Two million people watched Katie Hopkins’ latest TV appearance last week, but I’m not sure how many of them would even recognise the woman I meet a few days later at her London hotel. The snarling aggressor we saw on Channel 5′s Big Benefits Row has become a friendly Sloane who squeals “Lush!” at the waiter, teaches me how to talk about sex in “girl code” (a sort of exaggerated whisper that sounds like Miranda Hart playing a boarding school girl on her “PER-I-OD!”), jokes around, laughs at herself and is great company.
Viewers who have followed her TV career are unlikely to have formed this impression. Having distinguished herself as The Apprentice’s most notoriously rude and ruthless contestant ever, the former business consultant has built a media career as a “social commentator”, and is a regular fixture on TV studio sofas, scandalising audiences with a set of opinions typically held by mean girls bitching in the playground. When not on telly, she can be found calling Nelson Mandela a “cantankerous old git” in her weekly Sun column, or tweeting prolifically about her disgust for people who are fat, or unemployed, or badly dressed. Most famously, she has declared ginger-haired babies “harder to love”, and forbidden her children to have friends called Tyler or Chardonnay, as these names are “lower class”.
If you managed to miss all of that, you would get an idea of her style from her reply when I ask if she’d call herself a snob. “Oh, definitely yeah, 100%. I think it’s really important to be snobby. Do I think social mobility policy will ever work? Absolutely not. Is social class a much more efficient way of getting people to the top? Absolutely. Social class has worked for years. Born into the right family, go to the right schools, even if you’re not super bright to start with, you’ll turn out bright. You go to the right university, you get the right job, you have the right connections, you’ll make it to the top. Job done, very efficient.”
Efficient at what? “Efficient at getting smart, well-connected people to the top. It is efficient, because what public money was required to move those people to the top? None.” That would depend on whether we want the best people at the top, surely, or just the cheapest way to get some people to fill up the top? “Oh, for goodness sake,” she exclaims impatiently. “It’s this whole state school thing: ‘Oh, there are a couple of bright sparks, let’s invest £50m trying to get the two or three that might achieve to the top.’ Or, shall we take really clever people and not have to spend any money on them, and get them to the top because they’re connected and went to brilliant schools and their families will support them and they’re fantastic? So why bother with social mobility? Why does it matter? Why? Why? I don’t understand the obsession with it.”
We could easily spend the interview arguing. I think Hopkins would quite like that – she tries to pick a couple of fights when I haven’t even disagreed with her. In between the jokes and giggles she is coiled to spring from what she calls “girly chitchat” into TV studio rottweiler mode, but whenever she does, she stops listening, so it seems pointless. We already know what she thinks. I’m more interested to know why.
“But a lot of women think the sort of things I say,” she protests. “You know, ‘Oh God she’s put on so much weight, she looks dreadful.’ Well, I just say it.” But that still doesn’t explain why an apparently cheerful and successful woman would want to make herself a national hate figure. Rubbished all over the internet and booed by studio audiences, Hopkins seems to relish her reputation as a pantomime monster.
Some critics claim she doesn’t believe a word she says, and peddles controversy for money. Others think she must be secretly horrified that so many people hate her. I don’t detect an ounce of truth in either theory. It turns out Hopkins has never watched herself on television, never cries, is essentially immune to most human emotion, confuses public insults with compliments, and has kept secret the fact that she is hospitalised on average once every 10 days. The curious puzzle of Hopkins only begins to make sense when she describes the first 23 years of her life.
Now 39, Hopkins grew up in “a regular middle-class family” in a small Devon town, the youngest of two daughters to an electrical engineer and a housewife. Both girls attended a private convent school from the age of three to 16. “I don’t mean some notion of a grammar school convent school, I mean proper nuns, nunned up to the max. The headmistress was called Sister Philomena, and she,” Hopkins adds admiringly, “was mean.” The nuns tied Hopkins’ left hand behind her back to try and force her to be right-handed, and school life was highly regimented. “Oh, beyond! Whistle blows once: don’t move. Whistle blows twice: into lines. Whistle blows three times: into class. Can you imagine,” she laughs, “the pent-up rage?”
