Katie Hopkins

Katie Olivia Hopkins (born 13 February 1975) is an English media personality, columnist, far-right political commentator, and former businesswoman. She was a contestant on the third series of ''The Apprentice'' in 2007; following further appearances in the media, she became a columnist for British national newspapers, including '' The Sun'' (2013–2015) and MailOnline (2015–2017). In 2015, she hosted her own television talk show ''If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World,'' and appeared on the fifteenth series of ''Celebrity Big Brother'', finishing as runner-up. The following year, Hopkins became a presenter for the talk radio station LBC and underwent major brain surgery to treat her epilepsy. In 2021, she joined the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

Hopkins' social media presence and outspoken views, especially on UK politics, social class, obesity, migrants and race, have attracted controversy, criticism, media scrutiny, legal issues, protests and petitions. She has been accused of racism by journalists, advocacy groups and politicians for her comments about migrants. In 2016, her former employer MailOnline was forced to pay significant damages to a Muslim family whom she had falsely accused of extremist links. In the 2017 libel case ''Monroe v Hopkins'', Hopkins was required to pay damages and legal costs to food writer Jack Monroe after making defamatory remarks on Twitter. Her role at LBC was terminated in May 2017 following her comments on Twitter about the Manchester Arena bombing.

Hopkins was permanently suspended from Twitter in June 2020 for what the company described as "violations of our hateful conduct policy". In July 2021, she was deported from Australia and had to pay a fine for deliberately breaching COVID-19 health regulations.

Early life and education

Katie Olivia Hopkins was born on 13 February 1975,''Index of Births, Marriages and Deaths in England and Wales, 1837–1983.'' in Barnstaple, England. Her father was an electrical engineer for the local Electricity Board, and her mother was a bank teller. She has an older sister. She was brought up in Bideford, attended a private convent school from age three to 16, played sports and learned to play the piano and violin. As a child she believed she was "going to be the colonel of the forces. I loved the military. I loved the discipline, the rigour, the big shouty men."

She instead studied economics at the University of Exeter, receiving sponsorship from the British Army's Intelligence Corps. She spent weekends with the Officers' Training Corps.

She completed her military training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, but suffered an epileptic seizure during the final passing-out ceremony, and as a result was unable to take up her commission. Hopkins said she kept her epilepsy secret while attending Sandhurst, as this would have prevented her from being commissioned. Instead, she joined a business consultancy and moved to Manhattan, New York City, before returning to the UK in 2005. In September 2006 she joined the Met Office as a global brand consultant.

Career

''The Apprentice''

In late 2006 Hopkins was allowed to take unpaid leave from her Met Office job as part of her probationary period of employment to take part in series three of the reality TV show ''The Apprentice''. In the format used at that time, contestants in ''The Apprentice'' competed for a £100,000-a-year job working for the businessman Alan Sugar. Hopkins rejected Sugar's offer of a place in the final episode of the programme, citing problems regarding childcare provision for her daughters, and withdrew from the competition at the end of the penultimate task. The episode gained 6.2 million viewers, while the following '' You're Fired!'' episode, in which Hopkins was interviewed, was watched by 3.1 million.

Throughout her time on ''The Apprentice'', Hopkins made several critical comments on camera. The comments were directed at her fellow contestants, viewers of television shopping channels, maternity leave, fake tans, and overweight people. ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' and ''Notting Hill'' writer Richard Curtis expressed his distaste for Hopkins, jokingly vowing to kill her when he accepted his Fellowship award at the 2007 BAFTA awards. When video clips of her comments about other candidates were shown on ''The Apprentice: You're Fired!'', following up on the main programme, Hopkins said that they were "quite funny". Michelle Mone, the founder of lingerie company Ultimo and a guest on the panel, criticised Hopkins, calling her "exceptionally selfish", said she was not to be trusted, and accused her of giving "businesswomen a bad name". Sugar was criticised over his questioning of Hopkins about her childcare arrangements, and accused of violating the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. The incident received substantial media comment. Sugar argued his case in an interview with GMTV host Fiona Phillips, stating that he was aware of the rules.

