Katie Hopkins is hell-bent upon becoming the go-to bitch for television producers in need of a cheap villain to fill sofa space, capitalising on her notorious appearance on ITV’s ‘This Morning’.  From the beginning of our interview, she makes it clear she is here to “say what you can’t say anymore”. She is a pawn in the tiresome narrative of breakfast chat shows, perpetuating a meaningless cycle of scandal, outcry and comment. 

She accuses me of being “the sort of person who believes in climate change”, in a provocative non-sequitur with no relevance our conversation. On one level, she is evidently attempting to keep the camera focused on her by inspiring fresh outrage. 

For example, I believe that parents almost always seek the best possible life for their children. Hopkins does not. “I don’t believe every mother wants what’s best for their baby,” she says. “[Single teenage mothers] want what’s best for themselves. And what’s best for them is doing very little to support their children.” She goes on to tell me in absolute seriousness how “young mums… take KFC home, stick it in the blender and feed it to their babies.”  This is precisely the sort of pantomime nonsense which makes Hopkins so easy to revile. 

In doing so, though, lefties like myself run the risk of engaging in dangerous and hypocritical snobbery of our own. The vitriol Hopkins peddles on daytime TV is being drip-fed into the nation daily, and must be taken seriously, representative as it is of a far wider culture of disdain. In these days of debt, unemployment and uncertainty, it is easy to see the appeal of Hopkins’ economic and educational ideology that “you have to let people fail”. 

She spells out her views in simple terms: “I think that hierarchy is a great way of sorting life and I think that shortcuts are a great way of making hierarchy work and I think that the class system is the best system that perfectly matches this hierarchy.” In other words, your position in the “hierarchy” of society is decided by a series of value judgements based on arbitrary “shortcuts” such as class, race, gender, appearance and even name. 

“[For everyone] to be educated the same? to have the same chance?” To Hopkins, these are empty aspirations — there is not enough money in the economy for everyone to be financially secure and well-educated, and so some must fail that others may succeed. She sees the class system as “much more effective than any social policy” in determining who is able to access higher education — who will succeed, and who will fail. Private schools are an “efficient way of processing highly intelligent individuals… into elite institutions”, because the children who deserve to succeed are naturally to be found amongst the upper classes. 

In contrast, there is no room in the state educational system for struggling children whose parents cannot spare the time to help with homework or the money for private tuition. “If the parents aren’t going to take responsibility”, Hopkins expects primary-age pupils to fend for themselves.  “At a certain age, around 8 years old, you can recognise either you are going to do something about that or you’re not.” 

Rich children “are funnelled into private schools” which “turn them into fantastically inquisitive minds”. Children of equal academic potential, who come from homes where there is less money and less time to spare, are mere intellectual collateral. “It’s harsh,” says Hopkins, “but life is harsh.”

We also discuss other “shortcuts”, such as the use of racial profiling by the police. To Hopkins, it is simple. “The ratio of black people that are found to have committed crime is greater. And so we are therefore making those shortcuts… now clearly I’m not suggesting racism is a great idea. I’m merely saying there are shortcuts that exist.” It should be noted that racial profiling makes no difference whatsoever to crime figures, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. (She is careful to tell me that “nobody can use race any more” when making value judgements between people. I will let those two words, “any more”, speak for themselves.) 

Hopkins is as scornful of the campaign for women’s rights as she is of the right of black people to a fair criminal process. “Do I believe there’s a lot of inequality around? No, I don’t.” To her, feminism is a matter of “special treatment” and mere semantics, and she talks dismissively of all-male golf clubs and all-female literary prizes when the topic is broached.  In fact, she tells me, “the equality brigade has managed to get themselves far more than equal”. Moments later, Hopkins freely admits that she would always “pick the man” when choosing between otherwise equal candidates for a job, as she “knows the cost of maternity leave”. 

Hopkins does not “believe in the world of –isms”. This is despite statistical evidence that working-class women continue to learn far less than their male counterparts, as this study by the Institute for Public Policy Research shows. All this proves is that “there are idle people in this world, and there are grafters.” 

“Money is very easy to come by if you do nothing”, she tells me. “Until we cap benefits at £20,000 a year, we will never find the workforce we are looking for.” Two and a half million people in the UK are currently unemployed- but Katie Hopkins has the solution. “You have to create your own job. Ask twenty people if you can take their bins out for them. Ask thirty people if you can mow their lawn. Just knock on a door.” It is simple — an entire generation can drag itself out of unemployment by doing each other’s chores.

According to Hopkins, single mothers only “want to find an easy way of getting their kid through life”. She seeks to absolve us of our corporate responsibility to help those at the bottom of the economic ladder, by perpetuating the toxic delusion that life on benefits is anything other than an endless struggle. “I don’t think a lot of mothers want what’s best for their baby. I think a lot of mothers what is best for them, and what is best for them is doing frankly very little to support their children.”

If she were an Oxford admissions tutor, Hopkins assures me she wouldn’t “want a Tyrone in her tutor group” when she could have a “Cecil”. That is to say, she would favour an upper-class applicant over a working-class student. “It’s a case of being true to what you’ve learnt… not many Tyrones I’ve had the misfortune to meet have been terribly nice.” Hopkins wants everyone to know their place. The working class should not aspire to a university education, for that is the preserve of the rich elite. She tells me that people “look up to Oxford because it is the hierarchy.” 

