Katie Hopkins: the queen of the hate economy getting the last laugh on Britain
•You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country•Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars•The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss. . .
•You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country•Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars•The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss became PM•Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions•The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury•The shadowy maverick who pulled Labour’s strings… and sunk Starmer•Steven Bartlett: the glorified PR man quietly making Britain worse•The anti-sex, anti-fun godmother of Nimbys who gummed up modern BritainIf you had to pinpoint a moment when Katie Hopkins went from bad to worse, it would probably be in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bombing. Just before 9am the next morning, as a sickened nation digested the news that a suicide bomber had killed 22 people, many of them children, Hopkins logged on to Twitter (now X), where she had more than 700,000 followers. For reasons that are now not entirely clear to me, she targeted the TV presenter Phillip Schofieldwhile tweeting: “22 dead – number rising. Schofield. Don’t you even dare. Do not be part of the problem. Be part of the solution. We need a final solution. #Manchester. ”Hopkins, who was then a 42-year-old national newspaper columnist and broadcaster, later deleted the apparent reference to the Nazi genocide of European Jews, changing it to “true solution” and claiming it was a “mis-type”. But it was too late. LBC announced her immediate departure from its roster. But the damage was also arguably done for Britain. By the time of that tweet, Hopkins, whose rise to notoriety had straddled the advent of social media in the decade since she shot to fame as a reality TV star, was already in the process of embodying – and mastering – a new hate economy for the digital age. Trading compound outrage for cash and clout, she had found a way to push the limits of what it was acceptable to say while keeping the favour of mainstream broadcasters and newspaper editors. For those who elevated her, questions of blame still linger – including for me personally. Hopkins, who is now 51, developed a thick skin as a pupil at a strict private convent school in Devon. After studying economics at the University of Exeter, she kept her epilepsy secret at the Sandhurst military academy, until a seizure thwarted her Army career before it had begun (she later hadbrain surgeryfor the condition). Instead she became a consultant, eventually taking unpaid leave from a job at the Met Office to appear on the third series ofThe Apprentice(she was later fired for failing her probation period – she claimed she had been scapegoated). The show, which aired in spring 2007, was still massive and Hopkins emerged as a kind of pantomime provocateur, articulately dispensing snobbish views on anything from shopping channels to obesity and fake tans. (Given her own subsequent rise and fall, it perhaps says something that Michelle Mone, then a panellist on the companion showThe Apprentice: You’re Fired!, said that Hopkins gave “businesswomen a bad name”. )The cheques rained down as Hopkins embarked on an increasingly lucrative media career, appearing on comedy panel shows,Question Time, Loose Women, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!andCelebrity Big Brother. These were the days when the entire media class was hooked on Twitter and current affairs producers pounced on the loudest voices. In 2013, ITV’sThis Morninginvited Hopkins on to the sofa to discuss baby names. She told Phil Schofield and Holly Willoughby that she would refuse to let her own children play with those with “common” names such as Chantelle or Chardonnay. By the standards of the time, this was offensive stuff and the furore was sufficient that I thought I’d email Hopkins to ask her if I could meet her. I wanted to peer inside the outrage mill she appeared to be cranking for all it was worth. She replied within minutes: “Love to!”What followed waspretty predictable. Hopkins was charming enough, and regardless of what she really believed about the relatively low-stakes stuff she was sounding off about at the time, her role was clear. “They are a consumer purchasing a commodity – me – and I have to demonstrate its value,” she said of the producers and editors who employed her. I’ll let you decide whether my interest, intended as an attempt to examine this dynamic, in fact contributed to it. On she went, doing more and more to demonstrate that value. Later in 2013,The Sunhired her as Britain’s “most controversial” columnist. By the spring of 2015, she was calling for gunships to repel migrant boats in the Mediterranean: “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care… Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984’, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors. ”The UN’s human rights chief slammed her use of the word “cockroach” as an echo of genocidal propaganda. We all fumed. Hopkins charged on. For all its later purported discomfort, LBC gave her a special guest host slot, and later, her own show. She doubled down on the hatred. Later that year, Hopkins got a new job atMailOnline, which continued to publish her columns for months after the Manchester Arena bombing tweet. But the writing was on the wall for her mainstream career. Almost bankruptedby a drawn-out legal battle against the chef Jack Monroe, she was suspended by Twitter in June 2020. If it felt like Hopkins was doomed to irrelevance, she likely feels now that she has had the last laugh. She may no longer be a mainstream presence, but having gained notoriety and built her brand, she is now flourishing in a far right online ecosystem where mainstream conventions and rules, however flawed, aren’t even a consideration. In 2023, Elon Musk restored Hopkins’s suspended X account, among hundreds of others. She has spent time in the US, where she has been feted in MAGA circles (Donald Trump himself has repeatedly praised her). Back home, she’s a big Restore Britain supporter and is this summer on a stand-up comedy tour of small venues, including Trump’s Turnberry golf club in Scotland, promoted to her 1. 4m X followers and 665,000 YouTube subscribers. Almost a decade after the Manchester bombing, if there were signs of Britain straining its rivets, if not breaking entirely, then you could point to Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rallies. Hopkins was a guest speaker at the first rally in 2025. “This is how your capital city should look!” she shouted at a sea of white faces and national flags before heaping praise on Robinson and ranting about immigration, gender and freedom. She was, if nothing else, demonstrating her value.