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.”
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