Katie Hopkins Blog

In whatever line of business you work, you find yourself accountable. Perhaps you are accountable to clients and customers – for the service they receive. Some of us are accountable to shareholders – for profitability. Many of us are accountable to staff – for their job satisfaction and their pay at the end of the month.

Yet sometimes, it feels as if politicians are very far removed from the real world in which we work. They do not understand this need to be accountable. Sometimes this accountability seems limited to the moment we step into the polling booth at a general election.

Now that 6 out of 10 of the electorate want an referendum on Europe, surely they are accountable to ensure that this happens? If 60% of my customers asked for a service, I can guarantee it would be delivered. If 60% of shareholders voted for a strategic change, you can be certain that this would be put in place. If 60% of staff were unhappy, things would need to change.

And yet when it comes to a referendum that 60% of us want, we are still not given a voice. We work hard, pay our taxes, abide by the laws of the country, and fulfil our obligations as voters. Yet, we still have not earned the right to a say. Despite this a group of foreign states has a very loud voice in our affairs, and has the right to veto a range of UK laws and regulations.

This cannot be right.

Making difficult decisions is not easy. And providing leadership to take these difficult decisions is even harder. At Sandhurst – through my year of gruelling officer training – they called it moral courage. Having the moral courage to make the difficult decisions and lead people through them for a better outcome.

As business leaders we make these difficult decisions on a daily basis. Not all of them are popular, but we take them to try to achieve a better outcomes for the business as a whole and for the people the we work with. Sometimes tough questions have to be asked. I often hear: ‘I didn’t ask because I was frightened I might not like the answer’. I think this is true for the referendum on Europe.

I believe that our government is frightened of asking the question about whether we want to be in or out of Europe, because they are frightened that they will not like the answer. Six out of ten want to be asked the question. Six out of ten want a referendum. And six out of ten feel strongly enough about this to demand a voice.

We demand a referendum and it is time to let the people decide.

1) Stay at home mum: wearing tshirt that says ‘breast is best’ from the mumsnet shop. Has laminated costa coffee card on a lanyard and comfy pants.

2) Part time mum: as above, but wearing odd shoes, sweating profusely across the upper lip and already late for her three hour public sector job as a manager of something mundane.

3) Feeder mum: assumes you are vermin simply because you haven’t eaten half your body weight in cadburys for breakfast.

4) Popular mum: leader of the mums army, and popular figure head of the more extreme mum mafia mobilising mothers with every text.

5) The Dad mum: the father that shares parenting duties. Terribly right on, knits his own yoghurts and wears hand stitched shoes. Has ‘Poly Toynbee Rocks’ sweater.

There is an expression in military circles that goes: ‘feet ok, mail getting though?’ Two little questions that sum up the entire universe of an average soldier and his happiness. And no matter how his feet or whether his mail has indeed ‘got through’ he responds with the affirmative: ‘yes sir’   because he knows that is the correct answer and will keep him out of trouble.

When you think about it, the commercial environment is measured in equally simple terms – terms to do with assessing profit and growth. Just as these are the motivating force of any business, so are individuals intrinsically linked to this motivation through their pay.  Employee surveys state that ‘salaries are not the only consideration’ but then ‘promotion also matters’. We may not state that money is our motivation, (and it is not considered survey etiquette to do so) but it is consistently the primary force that drives people from their bed to plunge head first into the subway and beyond.

And with more than 2.62 million unemployed, who can blame them. The labour market is carrying surplus and all work is good work – particularly if it is paid and sustainable. My role in education is to make young people more employable: equipped with skills employers want. Their biggest concern is not trying to get a good job; it is trying to get any job. They recognise the competition is sitting next to them in crowded lecture halls and bustling campuses. To this anxious crowd, unpaid internships feel like a good job – one I spoke to had been an unpaid intern for over a year. 

As my mother’s Woman’s Institute group are very quick to point out, ‘in this world there are good people and bad people, and the latter don’t live around here’.  So how do we make the moral decision on what is good work or bad? What is the role of a professional bailiff? Is that not good work? Not a good person? From a commercial perspective, they reduce debtor days and are incentivised against performance targets. Manageable, profitable, results oriented. Or what about the firm engaged to manage a headcount reduction program. From a commercial perspective they reduce exposure to employability law, and operate to a fixed cost. But would it pass this noble formula for good work laid down by the Good Work Commission? I doubt it.

