Sunday Long Read: Carol Vorderman Made Reform Look Small

One by-election exposed a wider pattern: contempt dressed as banter, grievance dressed as common sense, and "protection" offered without rights.

Photo by Michelle Ding on Unsplash

Reform UK have a serious problem with women.

Now, from the outset, I’m fully aware that I’m writing this as a near 40 year old man, and that there is sometimes something deeply suspect about men who solemnly explain misogyny to women as though we’ve just discovered it hiding behind the good plates. Women, as a group, do not need a man to explain to them that sexism exists. They know this.

They have, rather inconveniently, been living with it for a while. Longer, certainly, than Nigel Farage has been doing his best to look windswept, blokey and historically important outside pubs and on hills in the Kent countryside - which definitely is saying something.

That does not however mean that men get to sit out on this conversation.

Now, some of you may be aware that there was a bit of a drama in the North recently, with a small byelection. Hardly made the news, I know. The reason this byelection was important though is because it put a rather uncomfortable spotlight on Reform, and, to put it mildly, the contempt they hold women in.

Their candidate, a certain Mr Robert Kenyon, had a rather… unsavoury history living in the back catalogue of the interwebs. It has been litigated to within an inch of his life, so I’m not going to do a full run down of his misogyny, certainly not on a lovely Sunday morning, but it gave anyone with a working moral compass the ick.

He was, however, merely the cherry on top of the rancid little trifle.

As much as Kenyon’s online proclivities deserve scrutiny the danger here is that we allow Reform UK to contain the whole story just within one rather sad man. One byelection. One candidate. One unfortunate guy with a keyboard, a deleted account and all the social grace and decorum of a soggy bar mat.

That would be pretty convenient for Reform, Farage and his hangers on. It would also be wrong.

Robert “I’m a sexist” Kenyon is not the problem with Reform UK’s attitude towards women - he’s just the evidence bag. He is the point at which all the little foxes of misogyny over the years coalesce together.

The casual sexism, the contempt, the “just banter” defence, the anti-abortion rhetoric, the refusal to apologise properly, the expectation that women should absorb the abuse, tolerate the smirking and then be scolded if they dare to make a fuss about it.

The latter being exactly what Carol Vorderman did. To great effect.

One of Kenyon’s “I just had a bad day and wanted to relax on the internet” comments that came about involved him responding approvingly to a grotesque sexualised comment about Vorderman herself.

Neither challenging nor ignoring it, not even doing that pathetic little internet shuffle where someone claims they “didn’t read it properly” before liking it. He endorsed it.

“He’s only saying what we’re all thinking”

Such a charmer, right?

Carol Vorderman then, to the consternation of Reform UK, had the temerity - nay, the audacity, frankly - to object. She called it out head on, demanded an apology, and then when Reform decided that basic decency was just a bar too high for them to clear, she decided to write to the women of Makerfield about it.

This was just a step too far for Farage himself. He criticised Vorderman for having “directly involved herself” in the political campaign. Quite the accusation when you consider that this is a man who has directly involved himself in European Parliament theatrics, elections, referenda, GB news monologues, migrant boat stunts, pub photo opportunities, jungle-based reputation laundering and more “man-of-the-people” photo shoots than is strictly advisable for any sane human being.

Carol Vorderman writes to the women of Makerfield though and the fainting sofa gets rolled out.

The issue of course is not that Vorderman involved herself in politics, it’s that she involved herself in politics while being a woman who refused to know her place.

And yes, I realise that phrase is doing a helluva lot of heavy lifting, but what else are we supposed to call it? There was a very distinct “know your place, woman” stink to Nigel Farage sitting on the GMB sofa not only defending Kenyon’s comments, but then also sneering at a woman who Kenyon himself brought into the fray with his comments.

It smacked of that familiar twitch we’ve seen from men in politics who are absolutely fine with women in public life on the proviso that they are agreeable, deferential, decorative, softly lit, preferably nodding enthusiastically and absolutely not standing between them and power.

