Dani Garavelli: Blazing about Heather

Published on Saturday 26 December 2009 18:55

DING DONG, the witch is not dead.

Just when you thought it was safe to venture out on to the Yellow Brick Road again, news reaches us that Heather Mills, yes, that wicked witch, is to be plonked squarely back on to our TV screens again in the new series of Dancing On Ice. It's enough to have me clicking my ice skates.

It is not that I particularly dislike Mills. To be honest my personal opinions on the woman are similar to my views on macaroons, the new Ford Focus and that little fellow in The Two Ronnies: I can take her or leave her.

You would, however, have to have been living under the Bass Rock for some time now not to be aware that, for a number of folk, the former wife of Paul McCartney has joined the likes of Osama Bin Laden, Pol Pot and Peter Tobin as one of the most reviled people in the country.

Those in the know are sceptical that Mills will successfully rehabilitate her image simply by doing a couple of spirals on a skating rink in a sparkly costume (which is, one imagines, the point of the exercise). Last week PR guru Max Clifford was wheeled out to give his weighty opinion on the matter. "Considering how many times she has tried to win the hearts and minds of the British public and failed it's not going to be easy," he remarked. "The British public have made up their minds."

Have we? I don't remember signing anything. Yet it certainly seems true that Mills has done a sterling job in bringing out the nation's heartless inner Tin Man. Ever since Mills popped into the nation's conscience as McCartney's new girlfriend ("Oh no, what about the late and lovely Linda?" everyone cried) she has been baited, followed, harangued, provoked, lambasted and cajoled to the point of a nervous breakdown, and was finally run out of the country after enduring one vicious headline too many. Don't get me wrong. I am not an apologist for the woman. She clearly has a number of personal issues that have spilled out into her public life in awkward and unseemly ways, and she has a particular knack for saying absolutely the wrong thing at the wrong time, refusing to even acknowledge for one moment that she has perhaps made some decisions in her life that others may not approve of, or understand.

But the last time I checked, Mills hadn't murdered anyone. She was not a rapist, a paedophile, or guilty of inciting racial hatred. She married a man who was older than her, and then she divorced him. Now I might be wrong here, but I'm fairly sure that's something that happens almost every day across Britain.

What concerns me is that for some time now, we have turned hating certain women – and yes, I do mean to use the word "hating", and yes they are nearly always women – into a national sport. A recent poll by Marketing magazine said it all: the top five most loved British celebrities were all men (Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham), while four out of the five most hated were women – Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona.

All four of these women are constantly in the public eye, often through their own choice. Two of them have undergone serious drug problems. Two of them married famous and talented men. One is bipolar. One is an amputee. None of them are Nobel Prize contenders, but none of them has committed genocide either. Why is it that we treat these women – in tabloid headlines, in chatrooms, on blogs, on newspaper website comments, down the pub – with such bile? Mills is perhaps the only person in Britain, other than BNP leader Nick Griffin, about whom it has become shamefully, shockingly acceptable to mock for their disability. A quick Google search brings up vile jokes that leave little to the imagination. It's base and depressing.

When women do kill, of course, this hatred ramps up an extra several notches. The grim fascination with the American student Amanda Knox, who was found guilty earlier this month of the murder of Meredith Kercher, has bordered on the obsessive. Knox's actions were horrific. Yet the fact that she is one of only three people, the other two being men, found guilty of the crime was almost forgotten amidst the hysterical coverage the case received.

But back to Mills & Co. Hating a woman because she is pretty and because she is powerful – no matter whether she chooses to exercise that power over a man, the media or anyone else – is an act of such supreme cowardice that even the cowardly lion would hang his head in shame. We are all entitled to like and dislike whomever we please, of course. But the kind of mob brutality exercised towards Mills over the past few years goes so far beyond casual disdain as to point to something dark and ugly in a nation that still clearly believes that wicked witches exist, rather than accepting that grown men like Paul McCartney should take responsibility for their own actions.

I will not, with bated breath or otherwise, be watching Mills's appearance on Dancing On Ice, and I will do my best to ignore the coverage her no doubt much-ridiculed performance receives. Mills never needed to appear on a second-rate reality TV programme to convince me that she was not the Devil incarnate. When it comes to judging women, we haven't been in Kansas for a very long time.