Carol Vorderman: ‘Nigel Farage is a liar and a grifter’
The forthright broadcaster on Reform, embracing being a ‘milf’ and her experiences at the BBC
Carol Vorderman enjoys a good fight. The broadcaster has been sacked from the BBC (“twice!”), stoked the ire of politicians like Reform MP Lee Anderson and former Conservative MP Edwina Currie, called Boris Johnson a narcissist and, on our Zoom call, labels Nigel Farage a “liar and a grifter”. She’s referring to the news that the Reform leader apologised for his 17 breaches of the MPs’ code of conduct, calling himself an “oddball” and blaming his poor computer skills for a failure to declare £380,000 of income on time.
Vorderman’s worn many hats throughout her career: Countdown maths whiz, RAF Air Cadets honorary group captain, two-time Rear of the Year winner. But the role she seems most fond of is that of professional provocateur.
And it’s a role she’s been very successful at. Her social media spats have seen her labelled “vicious” – by Currie – and a “hypocrite” – by Anderson – who also demanded she give her money away to “the poor people in the country and prove that [she is] a proper caring socialist”.
Vorderman made her fortune as the maths boffin on Countdown, earning a £900,000 annual salary at its peak. “It’s a commercial world out there and Channel 4 is not a charity,” she said when she revealed the figure in 2008. With an IQ she places somewhere between 154 and 167 – registering her on the genius scale – she knows her numbers. And now that words are her instrument of choice, she certainly isn’t mincing them.
It’s probably a good time to tell you that she’s also got some thoughts on this very publication. “I’m not prepared to pay for [The Telegraph’s] opinions,” she breezes. At least she’ll say it to my face.
It’s perhaps surprising, then, that this interview was arranged off the back of a campaign she’s fronting for a decidedly uncontroversial brand. Manchester-based JD Williams is known more for its reasonably priced floral frocks and no-nonsense wardrobe staples aimed at midlife women than it is for stirring the pot. It’s either a stroke of brilliance or madness by its PR team to choose the freewheeling Vorderman to front a campaign about the “milf”. For the uninitiated, the term translates to “mother I’d like to f–k”. When Vorderman tells me she “doesn’t give a monkey’s what people say”, I believe her.
Brow-raising as the arrangement may be, she’s just the woman for the job. Piers Morgan would certainly agree – he told her on Good Morning Britain in 2018 that she looks better now than she did 20 years prior – and former GQ editor Dylan Jones declared her the “woman every man in Britain fancies” after her 2004 appearance in the magazine boosted sales by 23 per cent, surpassing the Liz Hurley issue.
“I’ve always taken the term milf to be a bit of a compliment,” says Vorderman, adding that nowadays, she also gets called a “Gilf” (the “G” standing for “grandmother”). The point of the JD Williams campaign, however, is to redefine “milf” to mean “Midlife is Living Fearlessly”.
When it comes to the topic of Farage, Vorderman truly does live fearlessly. “He’s the worst thing,” she says, sounding baffled. I’m half expecting her PR to jump in and cut things off – JD Williams does have trousers to sell, after all. “He’s not an MP, he’s hardly there,” she presses on.
“He doesn’t turn up for the Prime Minister’s questions. He would destroy the NHS. This is a time where we all have to stand up and fight. People are going ‘politics isn’t for me’, well, it is when you need the NHS, when your police forces are diminished and violence is inherent for women and girls,” she adds, pointing to the 2023 Home Office report declaring it a national threat.
“I won’t forgive myself if I don’t step up. I’m coming back into the political fight later this year.”
Vorderman declines to provide further detail on this front, but one look at her Instagram account makes clear that the platform is her battleground – she’s moved on from X, calling it a “cesspit”, and citing death and rape threat concerns since Elon Musk drastically reduced content moderation on the platform. She posts dozens of Instagram stories per day, some humorous, some incisive, almost all political. A voracious reader, she says she’s got “about 10 news apps” and checks them all four times per day, using her learnings as fuel to take aim at political injustice with an irreverent wit. Nobody is safe: not Labour, not the Conservatives, especially not Reform. “I’ve always enjoyed a fight,” she laughs, “but not for me. For others.”
