Carol Vorderman is, rather appropriately for a mathematician, currently in her prime. The former Countdown presenter has lately enjoyed an unexpected late renaissance as the kind of fearless public figure she arguably couldn’t have been when she was younger: politically engaged, unembarrassed and trusted to speak up on issues ranging from financial probity in government to menopausal health, with all the authority born of having lived a bit. (Vorderman had severe depression herself in her early 50s, and was audibly incensed when the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, dismissed calls to outlaw workplace discrimination on the grounds of menopause, comparing the idea to seeking legal protection for having ginger hair.)
Unlike her fellow broadcaster Gary Lineker, she isn’t politically constrained by working for the BBC. But perhaps more importantly, at the age of 62, Vorderman is evidently experiencing something of a personal liberation. Her two children have grown and gone, and her elderly mother – whom she looked after for years – has died. Twice divorced, the presenter is gloriously unabashed about maintaining a roster of what she calls five “special friends” with benefits, instead of seeking a partner to settle down with, and has bought a campervan in which to take herself off hiking and paddleboarding at weekends.
Her goal in life now is to be happy rather than to be in love, she explained in an interview at the weekend, and she has simply stopped caring what other people think about any of it. “I’ve got nothing to apologise for, so I live without apology. And where I feel a sense of right or wrong – as opposed to right or left – I call it out.” That this flattering interview appeared in the Mail on Sunday, not normally known for its glowing coverage of people who embarrass Conservative ministers, is testament to her pulling power.
Obviously it’s preposterous to claim, as the academic Matthew Goodwin recently did in a series of essays to promote his new book on rightwing populism, that the likes of Vorderman and Lineker are part of a liberal “new elite”, secretly controlling the country in defiance of the popular will, as if a Conservative party that has been in power for nearly 13 years was somehow helpless in the face of a couple of TV presenters. But if she doesn’t have power, a woman like Vorderman undeniably does wield influence, and a less brittle or paranoid rightwing establishment would be trying to understand why that is, rather than furiously attacking it.
Vorderman does seem to have given voice to a broad female irritation with shoddy, sleazy politics, but her appeal arguably has less to do with political partisanship than with something to which millions of women instinctively respond – which is a defiant refusal to go quietly after a certain age. Above all, she embodies the intoxicating idea that getting older might not be so terrifying after all.
She’s lucky in having the money, the professional clout and the good health to ease her passage into what can be a difficult decade, of course. But she is also more broadly part of a generation that often has more options than their own mothers did; women who worked all their lives, grimly hanging on in there through the sleepless years with small children or in workplaces often overtly hostile to them, who are now reaping the rewards in their late 50s and early 60s of a financial independence older women have not always enjoyed.
The women Vorderman speaks to may well have weathered health scares and bereavements, professional setbacks and transitions, the stormy business of raising teenagers and the painful period of marital adjustment that often follows an empty nest. They didn’t survive all that just to be patronised to death now by younger women or hustled out of sight by older men, and they rightly expect more from life than a descent into unloved hagdom.
If 60 still looks frightening from a distance, the generation approaching it now is not easily scared, and there’s a vicarious thrill to be had from watching them rip into what looks suspiciously like a paper tiger. As Vorderman says herself, in her 30s there was always someone she felt beholden to; always someone she was trying to please, or to look after. Only now does she finally feel free to suit herself, and shrug off whatever criticism comes her way as a result. Compared to the paralysing insecurities of being half her age, frankly that looks like nirvana to me.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
