Let’s hope St Carol of Vorderman isn’t the last preaching Leftie to be sacked by BBC
Carol the penitent packed her Spanx and said goodbye to the circus. The professional provocateur, reality show star, serial detox dieter, maths expert, Michelle Mone tormentor, former television presenter, virulent Tory-hater, Jessica rabbit-alike and pioneer of the bodycon capsule wardrobe has been dumped from her Saturday morning show on BBC radio Wales for breaching new social media guidelines.
about time! Her four listeners are bereft of course, but there is no going back. ‘I am not prepared to be silenced,’ bawled self-important St Carol of Vorderman, much in the manner of a modern Joan of arc telling everyone she was ‘born to do this’ before bolting on her 38DD cup breastplate and taking her place at the head of luvvie army.
There, out on the battlefield for boneheads, a platoon of weeping celebrities has flocked around the deposed broadcaster to offer their support. Fellow BBC stars including comedian alan Carr (‘Big respect Carol’) and radio 2’s Michele Visage (‘adore you endlessly’) tweeted their allegiance like turkeys voting for Christmas, while Dame Kelly Holmes went further. ‘You do you Carol! Much respect for sticking up for who you are and not allowing corporations to silence you!’ was the message from the former olympian.
THOSE dastardly corporations! Dame Kelly sees no hypocrisy in denigrating the very same organisation that once made her BBC Sports Personality of the Year. ‘This is the biggest sporting honour your country can give you,’ she sobbed gratefully at the time.
However, that was then and this is now. and now is the time for these stars, many of them fulsomely enriched by BBC cheques, many of whom have the BBC to thank for their conservatory extensions and water villa holidays in Thailand, to cluster under what they believe to be the flag of freedom of speech along with the right to personal expression, and pathetically fail to grasp what is really at stake.
In praise of Vorderman, new ITV This Morning presenter Cat Deeley wrote: ‘You are bloody brilliant,’ while Katie
Piper called her ‘an icon’. Denise Welch, Patsy Palmer, Denise Van outen all rallied to the cause while Former SaS: Who Dares Wins star ant Middleton took the madness one step beyond.
ant believes employees’ social media activity should be of no concern to their employer. He posted: ‘It’s called SoCIal media for a reason because it’s what you do outside of your WorK commitments. It’s not called Work Media. The 2 should be kept completely separate.’
Darling, ant! all those muscles but so little coordination between coherence and thought and speech in the ant-brain. look around the cultural landscape and you will see that plenty of people in this country have lost their jobs because of their postings on social media — and rightly so.
a Savills estate agent was sacked after a bigoted tweet following an england football match. an essex negotiator was sacked after grabbing Professor Chris Whitty around the neck in a london park and posting film of the incident online. actor Marc anwar was written out of Coronation Street after posting racist comments, and so on.
Under UK law, misconduct on social media is just as serious as verbal misconduct in the workplace. Writing that ‘all views are my own and not those of my employer’ before you tweet or post is a fig leaf belief that personal posts cannot affect employment status. Wrong. They can and they do.
of course, Carol Vorderman is not guilty of any misconduct, except perhaps a contractual one. She was working for the BBC, which brings a complex set of responsibilities.
Just to remind all the Carol-fans out there, the BBC is a publicly funded national organisation; a broadcaster, whose very existence depends on its impartiality. If you accept the privilege of working for them, you must also accept you have to keep your more outrageous political opinions to yourself.
It means you shouldn’t roar onto Twitter like an unhinged escapee who has lost her meds and start fuming that the Conservatives are ‘a lying bunch of greedy, corrupt, destructive, hateful, divisive, gaslighting crooks’. That was Carol, not so long ago. and she can’t have it both ways. Not any more.
last month, the BBC introduced new social media guidelines following controversy over sports presenter Gary lineker, who was accused of breaching impartiality rules due to political content he had posted on Twitter. of course, his tweets echo the same political line as Carol Vorderman’s — and nearly every BBC star you can name. Which seems to be that the Tories are nothing short of an evil malignancy oppressing Palestinian protesters, the homeless, women, immigrants, bus drivers, boat people, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
It would be so refreshing — a miracle! — to find a BBC personality offering a different point of view on social media. Perhaps that sometimes Suella Braverman makes sense; that Boris Johnson wasn’t all bad; that illegal immigration is exacting a price this country simply cannot pay — anything!
YET we all know that if celebrities held those kind of populist views, the great irony is that they would never get a prominent job at the leftie-loving BBC in the first place.
at Beeb HQ, the struggle to be impartial is in permanent conflict with an institutional bias so deeply ingrained that many fail to even notice it exists. There is groupthink on absolutely everything, from Brexit to rishi Sunak to the Israel-Hamas war.
I even have my doubts about Jeremy Bowen wondering onscreen this week if the force of Israel’s attack on Gaza was ‘justifiable’. It might be a fair enough question, but is it one that the BBC’s Middle east editor should be making in the middle of a news bulletin?
Meanwhile, Carol Vorderman is ‘not prepared’ to lose her voice and vows to ‘continue to criticise the UK Government’ as only she knows how. ‘I’ll now increase calling out this disgusting Tory govt with facts & data which the right-wing media fails to publish,’ she foamed, in a Twitter blizzard yesterday. You do you, Carol! Yet while I disagree with almost everything Carol says, I defend her right to say it — only not when she is employed by the BBC.
She’s a monomaniac, a one-woman sandwich board, she who will not be swayed. Yet despite the greasy exhortations of her celebrity fans, Carol is neither victim nor martyr, nor quite the national treasure she fondly imagines herself to be. She is just the first celebrity to be sacked under the new BBC impartiality guidelines. and, thank goodness, she won’t be the last.