Farewell, Katie Hopkins, too toxic for an entire land mass

Unlike the refugees who risk their lives crossing dangerous seas to make a living in Australia, Hopkins made it her mission to defy the country’s quarantine laws – her career is surely over now

I suppose it’s entirely fitting that, having campaigned for many years to get undesirable aliens removed from Britain, Katie Hopkins, arguably quite an alien and undesirable personality herself, should be deported from the Commonwealth of Australia. She also has the unusual distinction of having had an Australian government minister declare himself personally gratified at her transportation back to Britain; a bit of historical redress, you might say.

Unlike the penniless refugees who risk their lives crossing dangerous seas to make a living in Australia, Hopkins made it her mission to defy the country’s quarantine laws and terrorise front line workers attending on her in a lazaretto of a hotel by opening the door to them starkers and – an especially cruel act – mask free, presumably with an expression of sadistic pleasure scampering across those familiar features. I think they have venomous spiders down under with nicer personalities.

Having been banned from social media, polite society and the Lorraine Kelly show, Ms Hopkins has now succeeded in getting herself excluded from an entire land mass. Nice woman. And to think she once went on The Apprentice as the prospective, consumer-friendly face for one of Alan Sugar’s businesses. Maybe it’d have been better all round if she’d devoted herself to selling internet phones or cosmetics, but we are where we are, as they say, and she’s back to London with another load of publicity attached to her.

Personally, I use Ms Hopkins as a comforting, informal index of levels of decency in British society. The more we see and hear about her, the more people take seriously whatever cracked things she has to say, the more I worry about the cohesiveness of this dear old country. The more she makes a fool of herself and gets mocked, the better. A low point was when Donald Trump, president of the United States, did her the honour of retweeting some of her battier contributions to public debate. Mostly, though, she’s barely on the radar. She has lost her columns with The Sun and MailOnline,; her talk show, If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World, hasn’t been recommissioned; and she is no longer a fixture on LBC.

Thus, I was greatly relieved that, despite everything, she has not (yet) turned up on GB News as it flails its desperate way to an early closedown. If she’s too “out there” even for them, we surely may sleep a little easier in our beds.

I’m also relieved (though a bit puzzled) that she never stood for election (with the partial exception of an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother). I noted with some trepidation in January that she’d joined Ukip, which is still going and being run these days by Neil Hamilton. Hopkins declared: “People always ask me when I am going to go into politics. I reply that I know I’m an arsehole, but not THAT much of an areshole... but, there comes a time when people lucky enough to have a platform and a voice need to make a more meaningful stand. Joining Ukip formalises my intentions to step up more robustly and help the silenced majority be heard.”

There was some speculation that she might run for Mayor of London or something, but it hasn’t transpired. Part of me is grateful, because it would have been a bit of a freak show, and she’d have churned up something rotten; but then again maybe it would have been better if she had run and been humiliated. It might have shown that the “silenced majority”, which people such as Hopkins keep conjuring up, don’t actually exist, and that in places such as Chesham or Batley they’re content with the Liberal Democrats and Starmerite Labour. The far right are sliding back to the stone form which they emerged, as someone said.

That decline, in fact, is what has been happening increasingly to far right groups, losing deposits and finishing behind Official Loonies. I have the sense, with the failure of GB News, the eclipse of the once mighty Brexit/Reform Party, the defeats of Trump and Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson’s increasingly incredible clown show, the reaction to the racist attacks on English footballers and some other signs that, just maybe, the peak of angry populism that convulsed the world for a few years has now passed. Not disappeared, but passed, like Hopkins’ media career. Or am I dreaming?