Katie Hopkins - Rude

W ell, not a complete twat, anyway.

I appreciate many people think I am about as big a twat as it gets. Yuge, as The Donald would say. A tremendous twat. Some would go as far as to say they cant stand me, and even talk about hate as in, I hate that bloody woman which seems a bit extreme.

Liberals say we must Hope not Hate, but maybe this only applies to people who think the same things they think, because liberals tend to hate me more than most.

And I get it. I really do. I have lots of opinions on lots of things that feel very personal to many people. The way they look, the way they feel and how they should handle everything from kids to depression. I have views on the choices people make, like how to spend cash and how to vote. And even on arbitrary stuff, like the way people navigate Argos stores and stand open-mouthed as their goods descend from the heavens on a mad, 1970s-style conveyor belt.

Its all up for grabs in my world. And unlike most people, who say things in the privacy of their homes to their mum or their mates, or on Facebook to their friends, I say things out loud to a few million people at a time.

This month, in one week alone, 45 million people read or shared my tweets.

This was not my design or plan. It just kind of happened. There was a space in the media market for a woman who spoke like a bloke but understood the mysteries of women. And I filled it. And then got paid to keep filling it.

Id argue that if I were a complete twat, no one would employ me. How could anyone ever work with me if I really was such an utter arse 100 per cent of the time? It would be horrible Id be rude to the team and cruel to the makeup ladies. (Then again, I look at the meteoric rise of James Corden, the biggest cockwomble of the lot, and I see that supreme twattishness is not a barrier to success.)

I prefer to address the twat issue head-on.

When I am booked for a piece of work a talk or a presentation, or the process of getting this book into your bag (for which I am eternally grateful to you, by the way) I schedule the I-am-not-a-twat meeting. This is how my diary looks:

I am not a twat: BBC Radio Festival.

I am not a twat: talk radio.

I am not a twat: political conference.

I am not a twat: BBC Three documentary.

I do other stuff in between these meetings, in case you were wondering. I dont spend my entire day schlepping to appointments proving I am not an utter spunk trumpet. That would be an exercise in futility.

But it is a useful by-product of the casual face-to-face in which people who might have to work alongside me get to see if they can.

I-am-not-a-twat meetings are a way of getting people to see the real me. A person I call me-me.

Once youve spent ten years or so as a monster in peoples minds, their expectations are pretty low. Most prepare to be insulted, I think. They expect me to come in, spit at the waiter, kick a fat kid, tell someone looking vaguely depressed to damn well pull themselves together, and punch a woman wearing leggings in the face for being so lazy.

And I will admit, most of these thoughts do go through my head. (No woman should ever wear leggings as an outfit choice. They are the devils clothes and look universally crap on everyone apart from Elle Macpherson.)

What people actually get is this strange little woman with a big nose and newly bleached blonde hair. A shit Ellen De- Generes seems to be the most common description. Or an over-excitable puppy dog, according to the Evening Standard.

I was once booked to be a speaker at the Annual Radio Festival hosted by the BBC. Its a fairly prestigious kind of event big names get invited to speak, and important people attend. Sensible types, stalwarts of the airways and random big names like Dermot OLeary are booked to entertain or bemuse an audience of left-wing media types who look like they are sucking lemons in the rain at a funeral they didnt want to attend.

Being the BBC equivalent of Ebola, I was only invited to talk thanks to the perfect storm of having my own radio show on LBC, the lady in charge knowing a bit about me from working with Jeremy Vine, and the theme: disruption. From a BBC perspective, apparently, I am as disruptive as a heavy period at a swimming gala.

I booked my I-am-not-a-twat meeting with the brilliant woman who runs the event, whom I came to love for being hugely enthusiastic about everything. Sure enough, ten minutes in she said, You know, youre nothing like I expected.

This is a pretty standard reaction to me. And what it really means is, Holy hell, you arent the utter twat I thought you were.

Its a funny thing: when everyone thinks you are a complete twat, there is only one way their opinions can go. And that is up.

I could probably turn up at meetings and be a bit of a twat and get away with it. Maybe wipe my cutlery with antibacterial wipes. Or tell a crying kid to do one. Because when the starting bar is so low that President Erdoan would be considered highly tolerant, the world is your oyster.

I want this book to be a kind of handbook for life. Much of it will be about the things I have completely stuffed up, and I hope that by sharing my tremendous failings, I can prevent others from repeating my mistakes.

So I feel obliged to say to any young people reading this that the whole I-am-not-a-twat lark is not a course of action I want you to follow. I am not suggesting for one moment you spend your life earning a reputation so maleficent that when people actually meet you they are pleasantly surprised.

This is an insane and hugely inefficient strategy, sort of like letting your child poop on the pavement then having to go around and pick it all up before you can start your day. No one needs that in their lives. You can ensure you are not perceived as the biggest bastard in Britain, or the biggest bitch in Britain and cut out the middle man.

Not that I am suggesting you should make it your aim in life to be nice. Christ on a bike, thats just offensive. Funny, sparky, rude, fabulous, queen yes. Nice no.

My class three teacher, Sister Bede, used to say, Never use the word nice, and I think she had a point. Who wants to be nice? It is one of the least exciting words in the English language. Weve got clunge. Frisson. Bamboozled. Dearth. Bombastic. Rank. And the best some people can manage is nice?

To be completely fair, Sister Bede was anything but nice herself. As with most religious individuals, she was reason enough to run from Jesus as fast as you could and keep on going.

Sister Bede had multiple other issues in addition to her intolerance of the word nice. A life of celibacy wearing only navy blue, with an unsightly head covering, and dodgy beige shoes had made her deeply bitter. She probably endured chronic chafing from excessive vaginal dryness as well. I can only imagine the flaking into those 30 denier tan tights with reinforced gusset.

She made it her special calling to make my life hell.

She used to make me stay in over lunch break and write lines with my right hand to improve me. Even though I was left-handed. I am pretty certain if she had been a Catholic priest, things would have taken a more sinister turn.

Im guessing she did it all in the name of Jesus, or some such piffle. But I say to all nuns (and priests): just because you do it in the name of Jesus doesnt make it right.

If I stabbed a kitten through the eyeball in the name of Jesus, the RSPCA would still prosecute me for kitten cruelty. And rightly so.

Despite accepting her advice to avoid the word nice, you could argue that if half the country already thinks you are an arsehole, you have taken things a bit too far. You can imagine what its like when I rock up to give a talk somewhere, in front of a few hundred people. The twat thing happens there too. People book me to give talks about my life, the economy, capitalism, the state of the nation all sorts of stuff. One of my favourite talks is: We are not all equal, some people are just not worth the effort. It is best performed at universities and other places where leftie liberalism is so pronounced that kids virtually have to murder a Jew on their way into the lecture theatre to prove their anti-Semitic credentials.