Has Katie Hopkins gone too far this time?

Six years ago, shortly after she withdrew as a contestant from series three of the Apprentice, Katie Hopkins appeared on the programme’s spin-off show opposite Nick Hewer, one of the mentors who had worked with the bolshy and at times wilfully provocative former army cadet during her time competing for a job with Sir Alan Sugar.

“Here’s what I think is going on,” observed Hewer. “You’ve decided to create a new brand: Katie Hopkins.” Referring to her appearance on the programme, he predicted her new character would be characterised by “a white suit, Pollyanna hair, red lips shaped for sin – and so much vitriol. And I don’t understand where it’s taken you. It’s made you famous but it’s made you loathed, and where is it going to take you now?”

Six years, needless to say, is an aeon in celebrity culture, and if there was ever a time when being widely disliked disqualified fame-hungry wannabes from a career in the public eye, that is certainly not the case now. The Sloaney image of Hopkins’s early TV days has been abandoned, but today, having worked her way from the lower reaches of the celebrity Z-list through reality television ubiquity, brand “Katie Hopkins” has become one of the most in-demand (and richly rewarded) commodities in a certain section of British media. And all of it achieved thanks to one singular tactic: a relentless quest to be loathed.

Be in no doubt, there is plenty of money to be made out of being “the most hated woman in Britain”. Hopkins writes a weekly column for the Sun and for Now! magazine. She is a frequent guest on breakfast and daytime TV, and in January appeared on the ever more outrageous Celebrity Big Brother, for which she was reportedly paid £400,000. Her Twitter feed, the failsafe measure of achievement or notoriety these days, has 543,000 followers.

The key requirement for each outlet is simple: be as outrageous, as wildly provocative, as possible. A random sample of the latest pronouncements: fat children should be sent to special schools; Oisin Tymon, the producer beaten by Jeremy Clarkson, “sat crying in A&E”; depression is “the ultimate passport to self-obsession”. Another day, another easy clickbait headline in the papers that pay her wages – and many of those that don’t.

But the rows, so often seemingly confected, sometimes have higher stakes. On Sunday, Hopkins was reported to Greater Manchester police and crime commissioner for alleged incitement of racial hatred, over a series of tweets about the local MP Simon Danczuk’s appearance at a ceremony briefly raising the Pakistani flag over Rochdale town hall to mark the country’s national day on 23 March. Danczuk had posted a picture of himself with two Pakistani men, whom he called “good friends”.

“Your Pakistani friends saw young white girls as fair game when they abused them,” Hopkins tweeted, referring to the Rochdale child abuse scandal, over which eight Pakistani men and one from Afghanistan were imprisoned. “Do NOT lecture me on community cohesion fool.” Danczuk protested that she “[had] waded into something that she didn’t understand”, and that “her ignorance is extremely dangerous”.

“Controversy sells, I get that,” the MPlater wrote, “but when irresponsible comments by someone who hasn’t even got a tenuous grasp of what she’s talking about starts to manifest itself in hateful intolerance, which puts people in danger, then we have a problem.”

Far-right extremists planned to march on the town in response to the tweets, he said, while Pakistani residents in the town were being abused. Hopkins retorted that the MP was playing for votes and trying to distract attention after his recent admission that he used porn.

It’s not the first time Hopkins has been brought to the attention of the police. In the past year, she been reported over tweets about the Ebola victim Pauline Cafferkey (“Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians”), and Palestinians (“Filthy rodents burrowing beneath Israel. Time to restart the bombing campaign”), and for insulting a group of overweight women during a documentary about being fat. There were further calls for her arrest this week, when she commented that Ed Miliband should “stick [wife Justine’s] head in the oven and turn on the gas”.

There have always been outspoken columnists whose career thrived on provocation, but rarely quite to this extent. Hopkins calls herself a “columnist, broadcaster and businesswoman”, but she might equally be described as a professional troll, a self-styled pantomime villain for the online petition generation.

It is a new phenomenon, notes Peter Mountstevens, managing partner of the PR and branding consultancy Taylor Herring. “Ten years ago, it would be hard to imagine such a meteoric rise. Social media has undoubtedly been her greatest asset, and the single biggest factor in helping her to create such a successful brand.”

The key to making an impact in the digital media landscape, he says, is “constant engagement to drive views, share news and keep brands front of mind, and [Hopkins] is the perfect catalyst to keep people interested. She has the ability to jump into any issue, usually with a divisive, newsworthy soundbite, in a way which will instantly inspire debate.” As a tactic, it demonstrably works, he says, “which is why she is unlikely to be short of job offers in the near future”.

Hopkins was born in Devon in 1975, the younger of two daughters of an electrical engineer and a housewife, who sent their girls to a private convent school. The ferociously strict regime, she told the Guardian last year, was “a hoot” – “I suppose I was one of those girls that was just fine.” She knew she wanted to go into the army, so after her A-levels was sponsored by the intelligence corps through university, after which she went to Sandhurst, where the drill sergeants who would mercilessly mock the recruits over their appearance. She insists she loved it.

Hand in hand with her military ambitions, however, was a thirst for celebrity that led to her appearance in an unscreened pilot for Big Brother that was filmed before the first series was broadcast in 2000.

The years following her Apprentice appearance were distinguished by tabloid pictures of her having sex in a field with a married man, an appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, and the sale of her subsequent marriage to the same man, Mark Cross, to a Living TV programme in 2010 called Celebrity Four Weddings. In addition to two pre-teenage daughters from an earlier relationship, she and Cross have a six-year-old son.

But life has not been easy for Hopkins – she also revealed to the Guardian for the first time that she suffers frequently from serious epileptic seizures that cause her arms to dislocate and require her to be hospitalised several times a month. “My epilepsy’s not an illness. It is my strength,” she tweeted recently. “I am tougher than it, bigger than it, better than it. It can DO ONE.”

Earlier this month, when the columnist declared that she would leave the country if Ed Miliband was elected prime minister, Daniel O’Neill, a student social worker from Salford, started an appeal on the Crowdfunder website to raise the airfare, which attracted the columnist’s approving mention. ”When you care about things, when you hold very strong views as well, how could you possibly sit on the sidelines?” says O’Neill. “If you don’t say anything, the things that she’s putting out there, a lot of her followers, her fans, they could believe in this and start spreading her message.”

All the same, O’Neill admits he believes her views to be a contrivance. “I think the Katie Hopkins you see in the media, on Twitter — I don’t in any sense believe that’s the real her. She’s created a good character, and she plays it very well.”

She may be highly objectionable to many, but her success relies less on the neglected majority on whose behalf she claims to speak than on the swift and indignant outrage of those whom she so carefully offends. Perhaps the truth is that we rather like being trolled. 

In any event, notes Mountstevens, “regardless of where you stand on her opinions or personality, her success means we are likely to see far more columnists and media personalities that are cut from the same cloth in the years to come”.

As for Hopkins herself, she denies that her schtick is an act, though she did joke to one interviewer: “If you disclose the fact I am not an absolute cow bag, me and thee will have words.” She is well aware, however, that her value to her employers lies in one thing alone – the controversy she manages to generate. “They are a consumer purchasing a commodity – me – and I have to demonstrate its value.”