Skip to content

Not wholly and exactly perhaps

The controversial views of columnist and broadcaster Katie Hopkins have landed her — and the media outlets she has worked for — in hot water. In 2017 alone, she lost a libel action against poverty campaigner Jack Monroe and was sacked from her radio show after a tweet she made following the Manchester bombings.

Hmm, well, yes.

My best period financially was probably two or three years ago, when I was hosting my radio show on LBC and doing other paid engagements. Sadly, my opinions have since made me unemployable. Fortunately, supporters in America, South Africa and Australia help to fund the work I do.

This is certainly an unkind view and it might even be wrong. But my impression has always been of someone straining just that little bit too much to be controversial. It’s a great gig if you get it just right – Mail online columns do pay £100k a year and up – but actively seeking to be pushing the envelope does risk tearing it.

24 thoughts on “Not wholly and exactly perhaps”

  1. Are you better off than your parents? “My parents are super-normal: Mum was a housewife and Dad an electrical engineer, at a time when if you worked all your life in the same job, you could afford a nice house.” …Bideford (North Devon) isn’t exactly a high-rent area; and even here, in South Devon, Most married couples I come across appear to be buying nice homes on middling salaries.

  2. But my impression has always been of someone straining just that little bit too much to be controversial.

    I haven’t read much of her stuff and gave up on the radio shortly after Wogan retired, but yarp, something like this.

    There’s also a related unfortunate tendency in right-wing media (such as it is) towards outrage porn, which gets clicks (the Daily Mail and Breitbart are still around) but is intellectually as shallow as a teaspoon of water and just as nourishing.

    So instead of telling us about the latest example of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GORN MAD (The Daily Mail), WUR DOOMED (Peter Hitchens), or JIHADIWADDIS ARE – GET THIS – BAD! (Breitbart), maybe – just maybe – there’s room for content that’s a bit more hopeful and substantive and maybe even constructive?

    But that would require conservatives to break their addiction to righteously complaining about stuff while losing.

  3. “But that would require conservatives to break their addiction to righteously complaining about stuff while losing.”

    Go on, Steve, take the fun out of life.

  4. “But that would require conservatives to break their addiction to righteously complaining about stuff while losing.”

    Hold on, that’s leftists that do that. When conservatives lose they shrug their shoulders, batten down the hatches, and work towards winning next time. It’s the left that lose and then translate that into accusations of cheating, assaults, and advocating of violence. You don’t get “Hang The Socialists” posters outside the Labour Party Conference.

  5. Tearing the envelope? Or, shifting the Overton Window?

    Perhaps it depends whether she is trying to make a living or, like Tommy Robinson, make a point.

  6. I have to defend Ms Hopkins here. I don’t think she’s a professional controversialist, at least, no more than any other columnist. I think she pretty much says what she believes, and that’s led to a loss of prestige and money. She could easily have moulded her columns to suit the line that the newspapers wanted, but she didn’t, and it cost her.

    I’m getting really sick of this idea that anyone with standard conservative views is a deliberate ‘controversialist’. For some time I’ve been intending to write a post about how conservatives need to stop going along with this sort of talk. The leftists in power are still the controversialists in regards to the views of the wider population outside the main cities and University areas. We need to make that point, and stop this ‘demormalisation’ of ourselves, and start denormalising them. (Both Mark Steyn and Kurt Schlichter are good on this topic.)

  7. Hector, precisely, challenge everything that you think is untrue or unjustified. At the very least it makes it harder for them to move the window. Every time you concede, you lose.

  8. The thing is, most of the stuff that will get you fired for being controversial now wasn’t controversial 10 or 15 years ago. So to stay employed, your views have to “evolve” in sync with our Progressive Thought Leaders.

  9. Bernie – we could still have transphobic Sudoku or something

    jgh – Except the Left’s refusal to let little things such as losing democratic elections and referenda get in the way of their agenda is a strength, not a weakness

    Hector – I’m on Katie’s side, but I definitely got the impression she was deliberately shit-stirring on Twitter. Problem with that approach is, those platforms are controlled by our enemies.

