photography SANE SEVEN styling SORREL KINDER
You’ve got to love Carol Vorderman.At 63 she is a rebel with a cause. A woman prepared to sacrifice a 40-year television career to become a trailblazer for truth and justice. Carol (or Vorders as she’s known to her friends) arrives for our interview fresh from her new Sunday show at the talk radio station LBC and we sit in a quiet corner of the Radisson Blu Hotel in London’s Leicester Square. In tight jeans, a white lace blouse and wedge-heeled gladiator sandals, she looks like a bodacious Boudica. Not the stereotypical outfit you’d associate with a rebel, but a trademark look for the girl from the Welsh town Rhyl, who grew up in poverty to become (via Cambridge University) one of the best-known faces on TV in shows ranging from Countdown to Tomorrow’s World and Loose Women.
There is nothing stereotypical about Vorders, whose debut political book, Now What? On a Mission to Fix Broken Britain, has just been released. She lives in Bristol with her 27-yearold son, Cameron; she can fly a plane, owns a large camper van, loves hiking, and has several ‘special friends’ but zero desire to get married (she has been divorced twice). Her rocks are her children, her PhD daughter Katie, 33, who is breaking ground researching the use of zero gravity production in space to help fight cancer, and Cameron, who struggled with learning difficulties and who she calls her ‘young philosopher’. Her perfect snack is a bag of raw sprouts.