Katie Hopkins did something dreadful this week, which is not unusual, because she craves such things. She retweeted praise — also not unusual, for she is narcissistic for a masochist — from a Twitter account called AntiJuden SS. The page even featured a swastika, should AntiJuden SS not have been clear indication enough. For Hopkins, however, neo-Nazi praise is a dog making love to your ankle. It would repel most people, but for her it still counts. Fake outrage begat fake outrage and Hopkins de-tweeted the retweet, and apologised: ‘My New Year’s resolution is to show contrition.’ To show contrition, not to be contrite; that is quite precise for Hopkins.
I am not sure that this retweet was deliberate, and part of Hopkins’s dimly felt — but never acknowledged — strategy to win attention of any kind. (Daddy issues surely, but I would not insult her by suggesting there are lines she will not cross. I am too busy marvelling both at her physical resemblance to Dolores Umbridge of the Harry Potter novels — a fascist in twinset and pearls — and her suggestion, also made this week, that she loves ‘language’, a sentiment disembowelled by every sentence she publishes.) No, I think rather that she retweeted the desolate AntiJuden SS because, essentially, she is not a journalist. She is a brand, a neurosis, a paradigm, a gobshite — call her what you will — but she is not a journalist. She is a former contestant on The Apprentice. There were three clues to the agenda of AntiJuden SS but the anti-journalist Hopkins — an obscurer, not a teller, of truth — missed them all. She gave neo-Nazism a national platform and, worse, she did it by mistake.
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