by Dan Hodges

Harriet Harman or Katie Price. Who is the most compelling role model?

To us, it’s an easy answer. The glamorous, media savvy stunner was always going to edge out the artist formally known as Jordan. Alex Reid? Tough? Has he ever met Jack Dromey?

Sadly, our view is not shared by the producers of Today. Seasoned BBC journalists are up in arms at news that the retired page 3 empress will guest edit their program. “It is showing a certain contempt for the audience”, said one BBC source. “They are quite a high-brow lot”.

The BBC aristocracy may cringe. But we sneer at our peril. Because whether we like it or not, for a significant proportion of young working class women, Katie Price is their Harriet Harman. Tough. Successful. Empowering.

My wife recently attended a debate on the “Pricey phenomenon”. One contributor described her as “Vichy France with tits”.  Katie Price that is, not my wife.

It’s a great line. But whether we regard Price as an appropriate ambassador for post-feminism, or a Trojan horse in a g-string, is irrelevant. We’re not her market. They are: “Bernadette and Keilly McCrory, 26 and 24 respectively, who think she is “brilliant, just dead down to earth, just a really nice, normal girl”. Ashley Ribair, 22, who says: “She’s just someone you can relate to. She’s been through such a lot but she’s just a real role model in the way she’s dealt with it”. Kayleigh Sansom, 19, who said she’d read her first book “when I was pregnant and was going to be a single mother and I just thought if she can cope, then so can I”.

That’s not some ad blurb. That’s from the Observer: “she inspires the kind of devotion that will inspire nearly 1,000 women to queue in the freezing cold outside Borders in Wallsend on a Wednesday morning in February”.

Katie Price may not be our cup of tea. But her constituency is our constituency. And if we can’t start to connect with her audience, we’re not connecting with our own. (more…)