The country-living controversialist has long had it in for cities, but now the Westminster attack has given her the opportunity to hawk her views to a whole new audience on Fox News

Is there any animal, vegetable or mineral less London than Katie Hopkins? There are bits of the Outer Hebrides that have more of the capital to them than Katie, with her dull, self-satirising snobberies and clear sense that the city – perhaps all cities – are a joke in which no one cares to include her.

Needless to say, madam has rushed straight from the traps to put her stamp on the Westminster terror attack, with a gazillion-word Daily Mail thunk-piece on London. Or as Katie has it: “An entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb.” Mmm. It’s like that bit in Mean Girls where the girl makes a histrionic speech in front of the whole school and the guy at the back says: “She doesn’t even go here!?”

“Liberals in London,” Katie also declared, “actually think multiculturalism means we all die together.” Um, you don’t even go here!? YOU LIVE IN DEVON, MATE. I’m not going to say where, because it’s not fair to cause a house price crash (and her exact location may be covered by some sort of Shitness Protection Programme).

Still, even as the police urge caution on the Westminster attack, Katie’s intemperate intervention serves as a reminder that where some people see tragedy, others see tragitunity. “No anger for me this time,” wrote Katie. “No rage like I’ve felt before. No desperate urge to get out there and scream at the idiots who refused to see this coming.”

There was, however, a desperate urge to get booked on Fox News. And since this is a showbusiness column, may I congratulate Katie and her publicist in pulling the gig off this time. Katie seems marginally more frantic to break America than even Robbie Williams once was. The problem is that Over There hardly lacks for its own supply of reactionary wingnuts. And with a protectionist president openly demanding a return to American-made goods and services, a foreign purveyor of discord will only be first choice in rare situations. Katie knows there are only going to be a few times a news producer is going to call her instead of Ann Coulter. The Westminster attack is one of them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ann Coulter: Katie’s greatest rival for US airtime. Photograph: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Consequently, we are in what Katie and her agent may well regard as a golden window. These are the hours and days you need to make count. She wants that phone ringing off the hook. She wants to graduate from Tucker Carlson to helping Sean Hannity talk about anything but Trump and the FBI. Deep down, she wants a Vanity Fair cover saying “The Alt-right Brits Are Coming”, in which she and Nigel Farage are in bed like Patsy and Liam were.

To read Katie Hopkins is to know that she would have disagreed with the Enlightenment if she thought there was a Loose Women appearance in it. She writes like a not-very-bright sixth former trying to ape the prose style of Tony Parsons – no argument, just a portentous moodboard. Her Westminster article reads like a series of Google calendar reminders to herself. “Shots fired. An Asian man rushed to hospital. And I grew colder. And more tiny.”

Here she is on the rest of the country’s relationship with London: “We are taken under the cold water by this heavy right foot in the south, a city of lead …” Oof. Prose of lead. The concrete shoe of no verbs. Too many. Staccato sentences. Passing for gravitas. In fact, having performed a highly scientific linguistic analysis, I can confirm Katie uses fewer active verbs than even Tony Blair or John Keats. Presumably it’s because she really doesn’t have anywhere to go, philosophically. Still, were Katie on hand now, I expect she would retort that what we say is more important than how we say it. In fact, I know she would, because it wasn’t long ago that she said the diametric opposite. “The thing that would hurt me,” she told an interviewer, “is if people suggested that I was bad at writing.”

For now, it falls to her to explain London to the Americans. “Londoners can’t even be honest about these attacks,” she told Fox News. “Because it would mean everything they believed in was false.”

Ah, the false idols of the decadent metropolis! Had Katie spent more than 10 minutes in the World History aisle of Wikipedia, she would know there have always been people who hated cities for what they stood for. The metropolis has at many times served as shorthand for a kind of moral decay and wicked permissiveness that requires (usually forcible) regression.

“This place where monsters lurk and steal lives away in an instant,” thunders Katie of the capital’s wickedness. “For nothing.” Dear, dear – it does all seem rather terminal. I wonder what Katie would do with the failed, corruptive experiment that is London? The Khmer Rouge decided that the only solution was to empty the cities, and send their suspiciously educated denizens to the countryside. Come Katie’s revolution, perhaps Londoners will be forcibly migrated too.

Yes, in a sledgehammer irony that will nonetheless have escaped her, Abu Hopkins detests the liberalism of the city. A serial preacher of hate, she speaks of humans as cockroaches, and of non-military matters in terms of struggle and war. “We stand divided,” she tweeted at Sadiq Khan, “cowed by your religion.” She now seeks to demonise London among her faithful, calling for an end to its degenerate values in the most apocalyptic terms she can muster.

Fortunately – and I hardly need to state this – she will get about as far with such smallness as she will with breaking America. Devon’s loss remains the capital’s gain. For all the tragedies and assaults enfolded into its history, London is a city that will never be so defeated as to have the time to explain itself to Katie Hopkins.