Do please don your evening gloves, and we’ll take up exhibit A: a leaflet created by Katie Hopkins to drum up business for her Stand Strong School Tour. I know! Can’t believe she’s not on the lucrative North American lecture circuit yet. After all, her every utterance is a come-and-get-me plea to the US that may be parsed as the inquiry: “What’s Ann Coulter asking? I’ll do it for a 10th of that and I bring my own porta-podium.”

To be honest, I’d been wondering what Katie was going to fill her time with after being ditched by LBC radio for that misunderstanding over her calling for a “final solution”. Obviously, she’s been fortunate with the spate of terrorist attacks, which have permitted her to wheel out her one article at each opportunity. If you’re not familiar with its template, it’s a staccato-sentenced, near-verbless quaver about how cold and tiny and terrified she is, and what moral failures people just getting on with life in spite of it all are.

Incidentally, the question has to be asked: is there anyone in the UK as reliably terrorised by terrorism as Katie? I mean, it REALLY works on her. It’s a good job she was invalided out of the army before ever being deployed, or she’d be running away from the fight somewhere it actually mattered. As it is, she is absolutely crapping herself down there in her rose-covered house in Devon. Katie is like the optimal test case for this stuff – you wouldn’t be surprised if they hand out her column in the terrorist training camps in Syria, as a reminder that the curriculum really does make a difference.

Anyhow, back to her latest venture: a proposed tour of schools, where she will speak to 14- to 16-year-olds about owning their own opinions. “Opinions are never right or wrong,” runs an early blooper that could be demolished by someone in year 3, which is perhaps why the tiddlies are denied the chance to apply. But before we go on, let’s take a closer look at the flyer’s design.

I love that Katie has literally gone for magenta and cyan on black – exactly the colours this leaflet would be if it fluttered by in a scene-setting shot at the start of a Paul Verhoeven movie. That’s essentially what we’re dealing with here – a quick, glib visual device that screams “near-future dystopia”, and then lets you get on with the business of coming up with ways for Denise Richards to shed some of her body armour.

“Katie Hopkins School Tour” is basically the equivalent of “robot police officers” or “Chief Justice Jeremy Kyle”. It says: we’re 20 minutes into the future here, and – species-wise – we’ve taken a few wrong turns. Yes, there are hoverboards, but students are using them to commute to the University of Vernon Kay.

Anyway, back to the nascent franchise on which we’ll slap the working title The Educator. Katie is currently punting this leaflet on social media, and asking her followers to push their kids’ schools to invite her in. According to her replies, several have already asked their head teachers. To this end, she has prepared a putative one-hour session with five case studies. They are: 1) Real News, where the case study is the leave and remain campaigns; 2) The Politics of Emotion, where the case study is the election of Donald Trump; 3) The Politics of Identity (case study: the Clinton campaign); 4) The Politics of Protest (case studies include the Woman’s March [sic], The Exclusion of Pro-Israeli’s [sic] from Pride, and Black Lives Matter); and 5) So You’ve Been Shamed. Case study: that Minnesotan dentist who offed Cecil the Lion.

To which the only reasonable response is: can we have double maths and the birch instead?

Clearly, what’s really happening here is that Katie has decided to vertically integrate her business operation. This way, instead of having to wait for someone else to produce a “free speech” row she can wet her pants about, she is essentially her own supplier. Right now, she’s getting people to ask their children’s school if she can come and address them; in a fortnight or so she will be releasing details of the schools she’ll say have “blocked her appearing” because they can’t handle her truth-speaking. I suppose it keeps her busy, but God knows she won’t rest till she has been no-platformed by a soft-play area.

In fact, the schools will most likely turn down the opportunity for a perfectly good reason: eg being a bit busy, or on grounds of quality control. Because – let’s face it – Katie’s not all that bright. Either way, those head teachers thinking they might take the liberty of declining are reminded: for a self-styled libertarian, Katie herself couldn’t be more of nanny state interventionist on some matters. She can’t even cope with her children playing with children with the wrong sort of names.

As she explained to This Morning in one notable appearance: “For me, a name is a shortcut of finding out what class a child comes from and makes me ask: Do I want my children to play with them? … It’s the Tylers, the Charmains the Chantelles, the Chardonnays. There’s a whole set of things that go with children like that, who are quite a disruptive influence in school, and that’s why I don’t like those kind of children. I tend to think that children who have intelligent names tend to have fairly intelligent parents and they make much better playdates for my children. We are really time short in this world and we need shortcuts to make decisions. It’s very effective.” No opinions are wrong, but some names are. What a mind!

For what it’s worth, I think Key Stage 4 kids could make light work of madam. Never underestimate the power of children to derail a cakewalk. For instance, back in the noughties, Tony Blair was interviewed by Little Ant and Dec – the kids who played junior versions of the big stars of Saturday Night Takeaway – and they weren’t half the pushover he had imagined. (By way of a historical reminder: Tony Blair didn’t like the mainstream media, who he thought were relentlessly and unfairly negative about him. He wanted to bypass them to connect with the silent majority – who he knew were on-board with his ideas – via other, more modern sources. I always thought he had a bit of a messiah complex, myself, but those around him went nuts if you said so. Crazy days.)

Then, of course, there was Norris McWhirter, the Record Breakers boffin who founded The Guinness Book of Records, knew every record off the top of his head, and had a sideline in being frothingly rightwing. It was with this material that he used to tour schools. When I was growing up, there was a possibly apocryphal story about one of these visits, and we’ll play out with it, all the while imagining the equivalent instance of teen justice being served on Katie should she enter any school’s lecture hall. Norris was said to have given his standard and fairly eye-watering political address, in his capacity as the founder of what became the National Association for Freedom. Finally coming to the end of it, he waited for the faltering applause, before asking the slightly stunned audience if they had any questions.

“Yeah,” drawled one pupil. “What’s the biggest fish?”