Hopkins’ argument is that “it is not the responsibility of the state [and] it is not the responsibility of the taxpayer” to help children who do not get the academic help they need from their parents. However, failure to invest in state schools will leave thousands of potential high-achievers without the training they need to support Britain’s gradual financial recovery, rather than achieving Hopkins’ stated aim of “getting this economy streamlined” by saving money in the short-term.

This is not a matter of what Hopkins terms “vengeful social mobility”. It is simply a matter of ensuring that the best possible people get the best possible training to give British businesses the best possible future employees. She is “sickened… by social mobility clauses” which make allowances for the different levels of education and support university applicants have received. But higher education exists to provide the economy with the scientists and businessmen and innovators it needs, irrespective of their social background. Oxford should embody not hierarchy but opportunity. 

Katie Hopkins believes that the poor are poor because they are lazy, and that the rich are rich because they are talented and hard-working. This is a lie. Although she contends that “we all buy into this shortcut system” where we can be judged on our social standing, class has nothing to do with the degree you can study or the career you can follow.  

It would be useless to tell Hopkins the truth — that snobbery is as groundless as racism, and that the word “chav” is as dehumanising as the word “nigger”. The value of human life evidently means nothing to her. However, you do not need a sense of social responsibility to see how these generalisations are hurting our economy.

All of Katie Hopkins’ “shortcuts” (and this is a word she repeats more than any other) seem to make life much easier. They distract us from the true causes of our poverty, debt and despair by making monsters of the innocent. They absolve us of our duty of care toward the vulnerable. But they also prevent whole generations from realising their academic and economical potential. They must be resisted. We cannot afford to do otherwise.

Marc Pacitti has just written a very thought provoking piece on this website, giving a republican perspective on the birth of the royal baby. In the first instance there are some things that he writes about which are I think certainly of merit.

He is for instance right to identify the friction between royalty and celebrity and the problems that this has caused – the 1990s being its best example. Royalty’s identification as celebrity produces problems in its ability to perform its constitutional role; but the media hopefully is learning lessons from the horrors of its behaviour in recent years.  

He is also right to identify the complexities associated with the Head of State sharing responsibilities as Head of the Church of England in our twenty first century secular society. We cannot expect an eighty six year old Queen – who is in all regards – a devout Christian to change this function radically anytime soon, but Prince Charles’s plans to be Defender of Faith as well as Defender of the Faith should certainly go some way to healing these issues.

But Marc’s piece does not, in all its significant length, identify what is arguably the basis for Monarchy’s survival – that it has to evolve, change and modernize. In order to survive the Monarchy has to move with the times – it is not a museum piece; it has to reflect the society at which it is at the head. As far back as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert the Monarchy has done this, through to George V’s use of radio and creation of the Windsor brand to Prince Philip’s 1960s modernizing programme and most recently the bringing forward of the new generation.

Marc quotes Christopher Hitchens in his piece, fortunately not associating himself with the belated writer’s aggressiveness and obsession to be right and throw compassion and pragmatism out of the window in the process. I have no intention of writing here to Hitchens’s (or Pacitti’s, for that matter!) depths but let me just put forward a few of the reasons, which I seem to share with a great number of people, for why what this royal baby represents works and is so special.

First, the monarchy is relevant – it performs that vital task of bringing our contemporary life together with our historical past. Monarchy provides a symbol of national unity around which we can all, regardless of our background gather. You only had to stand on The Mall on the evening of the Diamond Jubilee concert to experience that awesome sensation in practice.

Second, of course Marc is right to recognize the drawbacks of heredity – there are many. It is certainly the case that heredity cannot guarantee us that Prince George will, all going well, turn out to be a suitable King. In an age when we (quite rightly) care a lot less about royal etiquette and educate sovereigns much better, these risks are eliminated a lot less though. Heredity has less drawbacks than other methods of producing a Head of State. An elective monarchy for example would produce a scramble for social distinction and simply enlarge our awful culture of party politics. Who would want David Cameron or Tony Blair as a monarch? Who would show them the same kinds of affection we show the monarchy as it is? An elective monarchy would lose the monarchy’s central benefit – its reconciling character.

Of course, the greatest charge that many produce against the monarchy is its cost. But this can in practice come to no fruition. Even if one disregards the hugely significant levels of money the monarchy brings to this country’s economy through tourism, the Monarchy still runs at a significant profit. No longer do minor members of the royal family receive money from the state and nor, in a way, does the Queen because of the method of surrendering the Crown Estates’ profits to the treasury. If you were to put a number on it, which is difficult to do, then it would probably cost around 52p per head, which is far less than Heads of State in other countries. There is certainly a case for a republic and there is a case for a proper monarchy, but nobody wants a mean monarchy – where would the fun be in that?

In a final recall to Marc I have to tell him that I am not alone in my thoughts here – the numbers show that most of us support, and feel great affection for the monarchy. Probably, on principle, many objections can be leveled against it. Many of them are certainly fair – though I hope I have been able to respond to a few of them here, albeit briefly.

Put that aside, there are times when things work and are special for reasons which we cannot explain. The monarchy is an example of that and we would be very stupid indeed to let something as unique as it go. The birth of Prince George only reinforces the importance of the monarchy as an institution. We only have to look at what happened last time we got rid of a King to convince ourselves of the merits of having one. Why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book?

Marc describes the monarchy towards the end of his piece as “an interesting and decaying relic on the international stage”. Perhaps that is true, but there’s one thing that is for sure, there are certainly worse things to be called. Maybe we should take it as a compliment?