteley was oblivious throughout and just sat there with “his daft grin”.
This week Vorderman faced calls to apologise after she deleted tweets accusing Greg Hands, who is now Conservative Party chairman, of corruption following contact from lawyers. Vorderman said she accepted there was “no impropriety” from Hands in passing on an offer to provide PPE during Covid.
She is in receipt of tremendous support elsewhere — “Every day people of all ages come up to me and shake my hand and say, ‘I bloody love what you do,’ ” and has won many new admirers. “Carol Vorderman helping bring down the government wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card but I’m very much here for it,” said Tim Burgess, lead singer of the Charlatans. She is an MBE, was recently included in Vogue’s list of 25 women “defining and redefining Britain” and, on top of all that, let’s not forget, she has won rear of the year not once but twice, and has obligingly done those photos where, with head over shoulder, she’s looking down at her own bum with pride but also an element of surprise, as if someone else put it there.
• Carol Vorderman in spat with minister after lying claim
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This is where, I think, it gets confusing for some folk. She does have a brilliant brain. Although maths is her thing she was top of the class in everything at school, was put up a year and, when she left, the headmaster told her it should have been two. She was interviewed and offered a place at Cambridge University (engineering) at 16 years old and, as far as she knows, she’s the first girl from a Welsh comprehensive ever to be accepted there.
But she’s also been tabloid fodder for 40 years. During the lockdowns she even had paparazzi camped outside and helicopters flying overhead. Perhaps, I suggest, to keep an eye on your “dating system” and get a glimpse of your “special friends”? She says, “They never come to my house. I’m not dumb!” She is far from dumb, as established, but also she likes to have fun and baby-powder herself into latex, and some don’t seem able to comprehend that a woman can be in both camps. And when in doubt, they go the misogynist route? “I’ve had Tory MPs saying to me, ‘You Botoxed, pumped-up…’ They say awful things. I should complain, but it’s a distraction if you go down that route.”
Let’s spool back to where this phase of her life started, which is with Michelle Mone, who is always billed as a “friend” even if Carol stopped seeing her some years before for reasons she won’t say, and who is now under criminal investigation for making millions from PPE that proved unuseable. It was, says Carol, the disparity that made her blood boil and made her turn to Twitter. During the pandemic, she says, “There were wonderful people, good human beings, trying to help other human beings, yet for others it was a time of immense greed. I can’t get my head round it. To defraud the scared and the dying is the lowest you can go. And it was enabled by a Tory government that has never apologised, not ever. Well, they say, we were doing our best but NO, NO, NO, NO. Doing their best would have been finding someone who said, ‘I think I can get access to PPE but I don’t want any profit, just my costs covered.’ Not, ‘I’ve got this shell company, or I’ve just made up a company, and I want to make millions of pounds out of it.’ They have never apologised for it and that makes me even more angry.”
She’s been vocal about Nadhim Zahawi’s “careless” tax affairs, Richard Sharp’s appointment at the BBC, Rishi Sunak’s financial interests, Partygate, the £8 billion in Covid contracts that are still undeclared, the works. At the time of writing, her latest tweet reads, “How was Johnson’s £800,000 loan guarantor Sam Blyth put forward to run the British Council?”
I ask her if she thinks the rot set in with Brexit, which was, most would now accept, deceitfully achieved. Did that legitimise dishonesty in politics? How have we ended up with what is, essentially, a kleptocracy? “Brexit was a lie,” she says, “but at the time we didn’t know that. It’s not Brexit per se. I don’t live in London and people who live outside felt that if they had a view, or wanted to ask an honest question, they were told they were racist. They were told they were stupid. It was, for some, the middle finger to London. I remember on the day of the referendum the Evening Standard was saying that 70 per cent will vote Remain and I thought, that’s not going to happen, because of the anger that is now reminiscent of the anger we have because we were lied to. Johnson is responsible for a lot of it because he’s such an obsessive liar and it’s become part of their psyche.”
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The spaffing of taxpayers’ money up the wall, or directly into the bank accounts of ministers’ friends, isn’t something she could just shrug off, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis that has plunged so many people into poverty. And she does know what it’s like to be poor. She was born in Bedford, the youngest of three, on Christmas Eve, hence “Carol”. It could have been a comfortable life but three weeks later her Dutch father, Tony Vorderman, told her mother, Jean, that he had fallen for someone else. Jean had been in hospital during the pregnancy so a neighbouring woman had stepped in to help look after him and the children and he was carrying on with her 16-year-old daughter.
Jean packed up and immediately took Carol and her older brother, Anton, and older sister, Trixie, and returned to her home town of Prestatyn in north Wales. Carol would not see her father again for 42 years even if, bizarrely, he did see Anton and Trixie sporadically. She says her mother told her he once picked up Anton and Trixie from school and she came to supervise the hand-over, with Carol in the pram, and he didn’t look in the pram or anything before taking the other two off in his Jaguar and leaving Jean to schlep home on the bus.
