Back in January, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s explosive disclosures about Donald Trump to the author Michael Wolff gave rise to perhaps my favourite ever Katie Hopkins tweet (tough field). “Keep going, sir,” ran this Pooterish direct address to the president of the United States. “When I am over I am going to bang you and Steve’s heads together. You two boys need to learn to play nicely. Together we win.”
Every. Single. Word. It’s literally perfect, from the casual WTF-ery of “when I am over”, as though a bilateral summit were immediately pending, to Katie’s attempt to cast herself as a Republican strategist with the grim heft of a Lee Atwater. As for the explanation as to how “we” “win”, I’m sure Brad Parscale will be seconding her to the 2020 campaign just the minute he starts smoking crack. Big hire, that one. Gamechanger. However, the tweet’s keystone is obviously Katie’s bogglingly self-satirising attempt to play nanny to two “boys” who don’t even eat people like her for breakfast. They have people who have people who have people who eat people like her for breakfast. Still, she’s totally gonna bang their two heads together! Or, as the newspaper headlines will have it: “Unemployed foreign no-mark neutralised by secret service for trying to touch president’s hem.”
And yet, perhaps a new opportunity for interaction with Trump has presented itself. This week, it was announced that the US president’s much hokey-cokeyed state visit to the UK will, in fact, be going ahead in July. The news was only wryly welcomed by London mayor Sadiq Khan, but a certain someone is absolutely wetting her pants about it. As Katie declared: “A great little place I know called the rest of Britain is THRILLED to welcome Trump in July. Do not listen to the nipple-height, Muslim mayor of Londonistan. Britain needs Trump.”
Well, he does feel like the one thing that could bring our divided nation together at this moment … Depending on where you stand on such things, his visit will either be an overhyped event with protests much smaller than billed, or the most effective use of snowflakes against the far right since Operation Barbarossa.
Either way, we are getting ahead of ourselves. There is much to unpack, not least the sense that this should be madam’s big moment. I don’t mean to add any pressure, but it will clearly be nothing less than a total and humiliating failure for Hopkins if she is not able to finesse herself into some sort of encounter with the president while he is on these shores.
The second strain at work is her ongoing campaign against Khan, which she uses for securing bookings on Fox News in the off-season between terrorist incidents here or elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, last week Katie hinted at even bigger plans in this department, saying: “I would stand as London mayor.” Yet another Hopkins statement to which the most concise reply is: “You live in Devon, dear.”
The last time this response felt necessary was less than a month ago, when Katie posted a film of her giving a speech in which she announced: “I am a card-carrying member of the NRA.” You live in Devon, dear.
“Other mothers have car stickers saying: ‘Baby on Board,’” she went on. “I like to think mine has bullets.” I’m sure you like to think it, but it doesn’t make it true. You might be able to get away with persuading Americans that you never venture into Widecombe-in-the-Moor unless you’re open-carrying. But you’ll have less luck in your homeland. We see you.
The obvious question – so obvious it has begun to be asked with increasing frequency by even Katie’s fans – is why she does not simply do one to the States permanently. A few months ago, she attempted to explain it to a genuinely puzzled fan. “Moving to the States would be like getting into a warm bath, sir,” she replied, mustering all the grandeur of a duchess assured that the housemaid has drawn said bath specifically for her. “Welcoming and reassuring. But this is no time to leave the cold shower of the UK. We must get furious and fight back.”
The reality is that in the big pond of more skilled US wingnuts, Katie would not even be a microscopic organism. Thus her sole American USP – or the beat she is forced to share only with Nigel Farage – is staying in the UK, and talking down Britain for money on Fox News. Which she does at every possible opportunity, despite the exercise being almost a performance art piece about pointlessness. I can scarcely imagine a better illustration of virtue-signalling than calling for the London mayor to go, on an American cable news channel, in a live link-up from Devon.
Yet on she goes with the shtick, primarily talking down London – although it may as well be any major city. And, naturally, the ironies of this position escape our great student of Islamist terror. Like the enemies of the west to whom she fancies herself the polar opposite, Katie detests cities and what they represent. The rootlessness. The cosmopolitanism. The bourgeois liberalism. How much better things were in a mythic past that we must get back to, forcibly if necessary, whether the degenerate want us to or not.
According to the Exeter Pol Pot, London has “fallen” and is a den of every conceivable vice. Come her revolution, it would presumably be razed to the ground, Phnom Penh-style, and its denizens sent back to work on the land in Devon, or possibly in Katie’s online content mine. There have, of course, been cultural greats who romanticised their own kicks against the Enlightenment. In that situation, though, I do think it helps to be as talented as Richard Wagner, say, and not just someone whose prose reads as if it was written by a verbicidal maniac.
The other irony is that Katie is frequently required to make journeys to the capital for a television booking, or to be sacked by someone for her latest act of Freudian self-sabotage. Think of her as the Occidental Tourist. At these moments, her attempts to despair of the capital feel more Alan Partridge than ever. As he put it more than 15 years ago, while trying to flog his book to commuters in Norwich station: “Go to London! I guarantee you’ll either be mugged or underappreciated. Catch the train to London, stopping at Rejection, Disappointment, Backstabbing Central and Shattered Dreams Parkway.”
Well, quite. Still, a Trump visit would certainly be worth Katie’s train fare, and we must look forward to her affectionately ruffling his combover in public as one of its many high points.
Good Morning Britain posts a dog’s breakfast of a tweet
Enormous congratulations to ITV breakfast show Good Morning Britain for the manner in which it appears to be marking World Autism Month.
“We’re looking to speak to pet owners who haven’t given their pets vaccinations because they’re worried about side-effects,” ran an appeal for guests on the show’s Twitter feed earlier this week, “as well as people who have done so and now believe their pet has canine autism as a result.”
The tweet has drawn furious responses from doctors, parents of autistic children, parents of autistic children who are also pet owners – and all other permutations thereof. But the fact that it remains up several days later suggests that a) the idea remains actively pursued, and b) not a whole lot of tosses are given.
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