Deirdre Kelly from Benefits Street and Katie Hopkins on Channel 5′s Big Benefits Row
I can imagine, but it appears Hopkins can’t. “Yuh, very exciting. I had a hoot at school, it was a blast, it really was St Trinian’s – we were all girls together and it was really good fun.” She can’t recall any bullying or teasing, lost her virginity at 14 to a boyfriend “who looked like Tom Cruise”, and had no teenage insecurities at all, on account of always getting As, mastering grade eight piano and violin by 14, and being picked for all the sports teams. “I suppose I was one of those girls that was just fine.” Her parents were strict about exams and homework, but didn’t need to be, because “I wasn’t going to come second. One of the frustrating things with my children now is that I understood very quickly what you had to give the teacher to get a top mark. It’s not rocket science, is it? It frustrates me that mine can’t see that yet.” Her three children are nine, eight and five.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do. “I was going to be the colonel of the forces. I loved the military. I loved the discipline, the rigour, the big shouty men. I love monosyllabic orders. ‘George: Bed! George: Shoes!’ That’s how I talk to my children, yeah, and I love it. Love it!” She still likes to address her girlfriends by their surnames, “So you’d be ‘Heads’”, and the very thought of a man in uniform barking acronyms sends her into a schoolgirl froth. “Yes! Someone hot. With muscles. That you can clearly see, despite thick cotton. Definitely!”
After A-levels she signed a 35-year contract with the intelligence corps, who sponsored her through an economics degree at Exeter University, where she spent her weekends with the Territorial Army – “really fun, lying around in forests with guns having a brilliant time” – before arriving at Sandhurst. “And someone starts shouting at you the minute your parents drive away. Put in a little tiny room and told to clean it with a toothbrush, that kind of stuff.” Literally? “Yeah!” Her eyes gleam. “And you had to iron your pants into six-inch squares. I can still do it now. Everything in your wardrobe had to be a certain way. Brilliant!” She looks visibly excited by the memory. “Yeah I am, really excited.”
Significantly, she was at her happiest when being publicly insulted on the parade square. “The drill sergeant majors are enormously funny individuals, with brilliant lines. To the girl with sticky-out teeth: ‘You could eat an apple through a tennis racket with those teeth!’ I can’t even be half as witty, and everyone loves the guys, these are massive men who’ve earned their stripes, they’re 6ft 4in, usually Welsh, brilliant! Utterly brilliant men.” They mocked her ceaselessly for the size of her nose, but she never took offence, “because it’s almost more like kudos – you’re in the club and they know you can take it.” No insult was off limits. “There is no line, no barrier, no nothing.” She thinks every young person should have to go through something similar. “Wouldn’t it be great? Do you not think we’d all learn a little bit of discipline?”
But Hopkins’ military career came to an abrupt end days before the passing out ceremony. If I didn’t slow her down she would have glossed briskly over the details, but it transpires that she had an epileptic seizure on the parade square. “It’s not something I talk about,” she says quickly, “because I see it as a failing. So it does annoy me a little bit when people say ‘she failed at the forces’, but of course I never respond. I never say why, because it sounds like an excuse, and I won’t have that. I won’t have an excuse.”
She didn’t cry when the army discharged her. In fact, in her whole life she “genuinely can’t remember ever crying”, and says she doesn’t even know what fear feels like. The only failure she can identify was her first marriage, which ended within a year. “That was bad. But am I over it? Yes. Did it really matter? No.”
Hopkins joined a business consultancy after Sandhurst, moved to Manhattan and began going out with the boss. When their first daughter, India, was born in 2004, she took two weeks maternity leave, and was away on business most of the time, seeing her daughter only at weekends. The couple moved back to the UK and got married before the arrival of their second daughter, Poppy, the following year. Her husband was present for the birth, but Hopkins had to get herself and Poppy home from the maternity ward 48 hours later, because by then he had left her for his secretary. Neither Hopkins nor her daughters have ever spoken to or seen him again.
Katie Hopkins and fellow contestants on BBC2′s The Apprentice in 2007
She relays all this with the pragmatism of someone describing a little HR restructuring – and looks pleased when I say so. “Well, it sort of was like that, only in a life way.” She says she doesn’t experience “emotional stuff”, has never known a moment’s maternal guilt, and were I to ridicule her children in this article, “I would go, ‘You know what, I put myself out there, so I have to accept what happens.’” Nothing anyone has ever said or written has hurt Hopkins, or caused her to reconsider, because no one else’s feelings or opinions matter to her in the slightest, apart from her close family’s. For Hopkins, being in the public eye is exactly like being on the army parade square. Anything is fair game, and anybody who gets upset is as pathetic as the women in her old platoon who couldn’t hack Sandhurst and quit.
