'What The F**k Has Happened Here?': Carol Vorderman Is Still Asking The Big Questions

Carol Vorderman has a few suggestions for fixing the current political systemThroughout her four decades as a stalwart of British broadcasting, Carol Vorderman has been seen countless different ways by different people: impressive quiz show Maths whiz, cosy daytime favourite, staunch education advocate, impassioned charity campaigner – even, briefly, Cher impersonator.But many of us have been introduced to a different side to Carol in the last few years, which have seen her becoming known as much for her political commentary as her work on screen.Exasperated with the Conservative government towards the end of the Covid pandemic, the former Countdown presenter began venting her opinions on X (or Twitter, as it was still known in those days), and people quickly started to pay attention.It wasn’t long before Carol’s voice was one people were looking to in order to help make sense of the world. She even left a long-held post at BBC Wales so she could continue to speak freely about the then-government without breaching the corporation’s strict social media guidelines around impartiality (she was then snapped up by LBC, where she continues to front a weekly current affairs show), before being snapped up to take part in Channel 4’s coverage of the 2024 election and even publishing a book about the state of the country, Now What?, in which she lays out her “mission to fix broken Britain”.So fed up with the last government was Carol, that she spearheaded a campaign aimed specifically at – in her words – “destroying” the Tories, through tactical voting.Carol Vorderman launched her own show on LBC in 2024This approach, Carol says, is one she believes “we should never have to use, because we should have proportional representation”. However, she tells HuffPost UK: “With all the analysis, we know that we directly contributed to the Tories losing at least 100 seats. Hooray! Because they needed to be destroyed.”Carol is quick to point out, though, that her position was always “anti-Tory” rather than “pro-Labour”.“I have never said, ‘vote Labour’, other than tactically,” she insists. “It just happened to be that we have a two-party system.”“Or we did have,” she odds, ominously. “So, who else could win? Because we have a crap political system. It’s archaic. And it needs completely revolutionising.”Among Carol’s proposed solutions to this would be getting rid of the current first past the post voting system, and introducing proportional representation in its place, “so that people can see that their vote actually counts”.“The first past the post system is dire. It’s how America has got into its situation, and how we’ve got into our situation, continually,” she claims.Unfortunately for Carol, she doesn’t think the current structure will be going anywhere for the time being. “The turkeys won’t vote for Christmas, will they?” she quips. “The politicians won’t vote themselves out.”Carol Vorderman – pictured at the Edinburgh TV Festival last year – has admitted the current political climate is not something she feels optimistic aboutWe’re speaking the morning after Labour’s controversial welfare reform vote, just shy of a year since Keir Starmer’s election.As a prime minister, Carol admits she feels “let down” by Starmer, albeit “not wholly”, rating him a “three out of 10” as a leader so far.“I don’t know who the hell is advising them,” she says. “I mean, the way they’re dealing with it, it’s just like… own your shit! Why are you getting it wrong, and why are you getting it wrong so continuously? I don’t understand.”She then begins reeling off a list of suggestions (“Tax the rich! Stop corruption! Get an independent corruption commissioner! Have drug and alcohol tests for anyone who’s trying to enter the House of Commons! Stop second jobs for MPs! Have fantastic new rules so there are no conflicts of interest between donations to any political party and government contracts!”) that she thinks could reverse Starmer’s ailing public image.“These are all things that cost nothing, by the way,” she notes. “And the country would cheer! Why don’t they do it? I don’t get it! I genuinely don’t understand, and I am fuming about it.”As for the rising threat seemingly posed by Nigel Farage in the current political climate, Carol warns: “If Reform got in, we’d have the singularly most corrupt and vile government of my lifetime.”As well as an upcoming, updated version of her politically-charged book, Carol is also promoting a very different new project, a return to the world of TV quizzing in 5’s Celebrity Puzzling.Carol Vorderman as a team captain on 5's new quiz show Celebrity PuzzlingHosted by Jeremy Vine, the show sees team captains Carol and Sally Lindsay (plus an array of showbiz guests), pitted against one another in a variety of brain-teasers and quiz questions.