How might you explain that? She can’t, really. Her theory is that, “If he’d said to the girl and her mother, who lived with them, that he’d seen the baby, it wouldn’t go down well.” There was never a birthday present or a Christmas present, not even a card, and no financial contributions until he was taken to court and even after that he only paid a pittance. This, she doesn’t seem angry about. Instead, she is breezy. It is what it is, seems to be her attitude.
But when she was in her thirties, he wrote her a letter she didn’t open. Instead, she wrote “Return to sender” on the envelope and posted it straight back. “I’ve still got no idea what was in it.” Does that mean it was painful at some level? And you couldn’t face it? “I was probably just being melodramatic,” she says. Did you send it back because you wanted to hurt him? “Honestly, I am not driven in that way. I think we’re on this planet for such a short time, a blink of an eye, and I don’t like being around nastiness.”
She met him when she was 42 at her sister’s instigation and it was an underwhelming experience. “He was an old man and I thought, if I dig it up it’s just not going to change anything.” So you didn’t confront him? You didn’t say, “Thanks for the birthday cards, Dad”? “I didn’t. At that time I was just divorced and was imposing him on my kids and I thought if they want to see their grandfather I shouldn’t stop them.” She does, generally, seem to have the sort of personality that forges ahead, regardless. Perhaps it was formed here.
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Back in Prestatyn they lived in a flat rented from Jean’s uncle. It was two-bedroomed, with Anton in one bedroom and four in the other: Carol, her mother, her sister and cousin Pam from down the road, who was always staying for some reason. Her earliest memory is sitting on a Bri-Nylon-covered sofa and staring at the gas fire, which was a “Cannon Miser” and “it had three burners but we only ever had the middle one on”. They were, indeed, poor, but she didn’t know they were poor, “because there weren’t any rich people around. It was mainly tenant farmers scraping a living.” Her maternal grandfather was a tenant farmer who would drop off potatoes and eggs once a week, “so we lived on egg and chips”.
Her mother, from the sound of it, worked every hour there was. She had three part-time secretarial jobs, brought typing home in the evening and on top of that there was Anton, who was born with a double cleft palate and had facial reconstruction surgery “involving 24 operations, God bless him”.
What a load your mother carried, I say. She says she only saw her mother cry twice. Once was when she’d sent Carol to buy groceries with a ten-bob note and she lost the money, “which was all we had”. The other was when frozen food became all the rage and the family saved up for a frozen chicken, but it was put in the oven with the plastic bag of giblets still in and it was acrid and inedible. Again, a lot to lose.
When did you last cry? “I cried watching the Lionesses in the World Cup. I’m not into football. But it was about women coming together and I loved it, just loved it. It’s significant, a turning point. Others can now come in their wake, and when I think about all the crap we had to put up with in our generation…”
She says that her first ambition was to become a fighter pilot but when she tried to join the air squadron at university they said, “You can’t. You’re a girl.” She got a pilot licence anyway, albeit years later (2013), and now has her own plane. I am hoping she will perform a loop-the-loop for us on Carol Vorderman Day.
Maths came easy to her. She didn’t know that until she first started school and, “You had those exercise books full of sums. I was in Sister Zita’s class and I’d finish and she’d say, ‘Oh, very good, Carol Vorderman. Can you do these now?’ I realised very quickly that the others hadn’t finished. When I got to the end of Sister Zita’s class, at four or five, I was books ahead. All I wanted to do was sums. That’s when the headmaster said, ‘What do you think, Carol, if we put you up a year?’ ”
She says a good report card was the one gift she could give her mother, and by doing well educationally she could also restore her self-respect. “We were Catholic and at the Catholic school we were either the only divorced family or one of two. Being a single parent was a very unusual thing and I just felt my mum would be spoken about differently.” Her mother ended up exceedingly proud. “I think she bored people to death. ‘By the way, my daughter is Carol Vorderman.’ She’d work that into conversation on the bus.”
Her mother did remarry, to an Italian builder whom Carol adored and thinks of as her dad, but they were always running away to stay in some crappy lodgings because, as Jean later told her, he did have affairs. She knew, she says, from an early age she wanted to be independent and never financially reliant on any man. “I thought: I’m not having any of this.”
