Carol Vorderman will regret being Starmer’s useful idiot

Pity poor Carol Vorderman. After she went to all that very vocal effort to get those nasty Tories – boo, hiss! – out and Labour in, what is the first thing those baby-faced, butter-wouldn’t-melt champions of all that is right do when granted office? Why, they remove the winter fuel payment from pensioners – and not just the super-rich ones, but also those arthritic parasites whooping it up and enjoying the high life on £12,000 a year. Okay, so if Carol hadn’t ever opened her gob on the subject of getting the Tories out, they would almost certainly have come volplaning down just the same, but she certainly put a lot of Twitter hours in in the run-up to the General Election, helping them into the dumper. What was it all for?

Carol herself is now wondering. Following the cut to the winter fuel allowance earlier this week, she told Sky News: ‘I’m shocked by it, because they could raise that money in so many other ways.’ She confesses she feels ‘duped’ by Labour. ‘Even extracting the fact that many pensioners will be suffering… it is unbelievable that this new Labour government, the first thing they do is that? It is not what they were voted in to do.’

Carol is now demanding an apology from Keir Starmer – ‘I think he should apologise, I absolutely do’ – though whether that’s an apology to the nation at large, or to her personally, is unclear. And there’s small chance of Starmer coming wringing his cap to her, now that the winter-fuel-allowance cut has been indecently swiftly passed in parliament, with just one Labour MP having the guts to vote against it.

This is what happens when a storybook mentality meets reality. It’s as if Cinderella were to end with Cinders kicking the fairy godmother up the arse, and shoving Baron Hardup into the cold.

What did Carol expect? Just because the new incumbents always say they’re putting ‘country before party’ doesn’t mean you have to believe them. Governments always put their own supporters first and their opponents last. As we can see, the polling shows that the over-70s were by far the demographic least likely to have voted Labour in the General Election. The over-60s were not keen on Labour either, coming not far behind. So here comes their punishment beating. These are also being meted out to those pesky gender-critical women, and to public-school rotters – because we have to spite the gentry, because it’s the year 1843.

The difference with previous occasions of this kind is that Starmer is spectacularly bad at selling his obvious favouritism as a necessary bitter pill. Even former Tory chancellor George Osborne made a more convincing fist of it. As ever, the Starmer personality chip is programmed to think that because he believes he is in the right, everyone else will agree, except for the automatically evil. He keeps saying that he is prepared to be unpopular, which is fair enough. But the trick is not to be hated.

Carol is the same age, just about, as Keir Starmer. Most of us figured out the similarity between the Tories and Labour, because it’s obvious to a dead stoat, when we were about 11 or 12. I suppose this is one of the things that comes from her taking a sudden interest in politics in later life, which she previously ignored. It’s like being 51 and saying: ‘Gosh, the Beatles really were very good, weren’t they? And ABBA certainly had some tunes.’

However, good for Carol in being so vocal with her shock. This marks her out as not a bullshitter. She hasn’t either ignored what Starmer has done, or tried to excuse it. She has stuck to her guns, even if it’s made her look almost touchingly jejune. For instance, she could so easily have gone along with Labour’s nonsense ‘£22 billion black hole’ story.

Speaking of which, there hasn’t been a black hole so spooky and mysterious since the 1979 Disney film of the same name, though Ernest Borgnine is not involved on this occasion. Perhaps the newly sceptical Carol could volunteer to make herself useful with her maths skills, checking Labour’s figures… except that nobody, but nobody, is allowed to see them. Funny that. We just have to take it on trust that Labour had no alternative except to pluck a few hundred quid from elderly people with an income of more than £11,501 a year, while bunging billions at highly unionised train drivers, doctors and teachers.

We shouldn’t be churlish. It’s good to have Carol on board in the ranks of those of us who’ve long known that the difference between the Tories and Labour is the difference between getting a different prong in the buttock from exactly the same fork.

But how awful to slay the dragon – and wake up with another dragon. Then again, many people of Carol’s ilk have mistaken their tribal hatred for the Tories for virtue in itself. This has made them the useful idiots of the Labour Party. Don’t get fooled again, Carol.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.