Vorderman is none of these things - she’s clever, relentless, numerate, media-savvy and entirely unwilling to be cowed by men who confuse volume with authority. She annoys several kinds of shit out of them because she goes beyond just disagreeing with them and moving on - she pins them into corners. She documents, asks awkward questions and refuses to let them slink away under the usual damp tarpaulin of “banter”, “plain speaking” and “common sense” that so often gets rolled out to try and cover up weapons-grade misogyny.

Crucially though, she also made a difference.

Now, Andy Burnham’s spectacular Makerfield election was obviously not down to one person - politics rarely is, no matter how desperately commentators try to shove every election into a single neat little takeaway container so they can call it a “vibe shift” and get on with their evening.

Burnham had massive name recognition, local credibility and a lot of momentum. He had the advantage of Reform choosing a candidate with a particularly spotty history (even for Reform) and all the stage presence of an overturned potted plant.

I do however think that Burnham at least owes some thanks for that spectacular win to Vorderman.

Not because she single-handedly delivered the seat. That would be silly, and also the sort of claim that makes people on the internet start producing pie charts with the emotional intensity of medieval monks. But because she helped make Reform’s women problem impossible to ignore. She took what might otherwise have been dismissed as “old tweets” or “laddish nonsense” and turned it into a direct question for women voters:

“Is this really what you want representing you?”

That question cut through, and Reform’s candidate didn’t just lose - he lost after his comments became a central part of the campaign. Reform has been very busy examining whether Kenyon’s sexist and inappropriate posts had, in fact, cost them the election, and reports from the campaign suggest that many voters, particularly women, were given the ick.

A Reform spokesperson took especially badly to this, stating that:

“Carol Vorderman is a left-wing bad faith actor. If she spent half as much energy attacking Labour for letting men into women’s spaces and blocking a grooming gang inquiry - which present real dangers to women and girls - as she does clutching her pearls over mild tweets, her words might actually carry weight with women in Makerfield. Rob isn’t a polished, professional politician and doesn’t speak like one. That’s precisely why he’ll be a straight-talking, effective voice for normal working people in Makerfield.”

Hitting every single note of DARVO¹ possible in a few short sentences. Truly impressive.

In the end, Andy Burnham won the election by 9,000 votes, taking in 55% of the vote. That result serves as a stark warning to Reform.

A warning that when women organise, speak, write, campaign and flat-out refuse to let misogyny be laundered as banter, it can change the political weather - which is exactly why, I suspect, Farage was so incredibly annoyed.

Vorderman went well beyond just criticising Reform and their candidate - she did the worst thing you can do to an insecure group of men. She made them look small. She made them look like exactly what they are - a party that’s desperate to pose as the voice of ordinary people while asking women to ignore the toxic misogyny that sits in plain sight.

Kenyon was not an outlier, it must be noted. He was a particularly vivid expression of a much wider Reform problem.

Farage himself has history here - years ago, he said that women who take time off to have children are “worth less” to City employers. He has described mothers earning less after childbirth in some jobs as just “a fact of life”. Those are not cases of an unfortunate turn of phrase, or a man tripping over his own syntax and landing face first in the 1950s. It’s a worldview.

A worldview in which the economic penalty women face for daring to procreate is treated as natural, inevitable and part of the greater order of the world. Just one of those things. Like rain, train delays or Richard Tice making mistakes on his taxes.

Reform has spent quite a bit of time trying to paint itself as the protector of women, but ultimately, they will be anything but, regardless of cringey stunts like the “Farage Fillies.”

I am sincerely not convinced.

Not when this is coming from the same political project that wants to scrap or replace the Equality Act framework. The same political project whose proposals have been criticised by unions and women’s organisations for risking a rollback of protections around equal pay and discrimination.

The same party that dresses up attacks on legal protections as liberation from “woke bureaucracy”, as though women’s rights are an administrative garnish we can scrape off the side of the plate if it makes the Daily Mail feel funny in its trousers.

Reform patently does not want to protect women’s rights - it wants to be the sole arbiter of which women count, which rights matter and which protections can be sacrificed for the sake of their anti-woke agenda. It talks a great deal about women’s safety, but largely in the context of migration, especially when it can be deployed to attack anyone politically convenient to them.

