Ignorance is bliss!
As divisive as Marmite on a good day, and Public Enemy Number One on the other 364 days of the year; if there’s one celebrity we love to get ourselves hopping mad about, it’s Katie Hopkins – very controversial TV couch sitter, huge loser (of weight) after gaining it to make a point, renta-gob columnist and celebrity jungle survivor.
I say ‘we’ get mad about her, but of course ‘we’ doesn’t extend to ‘I’. For Miss Pollyanna has better things to do than dwell over a stranger’s points of view; I have visions boards to attend to, experiments in Pam Grout’s E Cubed book to conduct, and cakes to bake and test.
But I digress.
Over the years Katie Hopkins has graced us with wit and wisdom ranging from the vileness of redheads to children whose names are ‘too common’. In the year that was 2014, she’d even started to give Nigel Farrage a run for his money (for those of you who don’t know, Nigel is a British politician with a penchant for small pubs and large pints of beer… and always beside Katie in the ‘I Hate’ comments on any social media feed). And this year she has succeeded in utterly surpassing him with those unbelievable comments about the African boat immigrants who tragically died on their way to Italy.
The thing is, I feel more qualified to write a piece about society’s dahling and Scapegoat than most because I turned down an interview to appear on the UK’s The Apprentice in Katie’s year (the year that transformed her from wanna-be business woman to celebrity). But I said no. Even after a phone call from a bloke at Talkback Thames to ask if I was sure – I was, intuition told me to stop my five minutes of fame in its tracks – I’m pretty certain it was also one of my better life decisions.
My application for the programme went something along the lines of ‘I am a walking, talking Self-Help dictionary who believes in positivity and love to thrive in business’. Can you imagine how fired up the TV execs must have got plotting the potentially classic ‘Hopkins versus…’ TV moments in their heads? You couldn’t get two bigger opposites than Katie and me. In my woo-woo defence, I was at the time successfully managing a multi-million pound international publishing department, although I’m in no doubt she’d have eaten me up for breakfast in that quintessential greasy spoon over the road from Lord Sugar’s empire and spat me out by elevenses.
But here’s why I think – even when we look back in wonder at her highly publicised Big Brother 2015 appearance, we should give poor Katie a break:
WE CREATED HER!
Our incessant reading of her columns in newspapers and magazines, our non-stop critique of her views, our trolling of her tweets, and our throwing of stones at our television screens as she pisses the angelic Holly Willoughby off have magnified Katie Hopkins to these epic proportions. We’re literally feeding the monster. Which I mean in a literary sense; I am sure she has a heart in there somewhere. But my point is, don’t we have better things to do? Like lives to lead?
We do.
And deep down in our subconscious we really know we do. But it’s just too easy to let Katie be the cherry on the top of our cake of problems, isn’t it? The bills have piled up, the boyfriend’s gone off with someone else, the cat’s escaped, there’s a puncture in the tyre, the weight has piled on, the grades are failing, the dead-end job is more boring than watching paint dry. It’s so much easier to blame Katie for all of the shit. It’s just too easy to hate her. There she is in the public eye just waiting to be attacked, and most of the time it’s just for having a view. Which (surprise, surprise) might even be your own deeply-seated subconscious belief screaming back at you, the thoughts you are in fact too scared to admit to. Even if she isn’t. Think about it.
Some of her quips have actually been too close to the unspeakable truth. I’m almost tempted to join her on the common children’s name debate.
I said almost.
My points are two.
1: Where we direct our focus, like magnets we’ll attract more of the same. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy of Katie Hopkins. Solution: if you want her to go away then stop thinking about her, looking at her or reading about her!
2: Our outer world is a reflection of our internal state. So if we are happy or sad, loving life or wanting to lash out at it with a very sharp knife, you can bet your bottom dollar that Katie will be there… or not, mirroring back to us our favourite irritations or reasons why life is sweet. Personally, I couldn’t give a monkey’s if somebody else is getting page space in The Daily Mail, being paid thousands to appear on a reality TV show or has been caught bonking in the bushes. There’s enough of the world to go around, concentrate on your own life and hers will no longer affect yours.
And that Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls isn’t just more of Miss Pollyanna’s ju-ju – that is a simple lesson in quantum physics and an example of the good ole’ Law of Attraction in action. Plus it is also proof that listening to gut instinct can save your life… because I am not sure Katie Hopkins would have been my favourite roomie in The Apprentice mansion. So I’ll just stick to pretending she doesn’t exist.