And just what is it that motivates the tireless Vorderman to be so vocal? Perhaps it’s because she knows what it’s like to grow up with a single mother working five jobs to keep things afloat. Or what it’s like to be the “free school lunch kid” at state school in Prestatyn. Or how it feels to be the third woman to ever study engineering at Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College, only to have her dreams of becoming a fighter pilot dashed by the fact that the RAF didn’t welcome women until 1994. But most probably, it’s that at 65, she’s now climbed up through many echelons of British society – and intimately knows the struggles of having no money, and what it’s really like when you do.
“If I never worked again, I’d be alright financially. Financial security gives you the power to say: ‘If you’re going to sack me, crack on. It’s not going to change my life in any way.’ So I do things that I want to do, rather than have to do,” she says. Vorderman is even a rare case of defying the gender pay gap, revealing in 2018 that her Countdown salary was three times that of late host Richard Whiteley.
But no amount of financial padding can soften the blow of being a woman in the spotlight. “In the year 2000, when I wore this short blue dress to the Baftas that was above the knee and a bit booby, it was front page everywhere for weeks,” she recalls. “The BBC Kilroy show did an episode about it, asking: ‘Should a woman aged 39 wear a dress above the knee?’ It’s nonsense.” At this point, I’m suspecting that Vorderman takes more than a little pleasure in railing against her former employer. “In television, in my generation, if you got to your late 40s, you were over the hill. And there were a lot of women of my age group who were sacked. A number of them took the BBC to court on ageism.”
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Vorderman even holds the honour of becoming the first presenter to be sacked by the broadcaster not once, but twice. Somewhere in south London, Gary Lineker is nodding approvingly.
“[The first time was] in the 1990s because I was doing an advert, and only men were allowed to do adverts. This is the crap that we [women] have had to put up with,” she laughs, referencing the Ariel washing powder advertisement that led to her leaving Tomorrow’s World in 1995, while fellow BBC hosts such as Danny Baker were gleefully starring in ads for Mars chocolate bars. Undeterred, she went on to “set up a [TV] production company that was very successful”, which saw her creating revision videos for the national curriculum, including 10 Minutes a Day Maths and Spelling Made Easy.
The second fire erupted in 2023 while she was hosting a BBC Radio Wales weekend show. The broadcaster had instated new social media guidelines, which curtailed staff’s ability to speak publicly about their political opinions. She refused to comply. At the time, Vorderman was fervently criticising the Tory government on X to her 902,000 followers, and released this statement: “My decision has been to continue to criticise the current UK government for what it has done to the country which I love – and I’m not prepared to stop. I was brought up to fight for what I believe in, and I will carry on.” The following year, she published a political manifesto titled Now What? On a Mission to Fix Broken Britain.
Evidently Vorderman is no shrinking violet in the face of backlash. If anything, she’s getting bolder with age. “When you’ve been knocked and criticised and abused throughout your life, it doesn’t make you weaker. It makes you stronger and makes you care less about what other people think. That’s the beauty of maturing,” she said
But surely she needs someone to lean on when she’s got scores of politicians pointing proverbial pitchforks her way? According to Vorderman, it certainly wouldn’t be a husband. She’s been married twice, once in 1985 to Christopher Mather, a Royal Navy officer, and again in 1990 to management consultant Patrick King, with whom she has two adult children.
Now a two-time divorcee, she says she does “not want a full-time partner”. I can practically hear her turning her nose up at the idea, as she continues: “It doesn’t suit how I want to live my life.” These days, it’s all about her “girls and gays”, which includes Radio 2 presenter Owain Wyn Evans, Celebrity Traitors champion Alan Carr and the nation’s favourite supermodel, Kate Moss. “It’s people who are freer in the head.”
Like friends on an Erasmus programme, they spend much of their time “crying laughing”, and stirring up trouble on holiday in Italy. On a recent trip, she and Evans posed for photos in the streets of Florence dressed as Morticia Addams and Bette Midler from Hocus Pocus: “We went to this Halloween party where everyone spoke Italian, not English, which was quite funny,” she muses. “It’s just a free and happy way to live.”
It remains to be seen just how light-hearted things will remain when she steps into the political ring this year, as she promises to do. But if Nigel Farage can thrash through the jungle on I’m A Celebrity and still hold the political limelight, there might just be room for a “Gilf” too.