Perhaps the answer depends on whose shoes you are standing in? Because increasingly it seems that we are obligated to stand in the shoes of the long term employee. As the CEO of an organisation, the boardroom is cast aside, the board table upended, the management accounts filed away, and in its place we are supposed to focus with close to parental adoration on our employees. Take their temperature, check their pulse, offer them the comfortable chair and ask operations to whistle up some afternoon tea. Are they feeling ok, are they feeling content in their work? Are they happy? Offer them a snap survey to check. ‘Employee engagement’ is like giving more hormones to HR.

As an employer I feel like the employee has some kind of magnet to which political will is inextricably drawn, such that all legislation – and there is oodles of the stuff – is increasingly reading like a manifesto for how to make your employee happy. Strangled by TUPE, paternity, maternity, flexi time, job share, part time, sickness benefit, employability law and the plethora of rights that manifest themselves with the arrival of any new employee, I wonder just how small business is supposed to be David’s engine for  growth when it is spluttering for legislative air.

Occasionally I find myself wishing that ‘feet alright, post getting though’, could be enough for my own business too. 

@KTHopkins

And they’re off. £250 put down against fruit and veg, a gesture perhaps of the greater prize of £250,000 promised just 12 weeks down the line.

Ed proved enormously irritating from the off. He seemed less like a finance professional and more a committed soup fanatic, determined to make soup above all else.  Jim astutely pointed out they were going to make soup ‘like they had never made soup before’. Indeed.

Just like M & S, Melody was so much more than just a team leader. She christened the team, she led the team and she took the team to victory – and all with perfect make up and perfectly polished nails. Not only that, but with all with the blessing of Al Gore.

Like many animals going in for the kill, there is a certain moment when you can smell that your prey is weak and that their time is up. For Ed, pulling out the line ‘I am the shortest in the competition’ was that moment. Being vertically challenged is not something you mention in front of the Sugar.

 ‘Roll with the punches’ said Ed. More a question of needing to take cover under fire.

What is it with divers? They are the wrong side of naughty every time.

Tom Daley, the pocket sized diver from Plymouth got into trouble with his school mates for being an irritating twerp. He had to move schools.

The Alabama man that killed his new wife whilst on a scuba dive got into trouble with the police for being a murderer. He will have to move home – from a house to a jail.

And now poor old Eduardo, the Croatian striker for Arsenal, gets into trouble with the SFA and the whole of the Celtic supporters club for taking a wee dive to win a penalty. He will have to be moved emotionally – from smug bastard to repentant Croat.

Having spent two weeks in France, I have been educated as to the ways of the caravan owner. And there are a few things that I have learnt.

1) Mobile home owners are incapable of sitting still. Whilst waiting in line for the ferry one guy hovered his car and shook out his carpets whilst the missus made two cups of tea and rearranged the plastic flowers.

2) They like to strap on extra bits. Extra bike racks, spare wheels, additional luggage compartments by Thule. They are never happier than when they find somewhere else to stow the additional clutter they otherwise would not have brought. 

3) They like to express their affinity with the out of doors in every way possible. Footwear is robust and waterproof, clothing is Patagonia and replete with utility belts and furniture can stow away. I saw an entire picnic bench collapse into a large family sized box of matches.

4) Nudity is nothing. Living with nature means acceptance of nature as far as this lot see it. If you shower in the communal block, you are part of the commune of life and you may as well let it all hang out. What’s the odd bum or boob when you are weeing in a bucket?

5) It seems to help if your unsightly home away from home is called something fast like ‘speedie’ or ‘zippy’ or  ’whizzie’. Even when they are on their side in ditch after a nasty gust of wind they can imagine how fast they might have gone.

6) They are mercilessly self sufficient. A restaurant on a caravan site is about as populated as a pub in a nunery.

It seems to me that the divide between the women’s and Men’s game at Wimbledon is now a vast gulf which can never be bridged.

The men’s game is fast, punishing and raw – unless you are Fed in which case it is pure beauty. The women’s game is laboured, pedestrian, a touch sulky and a way too chunky. I mean chunky in the physical sense.

Some of those girls are look more like Ann Harvey than Ann Summers and frankly it ‘aint pretty. Their ample midrifts are flumped over larger backsides and supported by thighs twice the girth of the Umpires chair. 

I don’t get it. They are the elite of their sport, masters of their game and vying for the ultimate tennis tiara – and they cannot be arsed to hit the salad. If they are  burning as many calories as they surely must be, then how is it possible to still be a touch on the lardy side? What the heck are they eating to maintain these extra folds in the face of extreme physical exercise?

