There is a peculiar contradiction in the way some men attack Carol Vorderman.
They spend half their time telling us she is terrible, irrelevant, smug, woke, anti-Brexit, overexposed and wrong about everything from politics to public morality. Then, the moment their language slips its lead, what comes out is not simple contempt at all. It is sexual attention.
They are not merely furious because Vorderman is politically outspoken. They are furious because she is politically outspoken and attractive - and because the attractive bit does not make her compliant.
Many men, I am sure, find Carol Vorderman attractive. That is hardly a hanging offence. People find other people attractive all the time, and civilisation has somehow staggered on. The difference is that most people do not express it in the public square with the delicacy of a blocked drain.
The Robert Kenyon incident is useful because it shows the mechanism clearly. As reported, he did not write the original crude sexual comment about Vorderman. He endorsed it. He added the little public nod, the emojis, and the “he’s only saying what we’re all thinking” routine, as if he had been elected shop steward for the entire male subconscious.
Speak for yourself, mate.
That is the telling part. He did not merely approve a leering remark. He tried to universalise it. Not “I think this”, but “we all think this”. The rest of mankind was apparently to be hauled into the gutter with him, whether it had put its shoes on or not.
Even if many men did think something vaguely along those lines, the whole point of being an adult is that not every private thought needs to be released into the world like a ferret in a village hall. Private attraction is one thing. Public sexualised crudity about a named woman is another. You do not need a seminar room and a tray of herbal tea to grasp the distinction.
One wonders what Kenyon’s wife had to say about it. Not because she is responsible for him, obviously. But it must be a curious domestic moment when your husband explains that “what we’re all thinking” apparently included him, Carol Vorderman, and a level of public crassness normally associated with motorway service-station graffiti.
This is where “banter” becomes such a shabby defence. We are told this is locker room banter, as if Facebook, X, or any other public platform were some steamy changing room with wet towels on the floor and a broken shower in the corner. They are not. They are public squares. What you say there is not muttered to three mates while tying your boots. It is published. That is the word. Published.
Once it is published, the “private bloke having a laugh” defence collapses. You cannot stand in the middle of the market place shouting something crude about a named woman and then claim it was just dressing-room chatter because you happened to be wearing trainers at the time.
And this matters because Vorderman is not being attacked as a decorative celebrity. She is being attacked because she is a political nuisance. She keeps appearing with figures, arguments, receipts and a maddening reluctance to accept that blokes with flags in their profile pictures are the natural custodians of public reason.
For a certain sort of man, that seems to blow a fuse.
So the response is not “your argument is wrong”. It becomes “your body is available for public assessment”. Not debate, but demotion: a way of dragging a woman out of politics and back into an arena where some men feel more comfortable - judgement, ownership, appetite and humiliation.
There is also a certain amount of brass neck in this coming from the Reform-adjacent world, where people are forever announcing their deep concern for “our women and children”. Apparently women must be protected from outsiders, migrants, liberals, judges, human rights lawyers, small boats, drag queens, foreign courts and anything else that can be turned into a campaign leaflet. But protecting women from crude public sexual objectification by one of their own candidates seems to fall mysteriously outside the perimeter fence.
That is the hypocrisy. “Our women” are invoked as sacred symbols when useful, but an actual woman, with an actual name, actual politics and actual opinions, can still be reduced to a sexual target in the public square. The concern is not really for women as autonomous human beings. It is for women as tribal property. Protected from them, available to us.
The political irony is rather good. The same crowd who talk endlessly about freedom, sovereignty and standing up to elites seem oddly troubled by a woman exercising sovereignty over herself. Vorderman says what she thinks, uses her platform, annoys the people she wants to annoy, and refuses to be politely ornamental.
Which is why “speak for yourself” remains the neatest answer. Not all men think like that. Not all men need to turn disagreement into domination. Not all men see an attractive woman with opinions and immediately reach for the mental toolkit marked “put her back in her place”.
Some of us just think: there is Carol Vorderman, being politically irritating to exactly the right people again - and, yes, she is very attractive.
And then we put the kettle on.
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