“Obviously I love quiz shows, and I’ve hosted many over the years. But I particularly like this one because it’s less about general knowledge, so it suits me more,” she explains. “You’ve got to think more on your feet. It’s a different part of your brain.“And I tell you what, I absolutely love being a team captain rather than hosting. When you’re hosting, you’re more concerned about that, so you’re actually less involved in the quiz. Whereas when you’re a team captain, you’re fully in – boots and everything – which I prefer, it’s more in my nature.”Celebrity Quizzing also reunites Carol with her former Loose Women co-star Sally Lindsay, with whom she’s been friends off-screen for around 15 years.“She’s lovely, she’s just a great person,” Carol enthuses. “She’s exactly as you see her on screen. She’s straight-talking, and very kind, and very funny, obviously. And a grafter.”One benefit to already being friends with her fellow team captain, she observes, is that “all that initial politeness is already gone”, so she doesn’t need to try and mask her “natural competitive streak”.“I’m not pretending, I’m not going, ‘no, no, you first’. None of that. We’re straight in and competitive!” she adds with her signature laugh. “It’s like when the family plays Monopoly – no politeness.”Carol with her Celebrity Puzzling co-stars Jeremy Vine and Sally Lindsay“And it’s also unusual to have two female team captains,” she observes, a far cry from the early days of Countdown in the early ’80s, when she recalls there were still only a handful of women on-screen.Carol remembers this as a “challenging” time to be a woman in TV, “but in a different way than it is to girls now”.“It was challenging just to get on the bloody thing – that was a challenge!” she remarks. “Once you got on it, you didn’t really care what anyone said or did. It was like, ’yeah, I’m on! Woooo!’.”“Everything was a new opportunity then, for women,” Carol recalls, describing it as an era of “exploration and adventure”. Things since then have changed “hugely” and “positively”, she enthuses.“There just weren’t really women presenters back then,” Carol continues. “You were either Angela Rippon or Esther Rantzen, that was basically it. And then Cilla [Black] started presenting later.“But there wasn’t any daytime telly, either, or breakfast telly. Countdown was the first show on Channel 4 – and by definition, there were only four channels. So it was a very different time. There was no Sky, no satellite telly, no cable telly, certainly no streaming channels. So, everything has changed. But as far as women’s opportunities, I would say they’re kind of equal to men now, really.”Carol Vorderman in 1985, three years into her time on Channel 4's CountdownHowever, one thing Carol concedes that her male peers don’t have to contend with, that women in the public do, is the near-constant media scrutiny to which she’s been subjected her entire career.“I’ve known nothing else but that,” she admits, which she says is indicative of a “ridiculous cultural thing” that affects “women generally – not just the ones on the telly”.“You even have it with horrible politicians like Lee Anderson saying similar things – it’s just abuse and harassment,” she says. “I’ve got a skin like a rhino for things like that, because I’ve always had to put up with being followed around, and headlines all the time, certainly in the Daily Mail, for this, that and the other…”“They’re very good at bitching about women, and trying to get women to hate other women,” she says of the tabloids. “That’s their business model, you know?”What concerns Carol more, she says, is the trickle-down effect that this has had since the invention of social media, where regular women are now finding themselves on the receiving end of abuse.She explains: “When I go through Instagram, for instance – and I try and follow a whole range of different people, because you see the different lives that people are living and everything – every woman gets abuse! And I just think, ‘hang on, what the fuck has happened here?’. “OK, if you earn a lot of money and you’re on the telly, there are huge advantages to that – you take a bit of criticism. I mean, it’s not right – because it doesn’t happen to men. But it’s like, ‘well at least I’m getting the benefits’, financially, or whatever it might be. And that’s part of my job… I don’t think it is part of my job, but I’m just saying you can kind of go, ’oh, everyone’s got to put up with the bad bits as well as the good bits, if you’re going to be famous.“But when you’re just a normal person, a young woman living a normal life, doing your best, working hard, trying to have a nice time with your mates, and you get abuse – for what?? For why?? – that’s the bit I worry about, more than celebrities being mocked. It’s not the fault of social media, but social media has allowed the nastiness of nasty people to be freely out there.”Carol Vorderman says that more than 40 years of being the subject of tabloid scrutiny has given her "skin like a rhino"There’s one other palpable change that Carol has noticed over the course of her expansive TV career, too.Reflecting on the early days of her time hosting Countdown, Carol recalls that the show was made in collaboration with Yorkshire Television, and was filmed in Leeds, where she lived for a number of years.