Deaf to distress, her indifference towards anyone else’s feelings makes sense. But I’m confused about how she reconciles her contempt for emotional messiness with a private life so colourful that she once listed “stealing husbands” as her hobby on her CV. Her first husband was just one of a string of married fathers whom Hopkins seduced away from their families, including her second husband, the father of her five-year-old son.
How can someone so impatient with indisciplined self-indulgence justify wreaking havoc in so many lives, in of all things the name of love? “Oh, spare me the oestrogen tears,” she groans. “We’ve all got skeletons in our closets. I couldn’t be disingenuous enough to say I’m sorry for those women or children, because lots of us have done things wrong. When you look at the statistics for men and women having affairs, it’s huge.”
Lots of women are a size 18, but in Hopkins’ book that’s inexcusable. So why is poor impulse control acceptable in sexual behaviour, but not anything else? “For me there are certain standards of life. Intrinsic to my life are work, fitness, discipline.” So if I was fat she’d call me disgusting, but if I tried to steal her husband she’d say: ‘Fair enough’? “Yeah.”
It must surely have struck Hopkins that her arguments about how everyone should be – slim, fit, punctual, organised, smartly dressed, hard-working – are just descriptions of her own preferences. We’d all like everyone else to abide by our personal rules, but most of us see that our rules are wildly inconsistent and wholly subjective, whereas she has invested hers with the certainty of universal truths. How can she be so sure her standards are objectively right? “Because when I look at the things I think are important, they’re all things that don’t ask anything of anybody else. If you are healthy and not obese you’re not asking the NHS for anything. I’m not asking the taxpayer to fund my benefits. Because I’m not asking anything from anyone, I think that that gives me the right to say: ‘This is how it should be.’”
I had put Hopkins’ horror of being weak and needing help down to nothing too terrible ever having happened to her. But the horror is too visceral for that, and the real explanation is a revelation. She can see how some people have suffered awful things, “but I just don’t connect with that, because I still have my thing going on.” It takes a moment to realise she is talking about epilepsy. All of a sudden she speaks very quickly, as if the words were burning coals.
“When I have a fit at night, my arms come out. They dislocate. So I have to go into hospital to have them relocated. That’s happened 26 times in the last nine months. So we all have crap to deal with in our lives. I’m hard with myself. Get on with it. Move on. Get your arms put back in.” She never talks about it, she says, and as soon as has told me she looks as if she wishes she hadn’t.
Has anyone ever suggested, I ask, that she is profoundly disconnected from her emotions? “No, I think I’m just very male.” I think her emotional disconnect is quite extreme. “Do you?” She looks surprised. “I don’t think it is.” But being “very male” wouldn’t explain her violent disgust for others’ failure to live up to her standards, nor why women’s failings upset her so much more than men’s. It doesn’t explain why she never watches herself on TV, not even her debut on The Apprentice. “Yes, that is odd,” she concedes, when this curious fact emerges. “I hadn’t actually thought that before, but I suppose it is.” And it doesn’t explain why the only response she seems unable to deal with is sympathy. If I glowered at her she would be quite impervious – but a sympathetic look is a kind of agony for Hopkins, making her literally squirm, and I think this has distorted her entire perspective on other people’s problems.
Had she been born to a drug-addicted prostitute and an alcoholic pimp, and suffered unspeakable violence and neglect from infancy, would she expect herself to be as self-sufficient as she has been? “Look, there’s always an argument for why people don’t make it. Whereas I look at myself and go, you know what, I’ve had a fair amount to overcome. But I haven’t allowed it to get in my way.” So she would expect the same of someone born into addiction and abuse? “Yes. And I’m sorry, but they lose. They lose. The truth is, life is just not fair.”
Isn’t it interesting that people who say that are always at the top of the pecking order? “Yes, but isn’t it interesting that people who work hard do really well? Isn’t it interesting that people who get up at 5.30am to go running aren’t fat?” Not really, I say. Those are just examples of logical cause and effect. The child I’ve just described didn’t do anything to cause its circumstances – so why is it right for that human being to lose?
“I really don’t have an answer for it,” she admits. “But if you’re the sort of parent who can’t give a toss, then I can’t give a toss about your child either.”
Katie Hopkins interview: "Can you imagine the pent-up rage?"
