SIR Alan’s The Apprentice gave her a stage and a poised audience to parade her controversial views; taking pride in screwing another woman’s husband and ruthlessly casting people aside to further her own agenda.
She claimed to be a feminist by embracing masculine qualities whilst shamelessly flirting with old Alan and involuntarily turning new shades of crimson when he took her down a peg or ten.
She turned down Sir Alan’s invitation to star in the finale, despite battling her opponents so ruthlessly that she’d make Game of Thrones look like the Teletubbies.
She is callous, detached, ill-informed and opinionated: a worthy candidate for wicked witch of the South West.
I was impressed and disgusted by her all at the same time.
Unquestionably, Katie Hopkins has exceeded any other candidate’s ’30 seconds of fame’.
Fast-forward to now, in wake of the election results. Katie Hopkins vowed to leave the UK if Labour were elected to power: to many, this was the bigger blow than David Cameron and his forehead taking charge of the country for the next five years.
Why do liberal, free-thinking people despise Katie Hopkins and liken her to a sociopath? And what has she said that’s so outrageous?
'Me?' Yes you.Hopkins claims to be a businesswoman, economist and journalist, while her antics are not that dissimilar to an attention-seeking thirteen-year-old who’s had his stack of borrowed Playboy magazines confiscated after a parental room-sweep.
She also hides behind her Twitter account, cherry-picking her next target.
Just last week, she tweeted: ‘Oi! @charlottechurch wind your neck in. Your Welsh AND you lost. Own your problems’ because Charlotte Church dared to voice a political opinion contrary to her own.
Church aptly replied with ‘I have no interest in conversing with you. You lack humility AND you can’t spell. Parasite.’
Hopkins has since issued digs about Church’s career and her personal relationships. Why does Katie Hopkins believe she is entitled to publicly belittle people? She’s relentless in her pursuit of her next PR stunt, piggy-backing off any celebrity she can to acclaim relative fame. Church challenged her to a charity boxing match and Paddy Power are offering £50,000 (granted, not Mayweather money) to watch the spat turn from verbal blows to physical punches.
Charlotte Church is rightly 'mad as hell'Then there were the stints on This Morning. Most are familiar.
On live television she announced that her children would never be allowed to play with the ‘Tylers’ and ‘Charmaines’ of this world, because she believes a name accurately predicts the class their parents belong to. Holly Willoughby was flabbergasted, and Philip Schofield’s hair went a shade whiter. Who does she think she is? Apparently, she is single-handedly qualified to judge a person based purely on their name - which is a great lesson to teach her own children. Class is not a rigid concept: class mobility is more of a reality now than it ever was.
But does Hopkins 'The Troll' genuinely hold these views? Can a person be so ignorant? Or, the more likely explanation in my view, is that she knows how to spark debate and pour gasoline in the form of venomous words to detonate a full-on public uproar.
Her views on the overweight confirms the former and the latter.
Recently, she became embroiled in the '#getbeachbodyready campaign', championing her views that ‘if you are obese you look lazy’. Her own Twitter profile proudly states she lost 3.5 stone to prove fat people deserve the abuse of Fit-lers, blatantly disregarding any biological or genetic reasons as to why someone may struggle with weight loss. She fails to acknowledge that some people may not want to lose weight. On motherhood, she spouts ‘full time mummy is not a job title’ and as for having a ginger baby, ‘Ginger babies. Like a baby. Just so much harder to love.’ Inflammatory without a cause. Then she had something to say about getting people with Alzheimers out of hospitals to free up beds in our overcrowded hospitals. It's hard to reserve some human compassion for Hopkins, even when she writes an open letter to her children, stating she believes epilepsy will prematurely kill her.
Here’s what I think: If you want, like Hopkins, to draw correlations between spikes in violence in the Middle East and Ramadan, and attribute it to people being hungry, not only are you offensive, you’re dangerous.
You’re dangerous because you have a status, rightfully achieved or not, and that means your profile gives you power. You have an ability to shape and influence others in a way that I, and many others, can’t. In an age where UKIP received 4 million votes in the most recent election, views such as these exacerbate an already volatile climate of hostility.
She is callous, detached, ill-informed and opinionated: a worthy candidate for wicked witch of the South West - thankfully she failed to become a successful candidate for Parliament. She serves a purpose in our society; she serves to remind us that the majority of us aren’t like her. Nor would we want to be. ‘I’d relish [the] opportunity to lawfully smash her face in’. Who would have thought a choir girl had such smack-talk in her? I’m requesting front-row seats.
Follow Amirah Farag on Twitter @MissAmeerkat
