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Katie Hopkins leaves Mail Online by 'mutual consent' as column dropped after two years

Announcement comes after controversy over her comments on terror attacks

Lizzie Dearden
Home Affairs Correspondent
Monday 27 November 2017 14:37 GMT
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Katie Hopkins' most controversial moments

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Katie Hopkins’ column for Mail Online has been scrapped after a slew of complaints over her comments on terror attacks and other controversies.

A spokesperson for the website said her contract “was not renewed by mutual consent” and gave no further detail.

Ms Hopkins did not immediately respond to a request for comment and appeared to have deleted all tweets on her official Twitter account, apart from a small number of retweets topped with a video of her “bitchiest moments”.

The announcement came after protesters gathered outside an event where Ms Hopkins was due to speak in Lewes, causing it to be cancelled on safety grounds.

A tweet that appeared on Katie Hopkins' account shortly before her tweets disappeared on 27 November
A tweet that appeared on Katie Hopkins' account shortly before her tweets disappeared on 27 November (Twitter)

A previous motion to cancel the event because of expected demonstrations and tensions was defeated, with Ms Hopkins later claiming audience members and security staff had been attacked.

Ms Hopkins, who rose to fame on reality show The Apprentice, previously wrote for The Sun as what the newspaper hailed as “Britain’s most controversial columnist”.

She also headed a programme on LBC Radio, which was ended – also apparently by mutual consent – in May.

It came after listeners called police over a tweet calling for a “final solution” following the Manchester terror attack.

The message was deleted, with Ms Hopkins claiming the use of “final” was a typographical error and changing it to “true” in an apparent attempt to avoid comparisons to the Holocaust.

Donald Trump is among those to have praised Ms Hopkins, after she backed his debunked claims that police officers were “afraid for their lives” in some parts of London.

The future President publicly thanked the “respected columnist” her “powerful writing on the UK's Muslim problems”.

The United Nations, by contrast, said a Sun column that saw Ms Hopkins describe migrants as “cockroaches” and “feral humans” resembled pro-genocide propaganda in 2015.

The High Commissioner for Human Rights said tabloid “misinformation” about immigration was feeding into a “nasty underbelly of racism” governing discourse on the refugee crisis.

“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,” the article read as thousands of men, women and children drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.

Ms Hopkins resigned and moved to the Mail Online – one of the world’s largest English-language news websites - five months later.

Other controversies have seen her call for Ed Miliband to “gas” his wife, suggest dementia suffers be denied NHS care, and be sued for wrongly suggesting two brothers were extremists with links to al-Qaeda.

She is currently promoting her latest book, which professes to be “part memoir, part handbook for the modern woman”.

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