She is already the UK’s leading writer, with her novels, memoirs and style books a fixture on the bestseller lists.
But for a polymath such as Katie Price, whose only remaining literary rival is eighteenth century lexicographer Samuel Johnson, that was never going to be enough. Today, in the first-ever edition of the Sun on Sunday, she adds another string to an increasingly packed bow.
Yes, Katie Price has become a columnist. Combining razor-sharp political analysis with the common-sense wisdom of an ordinary mum, the column, entitled Katie Price, has it all.
The main piece is a hymn to family values, suggesting that it is bad parents who are to blame for Broken Britain, not bad schools. She outlines her theory thus:
“It doesn’t matter what school you go to – it’s family that really makes you who you are. I went to a state school – and look how well I’ve done. That’s because I had a sense of family.”
Anyone who saw Katie Price in her orange-skinned, multiple boob-jobbed heyday, slinging champagne down her neck whilst wearing little more than fake eyelashes and one of Alex Reid’s skirts couldn’t help but draw the conclusion that here was a woman who was achieving success through good, solid family values.
While Price’s longer works of penmanship are without doubt hard-hitting and thought-provoking, she has the ability to ‘get it said’ in remarkably concise fashion.
In a small piece on the left-hand column, just below an image of the correspondent in a demure below-the-knee blue dress, are words as wise as they are heartfelt. For it is here that she turns her felicitous pen to the tragic demise of pop star Whitney Houston, 48.
Katie is, like many of us, a huge Whitney fan. She had Houston’s music played at both her weddings, which shows a stubborn spirit which Churchill would admire.
Here I should let Katie take up the story:
“I felt so sad watching her funeral on TV because there should have been more dignity. I know I’ve lived a lot of my life in front of TV cameras – but death is different. Whitney’s funeral should have been a private affair, not a circus.”
It is Katie Price’s ability to get to the nub of the matter that separates her from lesser writers, such as William Hazlitt.
She rightly makes the not oft-made point that death, when compared with life, is different. There is simply no arguing with that kind of logic. It is inescapable, just like death itself.
Seven months after the demise of the News of the World left the millions people who read it every week without sustenance on a Sunday, it is heartening that Murdoch’s ready-made replacement contains such words of wisdom. While the Sun on Sunday inevitably lacks some of that vigour which only phone hacking can bring, with the advent of Katie’s (doric) column, one imagines that the readers will flock to News International’s newest newspaper in their droves.
By the factory wall 