Then suddenly women are sacred. They must be protected, listened to and defended from threat. The full four-string quartet comes out, the flag goes up, the voice drops half an octave and everyone becomes terribly solemn indeed.

When the threat is online misogyny, intimate image abuse, workplace discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, domestic abuse, stalking, harassment or men in their own ranks treating women like objects? The tone changes dramatically.

Then we’re suddenly back to “context”.

“No one can take a joke anymore.”

“It was years ago.”

“Boys will be boys.”

Back to “he’s a drinker”, “he’s just one of the lads”.

This is the modus operandi of the far-right. Weaponise women’s safety to justify hostility to anyone you don’t like while doing precious little about the violence, abuse and inequality that women actually face in their homes, workplaces, commutes, nights out and daily lives.

Women can and do see through this - they can see through the sudden concern, the staged outrage and the men who only discover violence against women when there is a migrant shaped space in a leaflet.

The fact remains that if Reform were serious about women’s safety, it would not be so cavalier about repealing online safety protections on day one of taking power.

It would not have kept making excuses for one of its then MPs after it emerghed that he had been jailed for repeatedly kicking his girlfriend outside a nightclub into their ranks and tried to fob it off by saying “a generous person might call it a teenage indiscretion”, tacitly making excuses for the young men in the world who see no problem in physically assaulting the women in their lives.

They would not have stood Matt Goodwin as a candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection (that they also lost) after remarks about “young girls and women” be given a “biological reality” check.

They would instantly disown one of their own MPs for suggesting that the England football team keep winning so women would face less domestic abuse.

It would not be drifting closer and closer towards the politics of male grievance, and Farage would not have described Andrew Tate as an “important voice” for young men.

Andrew Tate is not, and I cannot stress this enough, an important voice for anyone - he is exactly what happens when male entitlement is fed protein powder, algorithmic sludge and given a microphone.

The fact that Farage thought anything along these lines tells us that Reform’s political imagination is filled with small men who feel humiliated, displaced and wronged by equality. Men who have been told the world was built for them and are now furious that someone has dared to make space for anyone but them.

Women’s rights to Reform are not rights. They’re irritants. Obstacles. Cultural concessions that have gone too far. It’s clear in their discomfort with women who speak too loudly, argue too effectively or refuse to perform gratitude for being tolerated.

You see it in comments about female police officers needing to be paired with “big, strapping” men. You see it in the clumsy handling of domestic abuse. You see it in the way women’s safety becomes a prop, not a governing responsibility.

To bring this to a close, because this runs the risk of turning into a major rant - this is ultimately why Carol Vorderman matters so much in this whole sorry episode.

She did exactly the thing that women are so often punished for doing. She noticed, she objected, she organised and she refused to be quiet just because powerful men found her to be inconvenient.

She did not cross a line by writing to the women of Makerfield, she exposed one.

First, a Reform candidate was found to have endorsed a grotesque comment about her. Then Farage minimised it. Then she spoke directly to voters. Then Farage sneered that she had involved herself in politics, as though democracy is something women are only allowed to observe from a safe distance while men in fleece gilets make all the important noises.

Objectify the woman, dismiss the harm, defend the man, resent the response. There it is.

The whole rotten culture in miniature.

Reform has a serious problem with women, and they are a genuine danger to women and women’s rights. I’m obviously not saying that every Reform voter hates women, or that misogyny only exists in the far-right - neither of those things are necessarily true.

Misogyny is depressingly ecumenical and regularly turns up wearing a lanyard while claiming to be “just playing devil’s advocate.”

The risk here is that Reform gives it a political home, manifesto, flag and permission structure. It offers women “protection”, while threatening women’s rights and the legal frameworks that actually offer protection.

It wants women to be silent, grateful, useful and afraid.

Carol Vorderman, unfortunately for them, did not stay silent, and the women of Makerfield were not grateful for being patronised.

Reform didn’t lose the byelection because women misunderstood them. They lost because women understood them perfectly well.

1. DARVO for those lucky enough not to spend their Sunday mornings neck deep marinating in political sewage stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Reform is very good at this.