Aftermath

In June 2007, Hopkins lost her job at the Met Office, which said she did not meet the required standards to complete her probationary period, and it confirmed that her performance on ''The Apprentice'' and confessions about her private life were a factor in her dismissal. Hopkins later stated that the media were informed of her dismissal an hour after she was fired. After her appearance on ''The Apprentice'', Hopkins signed two deals to sell her story, one with the ''News of the World'' newspaper and the other with EMAP, the company behind ''Heat'' and ''Grazia'' magazines.

Hopkins said in an interview with BBC Radio Kent that she had great respect for Sugar and that she believed she would have won the programme had she been in the final episode. She also said that the media's attitudes towards her did not affect her but did affect her family. She made a similar claim of hypothetical victory in an interview with Fiona Phillips on the morning of the final ''Apprentice'' episode, although Sugar had said that if she had wanted to press on, he would have fired her, whoever she was competing with. Hopkins told BBC Radio 1 that she had not yet ruled out a media career but expressed interest in starting a business venture.

Media career

upHopkins in 2018
After ''The Apprentice'', Hopkins appeared in an episode of ''8 Out of 10 Cats'', and was a guest star on ''Loose Women'' and ''The Friday Night Project''. In 2007, she presented a ''Five Live Report'' on family life and working mothers for BBC Radio 5 Live and contributed an article on the same subject to BBC Online.

In 2007, Hopkins joined the series '' I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!'' as a replacement for Malcolm McLaren, who dropped out just before the show started. In January 2015, she took part in the Channel 5 reality series ''Celebrity Big Brother'', finishing in second place.

Hopkins has appeared twice on ''Question Time'', in the programmes of 10 June 2010 and 27 January 2011. She also appeared on the Young Voters' version of ''Question Time'' on 20 October 2010. She appeared on an episode of '' 10 O'Clock Live'' on 24 April 2013, alongside Theo Paphitis and Owen Jones, to discuss the legacy of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had died that month, and to debate tax policies and the division of wealth among British citizens.

In 2015, she deliberately gained and lost over the course of several months, in an attempt to show that obese people can diet successfully. Her progress was carefully documented by a camera crew and then played on a programme called ''My Fat Story'' for TLC. TLC claimed an audience figure of 10 million in the UK and US for the programme.

Later that year, she began her own chat show, ''If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World'', on the digital channel TLC. She said she wanted to bring a new approach to chat and panel shows. The series was cancelled in December, after the first series, owing to low audience ratings.

From April 2016 to May 2017, Hopkins presented a Sunday morning talk show on LBC, a London-based national talk and phone-in radio station. She had previously worked as a guest presenter for the station. "The snarling facade remained", wrote Fiona Sturges for ''The Independent'' in April 2015 after one such broadcast, "but even Hopkins knows when to tone down the panto villain act". LBC announced Hopkins's departure on 26 May 2017, 'effective immediately', following her comments on Twitter soon after the Manchester Arena bombing, in which Hopkins claimed "we need a final solution". Speaking about her departure a few days later on Fox News, she said a deal had been made with LBC not to speak about it, but suggested it was part of a "silencing" of people with right-wing views.

At a Church and Media conference in October 2015, Hopkins said she was "pushing back the walls closing in on freedom of speech". Describing herself as "Jesus of the outspoken" during her speech, she said: "I have never apologised for anything I've said. I find it very disappointing when people apologise. You should have the positive moral attitude to stand by what you say".

Since appearing on ''The Apprentice'', Hopkins has frequently featured in the media for making controversial remarks, being described in ''The Guardian'', ''HuffPost'', and ''MTV'' as a "professional troll". She has described herself as a "conduit for truth", declaring "what other people think but are too scared to say"'.

In 2019, Hopkins presented the documentary ''Homelands'' which was about Islam in Europe.

Print and online presence

Early in her public career, Hopkins wrote a column for Exeter's ''Express & Echo'' newspaper, but her articles ceased after an online poll in October 2007 found 84 per cent of readers wanted the feature to end.

