What will Katie do next?

In her memoir Rude, the former Mail Online columnist Katie Hopkins reveals her true self. She does this by accident, because she has no self-awareness, but it is there, on page 233:

It may we’ll [sic] be that by the time you are reading this I will be going through a dominatrix phase… a fierce bedroom warrior, nipples pinched tight by clamps, an orange in my gob, more buckles than a boot store, locked into a metal girdle with only my front bottom on show.

Oh Katie! Don’t you know anything? The dominatrix doesn’t wear the nipple clamps; she doesn’t suck the orange; she isn’t locked into a metal girdle. This is the costume of the masochist.

Most popular

Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

Once you realise that Katie’s op-ed is the faulty instrument of her unfulfilled sexual longings, it is easy not to mind her politics so much: her snobbery; her loathing of feminists; her description of migrants, in a Sun column as ‘cockroaches’. (I didn’t mind her calling for a final solution on Twitter because she obviously didn’t know what the Final Solution was.)

Her politics are mere projection: she is the outsider seeking sanctuary, she is the woman coveting power. I have always found her anger fascinating — and here is the raw material in Rude, incoherent and disorganised, but present in her accidental prose.

Rude is, essentially, a self-help book from a nutter but there is one immutable truth in it: her epilepsy. She went to Sandhurst, but collapsed on the parade ground, and was expelled from her natural element, which is working-class men screaming at her — the army. Her fits got so bad that her father said that if she were an animal, she would be put down. Three paragraphs in, and what else is there to say?

Not much, and so Rude is a list of things she hates, written in the duplicitous style of a semi-educated ‘just folks’ everywoman who is vastly more irritating than the real Katie Hopkins, or anyone.