Carol Vorderman has opened up about the moment she felt compelled to speak up about the sorry state of British politics.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, the former Countdown star said she turned activist during the pandemic when the scale of the cronyism crisis became apparent.
She said: “There were wonderful people, good human beings, trying to help other human beings, yet for others it was a time of immense greed.
“I can’t get my head around it.
“To defraud the scared and the dying is the lowest you can go.
“And it was enabled by a Tory government that has never aplogised, not ever.
“Well, they say, we were doing our best but NO, NO, NO, NO.
“Doing their best would have been finding someone who said, ‘I think I can get access to PPE but I don’t want any profit, just my cost covered’.
“Not, ‘I’ve got this shell company, or I’ve just made up a company, and I want to make millions of pounds out of it’.
“They have never apologised for it and that makes me even more angry.”
A report by the National Audit Office released during the pandemic found that politically connected firms were given ‘high priority’ for government COVID contracts over established firms without connections that could have been better placed to fulfil the requirements.
The report found around 10 per cent of the suppliers referred to the channel by a political contact were awarded a PPE contract.
Suppliers without such links, by contrast, had only a 1 per cent chance of winning a contract.
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