At the end of October 2013, it emerged that Hopkins had joined '' The Sun'' as a weekly columnist, with the newspaper promoting her as "Britain's most controversial columnist". In February 2015 Hopkins defended her remarks and those of her critics, commenting: "I welcome it because I've had my opinion and it's only right that people have theirs. I welcome the debate and the fact that people are getting involved."

In autumn 2015, she left ''The Sun'' for the Mail Online website, the online companion to the ''Daily Mail''. ''The Daily Telegraph'' contributor Bryony Gordon wrote in April 2015 that media organisations have "a tipping point here, where the marketing men and women don't want to be associated with reality TV's very own Adolf Hitler. But so far that doesn't seem to have happened." The ''Mail'' published a front-page article in June 2017 expressing its low opinion of the liberal ''The Guardian'' newspaper, which had attacked it for its coverage of the attack on the Finsbury Park mosque
and also referred to Hopkins. It "was a lie" to say Hopkins wrote for the ''Daily Mail'', it asserted. "''The Guardian'' and its writer know that Ms Hopkins has nothing to do with the ''Daily Mail'', but works for Mail Online – a totally separate entity". The ''Daily Mail'' newspaper and Mail Online are part of the same group. Her last column for the ''Mail'' website was published on 5 October 2017. In a late November 2017 statement from her employers to the ''Press Gazette'', it emerged that Hopkins's ''Mail'' contract had not been renewed "by mutual consent". A large number of Tweets from her Twitter account were deleted around the same time.

A few days before, a video was posted online of Hopkins's appearance at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Florida earlier in November 2017. "It's such a pleasure to be amongst people that are prepared to fight for their country" she said, asserting it is "our time". She continued: "We can commit to arm ourselves, not just with the help of the NRA". In her opinion, there is a "Muslim mafia" in certain areas of Britain and "institutionalised discrimination against whites" in the UK as a whole.

In January 2018, Hopkins joined The Rebel Media, a Canadian far-right website which Tommy Robinson, founder of the far-right English Defence League has also contributed to. In her first column on her own ''Hopkins World'' outlet, she wrote: "When so many platforms are under the control of the Saudis, tied to fickle commercial advertisers or beholden to special interests and religious lobbyists, it is a real thrill to find a place for us to speak without censorship". Hopkins no longer writes for Rebel Media and it appears that she was quietly dropped as a contributor around October 2018.

In June 2020, Hopkins was permanently suspended from social networking site Twitter for what a company spokesperson said were "violations of our hateful conduct policy" – having previously been suspended for one week in January 2020. Hopkins subsequently stated that she had joined the social networking site Parler as an alternative. After the announcement a fake account was accidentally verified as hers, and was then used to scam users.

Views and controversies

Since appearing on ''The Apprentice'', Hopkins has frequently featured in the media for making controversial remarks, being described in ''The Guardian'', ''HuffPost'', and MTV as a "professional troll". She has described herself as a "conduit for truth", declaring "what other people think but are too scared to say"'.

Islam

Hopkins is anti-Islam. After the 2016 Nice truck attack, Hopkins stated "Islam disgusts me", declaring the statement was "entirely rational" and not Islamophobic. She is in favour of a burqa ban and has labelled Islamic culture as homophobic. In March 2017, Hopkins gave a speech at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event, in which she criticised Muslims, stating that a "Muslim mafia" controlled areas of Britain, and describing London Mayor Sadiq Khan as the "Muslim mayor of Londonistan". Calling on people to "fight for your country" against Muslims, Hopkins stated that "we can commit to arm ourselves, not just with the help of the NRA," adding "get furious and fight back".

Multiculturalism

Hopkins is against multiculturalism. Referencing a so-called "multicultural mafia", she has said that increased crime is directly linked to it. Criticising the Notting Hill Carnival in 2016, she said: "I don't buy multiculturalism at all", stating that a "London bubble" believed in it and "the liberal left wing press, the BBC
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