I had an all-day ticket for the Lewes Speakers Festival at the All Saints Centre on Saturday. I was keen to hear the writer Damien Lewis on the wartime Special Interrogation Group who’d disguised themselves as German soldiers and stormed Tobruk, Andrew Monaghan on his book Power in Modern Russia, and Theodore Dalrymple, ex-Spectator columnist and a former prison psychiatrist. The last speaker, scheduled for 6.45 p.m., was to be Katie Hopkins. I was curious: is she autistic, does she have a narcissistic personality disorder, or is she just a horrible person and a show-off?
I had hardly read her stuff, but after the food writer Jack Monroe won a libel case against her in March 2017 (Hopkins thought Monroe had desecrated a war memorial), my daughter showed me an interview. Hopkins did seem a bit crazy. I knew that she had termed migrants ‘cockroaches’ in the Sun and in May 2015 had tweeted derogatorily about a nine-year-old mildly autistic girl.
The following summer, though, she wrote a moving article for Mail Online about her own daughter, who has aspects of autism and other inherited health problems. (This week Mail Online said Hopkins’s contract had not been renewed ‘by mutual consent’.)
Nick Davies, prize-winning investigative journalist, attending the Russia and Dalrymple talks, said Hopkins’s invitation should have been withdrawn as ‘potentially it gave her two things to which she is not entitled: respect, which she has forfeited with her cruel aggression, and credibility, which she does not deserve since, unlike other writers there, she is no expert on anything’. However, a motion to cancel the event had been defeated and the right to hold it upheld by the town council. Meanwhile, we had noticed three burly men, obviously security guards.
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