“I adored those days,” she enthuses. “Yorkshire Television was a powerhouse, just like Granada [based in Manchester] was, and most people [working there] were working-class, as opposed to now, where over 90% of the people working in telly are not working-class. Which is why, maybe, it’s changed so much.”She recalls: “You would pile into the bar after [filming] – it didn’t matter who you were, whether you worked in the canteen, or you were a camera man, or a props girl or props lad, or a spark, or on screen, or whatever. Everyone knew each other and talked to each other, there was no social hierarchy there, which is very much a Northern thing, and it was very much a working-class thing.”“Those were the golden days, the ’80s and ’90s, in terms of working in telly. But those days are well gone,” she laments.Carol says this shift began in 2004, when ITV merged many of its local studios around the country, and shuttered others completely.Carol Vorderman pictured in the Countdown studio during the show's early years“If you were living in Yorkshire, or Manchester, at that time, you felt you were represented by your media. And then in the early 2000s, ITV became one company, and largely, all the shows went down to London,” she explains. “So, you then had a different perception when you were watching.“The heart of ITV was always in the North. And then, progressively, when all the work came South, other than a few bits and pieces, of course, you had very much more of a middle-class view on things. And the number of regional shows came down, the regional newspapers started being cut, so people weren’t seeing themselves represented.”“It’s had a huge political shift, I think,” she adds, before correcting herself: “I know!”This idea of London-centricism is something Carol feels has partly led to the divisions that she believes to be the biggest threat facing the UK politically right now.“From about 2014, people [started] doing what they’re doing in America now, which was, ‘you’re either for or against’. And it’s very divisive,” she claims. “We thought, perhaps, after the [Brexit] vote, that it would heal. But it hasn’t.”Carol says: “In my lifetime, I’ve largely lived in the North. I’ve lived in Bristol for almost 20 years now. I’ve also lived in London, which is not my place, at all.“So, I’ve lived around the country. But, you know, we went from thriving towns, to desolate towns – post-industrial, as they call it. You see it in South Wales, you see it all over the place. And those people are traditional Labour voters.“Now, when Brexit came along, not being a Londoner, I knew that people would vote Leave. And the reason I knew that was because it was as much an anti-London vote, or an anti-South East vote, as it was anything.“When I lived in Leeds, I had very bright friends, who’d be running businesses there, and then they’d have to go down to London for meetings and stuff, and and people would just take the piss out of their accent. Like they’re thick.“And then, we’d be promised things [by politicians]. You’re lied to constantly when you’re from the North – or when you’re from areas other than the wealthy, greedy South East. And it’s like... something has to give. Because people are left without hope.”Celebrity Puzzling is Carol Vorderman's latest TV ventureThe current political climate is something that Carol admits she does not not feel at all optimistic about. “Not unless people wake up and do something radical, like register to vote, and then get off your arse and get to a voting booth or a postal vote,” she adds.In fact, she is of the opinion that voting should be made mandatory, as is currently the case in countries like Australia, Belgium and Brazil.Carol says: “In the last election, in spite of Partygate, Johnson, Truss, the country in austerity, all of that, only 52% of people who could have registered and voted did so. What about the others who didn’t? ‘Ah, well, there’s no point, is there?’ Yes, there is!! It’s all you’ve bloody got!!”“The system has made people very disillusioned – and so, I don’t blame people for not voting. But you have to wake up and vote. You have to do it,” she insists. “Or we will have a far-right government, which is like Poundland Trump, in this country. And then, you’re buggered for two generations.”Celebrity Puzzling is available to stream now on 5.READ MORE:Self Esteem: ‘I Achieved Everything I Set Out To Do, And I Was Sadder Than Ever’Sir Ian McKellen: 'When Society Disregards A Minority, That’s When It Is Going Off The Rails'Katherine Ryan: ‘I’m At That Age Where I’m A Bit Of An Old Straight White Man Myself’

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