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Creepy Katie Price holds a mirror to Britain

I don't lose too much sleep over the sordid and trashy life of Katie Price.

I do think she is an appalling example to youngsters who may wish to ape her expensive "glamorous" lifestyle.

Yet now, I am utterly sick of seeing endless stories from "friends of" and "sources close to" on the subject of the latest car crash in her life- in this case the end of yet another of her marriages, just a few months after the vulgar wedding- recorded, naturally, in the gossip sheets and scandal rags after payment of a large fee for the pictures.

However it is not so much her own staggeringly immature and nasty behaviour that disgusts me, but the willingness of the press to regurgitate her press releases on subjects that should be totally private. Katie Price has one overwhelming talent: she attracts huge attention from a certain section of media.

The vulgar, immoral, trashy, callous media.

As another round of "he said/she said" goes around, I am reminded of my school playground. I suppose that is why this horrible woman remains weirdly popular, despite behaving in a way that should have got her totally shunned years ago. She is understandable. She is primitive. She makes public her more base and basic feelings in a way that we recognise. That she seems to possess no other -finer- feelings, in my view kind of disqualifies her as a matter of public interest. Yet time after time, people seem to want to read about her- and the media will provide.

Perhaps I should pity this nasty and mercenary women and her knuckle headed soon-to-be-ex. The vacuous wheels of celebrity are oiled by precisely these slightly tragic stories, so maybe "Jordan" feels that these domestic storms are part of the deal to keep the public interest. No detail, no matter how creepy or sordid, should be kept from the prurient or the merely curious, or maybe the media lose interest and "Jordan" loses her livelihood.

Maybe it says more about us as a society, than it does about Katie Price, that we pay up and pay attention to her and her merry-go-round bedroom antics. Yet I don't think it says anything good that we do this. The values we say we want to instill in the young are those of kindliness, responsibility, perhaps even more old fashioned ideas like self discipline and hard work. Yet what this woman represents is a steely-eyed greed and monumental selfishness- a money for nothing celebrity of astonishing pointlessness.

I concede that her past as a "glamour model" may have left her a very damaged woman. All the more reason, I submit, to avoid casting her as any kind of role model.
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