If the lovely Roddick can manage to shed a stone from his well toned physique at the advice of his fitness coach, surely they could have a crack at shifting a couple each? They could even do it together: Weight watchers @ Wimbledon.

I am sitting on the sofa writing this. And I just ate a bag of minstrels. But then again, I am not about to squeeze myself into a white mini dress and bend over alot.

Mark Sandford, Governor of South Carolina, has just been outed for an affair with an Argentian lover.

The father of four, husband of one and Governor of a purist state disappeared over Father’s Day weekend in order to spend four days with his alternative squeeze somewhere down South. Having broken down in a press conference and laid his cards on the table he would now like the press to respect his wife and sons and give then some privacy.

Why is it that the thoughts of adulterous men only turn to their families once their affair has been discovered?

Why would the press accord his wife respect when he has not?

And why is it that in the midst of all this melee, many are quick to jump to his defence and uphold his reputation. If Mr Mark Sandford were a Mrs, would he be afforded the same support?

I think I understand all the complexities of the debate and I have been on the receiving end of all of it. The husband who ran off, the loneliness of the injured party and the woman pelted with rotten fruit because my partner was once belonged to someone else.

Whatever the verdict of the jury on their sofas, one thing is certain. Despite all the hoopla Mr Mark Sandford will be feeling a whole lot better. His secret is out, he no longer has anything to hide, and the worst is over.

It is a trait I see time and time again. Men gripped in the thralls of an affair reach a certain point where they want to be discovered, where the burden of secrecy is too over whelming and where they actively want someone to ‘lance the boil’ so that the worst may be over and they can start to breathe again, live again. After a storm, there is an uneasy calm, and after that the process of rebuilding may begin.

I feel sorry for them all. The husband, the wife, the kids, the other party. No one would choose for this to happen and no one would willingly put their family through an emotional mangle just to see how much they could cry.

Life happens, and sometimes we are all the injured and yet innocent party. For most people an affair is the worst time of their life. To live through it in the media spotlight is truly horrid. People reading papers need to recognise that they are not the judge or the jury.  And before they reach a verdict that no one asked for, they need to look at their own lives and question whether they would really stand up to closer inspection.

My daughter and I got to chatting about death.

You may think this unusual in a four year old, but as they say in the film ‘love actually’ – love is all around. And, as it turns out, to young eyes, death is all around as well.

Animals splattered on the road or a walk by a graveyard is usually sufficient to get us going. The day we put granny in a hole in the ground fuelled their interest for a good few months.

I have always told the children that we all die one day and that when I go, I will turn into a star in heaven and will watch them growing up. (Clearly if God has Google I am stuffed and I will be watching from somewhere altogether hotter).

Anyway, I will be a star in heaven and I will be watching them. In terms of a timeline I have always said that I will die when they don’t need me anymore. I like to point out at this juncture in the conversation, that as they learn to put on their own pants and find cbeebies independently, I will become much less important to them.

On our way to sports day this morning India (4) was keen to underline her view that at the moment she does need me and she would prefer it if I stuck around for a bit longer. I wondered when she thought it would be alright for me to pop off:

‘About eleven I should think’.

 I will remind her of this when she is twenty eight and moving into my spare room with her boyfriend…probably with her pants on back to front.

Now everyone is at it. The most fashionable thing in politics it seems – aside from Joanna Lumley – is to stand as an independent.

Esther has declared her hand and is planning to stand as an independent in Luton on an ‘anti sleaze’ ticket. Actually she has said she will stand if people want her to.. which is sort of like wanting to count your votes before you fill in your nomination papers.

So far not so good. Jeremy Paxman made her look like inconsequential fluff on Newsnight and in contrast to Lumley, Ranzen appears somehow misplaced. Like an ex show host in need of a project.

Lumley has everything going for her. A real cause – prompted by familial ties to a proud regiment, a reputation for being daring, fabulous and funny, and captivating beauty. I fear Rantzen fails to deliver on any of these.

It seems that true support can be garnered for a real cause – standing for something, in support of something, in order to change something. However, standing against something- the anti ticket - does not mobilise the masses nor motivate the voter. After all, once the problem you are standing against has gone away, what then? What are you all about?

I am campaigning for Buy British – supporting British small business, British farmers and fishermen and for the British Armed Forces. Europe can be a worthwhile ally, but it is not our master.

I wish Ester well in Luton. But I think she needs to stand FOR something, or she may well fall over with the thing she is standing against gets taken away.