    JerryC – True

  10. The fact she’s unemployable shows how the left have won the war on deplatforming, apparently she’s even had live shows cancelled due to danger of unrest (protests I assume) and she’s not that far out there in a lot of what she says.

  11. @jgh

    +1 See Remoaners, USA Democrats….

    @Mr Lud, rhoda klapp

    +1

    @Hector Drummond

    +10 spot on – good example is DM Columnists who switched from Brexit to Remain/Brino when Dacre replaced (eg turncoat Glover)

    I rather like Katie Hopkins, sadly like any outspoken critic of Left Mob, illegal immigrants welcome mob etc she’s vilified by msm, Gov, Judiciary etc

    https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/katie-hopkins-having-sell-1m-3547442

    Linked “The Mirror” article:

    Racist Katie Hopkins moaned that speaking her mind lost her her career

    Speaking to The Sunday Times, racist Hopkins…

    Isn’t that libel?

    .
    twitter.com/KTHopkins

    Vids:
    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Katie+Hopkins&sp=CAJIFJgBAeoDAA%253D%253D

  12. Ideally what you want is for someone else to take the risks and and you to blow the dog whistle.
    This is much the relationship between the Conservative Party and the Brexit Party which is also now unemployable. The Brexit Party spend years saying thing like Africans give you AIDS ( which has some underpinning but thats not the point ).
    The Conservative Party gently worries that people are concerned at the pressure being put on services by excessive migration ……but everyone knows what they mean . My own MP takes this to delightful extremes , she actually had a small campaign against FMG .
    No-one is pro Female Genital Mutilation so this , you might feel was redundant noise .
    Not so ..everyone knew what she meant ..and who can complain about the sentiment

    Pweeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

  13. “No-one is pro Female Genital Mutilation”

    Large parts of central Africa, the middle East, Indonesia and Malaysia are.

  14. @jgh “Hold on, that’s leftists that do that. When conservatives lose they shrug their shoulders, batten down the hatches, and work towards winning next time.”

    +1

    Capitalism tries things and if they don’t work they try something new.

    When Socialism fails, it is deemed ‘not proper socialism’ and they try it again, exactly the same.

    Generally everyone else (except website idiot Newmania)

    +1

    The right’s biggest mistake over the last couple of decades has been trying to justify their views to the left. The left aren’t listening. Cults don’t listen to reason, they have belief.

  15. Andrew C The problem with that is that in your lost of “socialist failures” your sort usually include Germany , Scandinavia and France who by most measures broadly successful countries in many ways more so than the relatively low tax Anglo Saxon model.
    In every case success is written off as ‘despite the State’ in exactly the sort of swivel eyed ” everything proves me right” manoeuvre you describe
    Ed Milliband was pretty much a Scandy loving moderate but you have thought he was Lenin by the way you comically gesticulating Yosemite Sams of Free Market ideology reacted
    In order avoid the taint of this model we have all been forced to endure poverty insecurity and international irrelevance aka Brexit
    Marxist reactionaries and Free market determinists have much in common
    Neither think and neither are interested in the messy human compromise of reality .I`d say it was young man`s shtick that most of out grow

  16. Brexit Party spend years saying thing (sic) like Africans give you AIDS

    The Brexit Party has existed for less than a year. If you meant UKIP, Farage (5 years ago) suggested that an AIDS test should be applied to all potential immigrants (alongside other undesirable conditions, such as TB – but not to those from EU, obvs, because we can’t).

    Those voices inside your head? They’re not real.

  17. I take the Brexit Party and UKIP to be the same thing during the Farrage Period and I was only mentioning the AIDS thing as an example of the sort of things said by kippers over the years .
    I don`t especially mean to condemn their anti immigrant shtick ( although I do not approve personally)

    I was only suggesting that the background of forthright ethnic aggression and xenophobia informs the Conservative Party`s “side of the mouth ” hints . This allows them to take the votes without taking the risks.

  18. @Newmania “Andrew C The problem with that is that in your lost of “socialist failures” your sort usually include Germany , Scandinavia and France”

    No I don’t because none of those countries is socialist – not anywhere close in the sense that Brother Corbyn wishes to impose on the UK. Socialism requires state intervention and control, more and more of it the more socialist you want to be.

