Gamechangers: Katie Hopkins will move to Greece 'if Ed Miliband wins election and bankrupts UK'
Breaking news: Katie Hopkins says she'll move to Greece if Ed Miliband wins the general election. "Because that's how Britain will become. Bankrupt," she says.
But she's not worried because she is totally confident that he won't get in. Some will be hoping she is wrong, if only so she leaves the country. My Facebook page is clogged up with her photo and people urging me to vote Labour just to get rid of the woman.
She has a series of petitions running against her. "What it that about?" she asks, seemingly bemused, and says 44 police forces have had to engage in complaints about things she has said.
Someone actually called social services on behalf of one of her children because they claimed to be concerned for their welfare.
Teenage role model
Yet for all this outrage against her, she says people come up to her in the street to urge her to continue to speak her mind and she has a strong following among 14 to 17-year-old girls inspired by her determination to stand up for herself.
Hopkins as a teenage role model is quite a leap. She is in talks with Russell Brand about some sort of political partnership where they represent each end of the political spectrum. A very weird idea when you consider that one of them has only just conceded to the idea of voting and the other admits that no political party would ever have her.
In person, the woman described as the "angriest in Britain" is, as she was on Celebrity Big Brother, charming and hilarious. If utterly without social boundaries. She giggles hysterically about Sheryl Sandberg's husband falling off his treadmill, saying "Oh come on, you have to admit it's funny" and confesses she's tempted to tweet something about leaning in. "But they'd go mad," she says of Twitter.
Hopkins' hit list
The targets of her political views are obvious. She loathes "dreary" stay-at-home mothers, eco mothers, PTA heads and "full-time mummies". The latter group makes her teeth itch for the implication that women who work are part time or, maybe, "zero hours" mummies.
She hates, or rather hates, everything about HR. And therapists. That's before we've even started on her traditional targets of fat people, gingers and children with "cheap" names. She also considers paid maternity leave within SMEs "morally abhorrent", preferring the American system of a few weeks' unpaid leave.
She loves structure and order. Weirdly for someone so unwilling to conform with other social norms, she loves rules and boundaries. She is always on time. She loved living in America for 10 years and managed, somehow, to conform successfully to their more reserved and deferential corporate culture.
In fact, if I had to sum up meeting her, it's like an incendiary right-wing American male talk show host, dressed in white lace with a propensity for swearing.
The moment at which she is most compelling is when she says the British are uncomfortable with the idea of an angry woman, willing to engage in conflict, and she is determined to change that.
The Tories should give her a seat. At least the next election would be more interesting.
Christine Armstrong is a contributing editor of Management Today, author of Power Mums (interviews with high-profile mothers) and founder of www.villas4kids.com. She can be found on Twitter at @hannisarmstrong.
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