After Cambridge, her first engineering job was with a frozen pea company. It was her mother who, one day, saw the article in the Yorkshire Evening Post saying a TV company was looking for a girl who was good at maths to appear on a quiz show. Carol wasn’t interested. Her mother wrote the application letter and gave it to her to sign. Carol still wasn’t interested. So her mother forged her signature. The letter is published in her 2010 memoir and starts: “I read of your search for a Channel 4 hostess. If it’s brains and beauty you want, addition is no problem and I enclose a recent photo for you to judge the second qualification…” The first Carol knew of it was when she got a call about an audition, and when she was offered the job she thought: why not? If it all goes pear-shaped, I can always be an accountant.
She was on Countdown for 26 years from 1982 even if, to my mind, it never recovered after Whiteley’s death in 2005. (He was adorable. I spoke to him on the phone once. He said, “I live in Wensleydale. It’s between Tuesleydale and Thursleydale.”) And then they sacked her. She doesn’t know why. “They asked me to take a 90 per cent pay cut and my understanding was that they just wanted me to go. It’s a long time ago, and I don’t want to resurrect it, but it was losing Richard all over again. It was painful. I was very hurt. Heartbroken, actually. But life goes on, doesn’t it,” she says, “and I got to do so many other things.”
She’s been married twice. The first marriage, to a navy fella, in her early twenties doesn’t count because it shouldn’t have happened — “I’m sure he’d agree” — and didn’t last a year. She had her doubts — her mum even had “wedding cancelled” cards printed — but went ahead “probably because of the pressure to get married”. Don’t do anything that, deep down, you don’t want to, she learnt. Her second marriage, to the businessman Paddy King, didn’t work out but, “I did love him.” They have two children, Cameron, an animator, who still lives with her, and Katie, a nanoscientist. What do they think of Mum’s rebirth as a “‘firebrand”? “They think it’s very funny. And good.”
I wonder if any of this has, in fact, cost her jobs. Not yet, she says. Actually, when the tabloids had a pile-on recently and “basically blamed me for Brexit not working, I was offered quite a few”. She has a show on BBC Radio Wales, owns and runs a successful online maths school, which, if it’s of interest, was free during the pandemic. Also, she still hosts the Pride of Britain awards and has a hit quiz-based podcast, Perfect 10, and has just published a book based on that format She isn’t exactly “a fading star in search of headlines”, as some would have it, although, to be fair, I’ve read a lot worse. She says she does use the “mute” facility on X where you can block certain words but, when it comes to it, “I really don’t care.”
She lives in Bristol. She doesn’t powder herself into latex when pootling about at home. She wears “PJs or leggings”. She cooks, but doesn’t get excited about it. “It’s a bit of chicken and a few veg thrown into the air-fryer.” (I can see I’ll need to arrange caterers for Carol Vorderman Day. There’s so much to do.) She likes adventures. She hikes. She paddleboards. She has a camper van. I checked her Instagram and saw her doing a zip-wire thing that I wouldn’t do in a million years. (She’s horizontal!) And she has her “special friends”.
How does it work? Is there a spreadsheet? What if two turn up at the same time? Are some graded “very special” and get to pull rank over those who are just “a little bit special”? She says it all sorts itself out. She adds, “A lot of men ask me if they can be my special friend and I have to say, it doesn’t work like that.” They’re men she’s come to know. They’re all adult and single. She says men who see a variety of women are called “players”, whereas the words for women who do similar aren’t quite as flattering. She thinks we should call them “Boudicas”. She’s a Boudica, in it for “a good time”, and why not? She is not seeking a full-time relationship. It would be a bore. “My women friends who are divorced or widowed feel the same. We’d only end up having to do the caring.” She is free, can do what she likes when she likes, and doesn’t give a jot what anyone thinks about any of it. “I’ve nothing to apologise for, so live without apology.”
She is, she says, going to keep at the Tories until they are gone. “If our kids are to have a future, we must kick them out. And if I can make a difference I’ll do everything I can to make that difference.”
Have you ever bumped into anyone you’ve taken on? “No,” she says, “but I’d like it. I’m a fighter. Bring it on.”
Magnificent, and we hope you will join us for Carol Vorderman Day. Latex is doable but remember the powder or there will be trouble. And other games will include Pin the Tail on the Rail Minister, If He Doesn’t Hide in the Ticket Office. Again, don’t set your hopes too high.
Carol Vorderman’s Perfect 10 Quiz Book is out now (Pop Press, £14.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount for Times+ members
Hair: Desmond Grundy at Joy Goodman using Bristows haircare. Make-up: Malin Coleman using Giorgio Armani and Tatcha. Black latex jacket and skirt, atsukokudo.com. Bodysuit, wearcommando.com. Earrings, vanessabaroni.com. Leopard print catsuit, Norma Kamali (mytheresa.com). Shoes, zara.com. Belt, hinkelman.com. Earrings, vanessabaroni.com. Coat, riverisland.co.uk. Boots, casadei.com. Belt, black-brown.com. Earrings, vickisarge.com. Ring, crystalhaze.com