    The Scandinavia countries are confused by the likes of you as ‘socialist’ simply because they have high taxes and a welfare state. But they could afford the introduction of those because they were successful free market economies. We have the Danish PM saying “Denmark is not a socialist” country” -and you’d think he ought to know more than you – and a summary of the Swedish position can be found here – https://reason.com/2019/01/02/sweden-isnt-socialist/

    France and Germany are, again, mixed economies. France probably closer to socialism than Germany – which explains France’s moribund economy.

    So, nice straw man but as always “it’s not that socialists know nothing, it’s that they know so much that isn’t true”.

  19. “Ed Milliband was pretty much a Scandy loving moderate but you have thought he was Lenin by the way you comically gesticulating Yosemite Sams of Free Market ideology reacted”

    You want to see a real foam speckled reaction to Milliband, just ask one of Corbyn’s supporters.

  20. I was only mentioning the AIDS thing as an example of the sort of things said by kippers over the years .

    The “sort of thing”? But did you ever hear any UKIP actually say it or are you just projecting again? As ever, everything you type is complete bullshit.

  21. The UKIP Councillor Filmed saying she had a ‘problem with people with negroid features’
    UKIP member Ken Chapman, hoping to be elected to Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire, wrote
    “islam is a cancer that needs eradicating multiculturism does not work in this country clear them all off to the desert with their camels that’s their way of life.”
    Hmmmm certain lack of cultural sensitivity possibly – you could go on all day there are endless “isolated examples at odds with what UKIP as the only explicitly “Not racist” Party stands for ”

    I like this one “After the death of Nelson Mandela, West London UKIP member David William Griffiths wrote in the members-only forum that some people were ‘intended by nature’ to be slaves”

    Charming man by all accounts

  22. Newmania, perhaps if you had ever been to South Africa, you know the country liberated by Winnie Mandela’s Dunlop tyres and boxes of Swan Vestas, you might have an inkling. You never forget the image burnt into your brain the first time you come across a necklacing victim whilst on township patrol.
    As for the Amber Valley bloke, the people of Doncaster, Rotherham, Oldham, Reading, Telford and other towns blighted by rape gangs may well be in full agreement.

  23. Bloke in North Dorset

    Sweden is closer to being libertarian than socialist (in the correct sense of the word, not what idiots want it to be):

    In the short term, the most important thing was that Sweden opened up new markets dramatically,” Norberg says. “All those areas that had been blocked by government monopoly, regulation, and license requirements were opened to competition: telecom, energy, railways. This helped give birth to a whole new breed of important companies. In the long term, the most important reform was in the pension system. We have reformed the system to the extent that it cannot go bust. That sounds like magic, but it’s not a defined benefit any more. It all depends on what happens in the economy, to wages, in the future. It’s a more modest offer, partially privatized, but we know that it will survive.”

    Trust, openness, entrepreneurship — it’s a potent combination. “The only way we can pay for those taxes is by having a more open economy,” Norberg argues, “a more deregulated market economy in other areas: more freed trade, more openness to business and competition than the United States. That’s something the American Left misses completely.”

    PS It doesn’t qualify for the book page because I read it in early 2017 but Norberg’s book Progress is a heartening read.

  24. @Newmoaner

    The Brexit Party spend years saying thing like Africans give you AIDS

    Ahem, unless they own a Tardis not possible

    The Brexit Party was formed less than 9 months ago

    If you’re referring to UKIP on HIV – citation needed

    No-one is pro Female Genital Mutilation

    A very large proportion of UK Black and RoP population are and do it. Like RoP child rape police etc ignore

    UKIP member Ken Chapman, hoping to be elected to Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire, wrote
    “islam is a cancer that needs eradicating multiculturism does not work in this country clear them all off to the desert with their camels that’s their way of life.”

    He is correct, on RoP and multi-culti – integration is needed for a cohesive country

    “cultural sensitivity” – one does that when in a foreign country, not one’s own. “When in Rome….”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *