How DID Britain’s tawdriest reality show star blow £45m?
She was the queen of tacky ladette culture. Now as Katie Price is given three months to stave off bankruptcy ...
HeR motto, she once declared, is: ‘Don’t flash the cash.’ As if to demonstrate that mantra, on Sunday, we were greeted by the decidedly unglamorous sight of Katie Price, glamour model turned businesswoman, pushing a lawnmower over the parched lawn of her Sussex mansion.
How times have changed for the controversial yet entrepreneurial star, formerly known as Jordan, who once boasted, ‘whatever I do turns to gold’.
Because for a woman who somewhat ironically prides herself on not flashing the cash, the permatanned Miss Price certainly seems to have done a cracking job of rattling through the millions she made on the back of what started as a decidedly downmarket career displaying her ‘assets’.
Once reckoned to be worth £45 million, the thrice-married star, who has enthralled fans and disgusted critics in equal measure, was yesterday given 12 weeks to restructure her finances or face bankruptcy. A judge at London’s High Court agreed to put off a hearing while the star, whose ever-colourful private life has taken a tumultuous turn since the demise of her third marriage to stripper Kieran Hayler, tries to reach an agreement with her creditors.
Katie, who recently cavorted in a typically vulgar display on a Thai beach break with her latest beau, 29-year-old fitness trainer Kris Boyson, was not in court.
So what on earth has happened in the life of the self-confessed ‘rich chav’ who is reported to spend several thousand pounds a month maintaining her appearance, with hair extensions, tanning treatments, facials and massages every other day?
A clue may lie in the world of reality television, the kingdom over which she has long presided, setting a depressingly tawdry benchmark for a legion of young wannabes who have followed in her footsteps.
Her latest offering is a fly-onthe-wall series titled My Crazy Life, and showing on satellite channel Quest Red, a far cry from the days when she drew 5.5 million viewers on ITV2. Crazy is one word for it. As well as pouring away a small fortune on inflating, deflating, reinflating (eight breast enhancement surgeries at the last count) her bestknown assets, Katie — who celebrated her 40th birthday earlier this year — has endured a turbulent time in a personal life that’s been as colourful as any work of fiction.
CURRENTLY facing her third bitter divorce battle, the model continues to wrangle with her first husband Peter Andre over their children Junior, 13, and Princess, 11, while her businesses (of which there have been several) have struggled to such an extent that she’s taken to selling her clothes on eBay.
What’s more, Katie is apparently having to accept the crushing reality that her allure is not quite what it was in her nineties heyday.
An ‘Audience with’ tour was scrapped last year after poor ticket sales and a recent appearance was in Halifax at the Acapulco Club: drinks 75p until 11pm, £8.99 for a meetand-greet with the star.
She is said to have resorted to taking cocaine in the wake of the break-up, and her children with Andre live with their father — the Mail has discovered they have been enrolled in a school close to the home he shares with his second wife emily, a doctor, in Surrey.
Refreshingly self-aware, even Katie concedes it’s been a particularly hellish time.
‘ It’s been the worst six months of my whole life,’ she said in a recent interview.
The demise of marriage number three has been a messy affair. It was back in 2014 that Katie told her Twitter followers that Kieran had been cheating with her best friend Jane Pountney.
The couple, who have two children together (Jett, four, and Bunny, three), reconciled and renewed their vows in Barbados in 2016, but more infidelity followed bringing the marriage to an acrimonious end — documented, in carcrash fashion, by TV cameras.
The star’s financial woes, meanwhile, have worsened and she recently admitted to staging lewd paparazzi photographs — a throwback to her Jordan days — on holiday with her latest toyboy lover.
Her once grand £2 million Sussex mansion with 12 acres of land is a shambolic mess, with recent photographs showing a stagnant green swimming pool, an abandoned tennis court and discarded toys littering the front drive.
The house is reportedly on the market and her prized horses have already sold for £7,000 (her famous pink horse box though, is still there), while the llamas that once made up her huge menagerie, costing her tens of thousands of pounds a year to maintain, are on sale for £2,000 a pop.
even the star’s guest host gig on ITV’s Loose Women has been noticeably quiet.
‘This has been coming for years,’ says one well-placed source. ‘She got away with so much for so long for the simple reason that she was prepared to go further than anyone else. nothing was out of bounds, everything had a price.
‘At one point she was knocking out autographs for £7 a pop. She’d actually sit there with a pile of books at home, scribbling away, then blow all the money she made on a new blanket for one of her horses.’
That’s not all. According to recent reports, she splashed out £120,000 on housekeepers, gardeners and nannies, £1,500 on twice-weekly manicure and pedicures and £2,000 on a monthly heating bill.
JUST maintaining the hair extensions that have been her crowning glory for the past 15 years costs £12,000 a year, not to mention Botox (she admits a long- standing obsession at £400 a time).
Lavish expenditure, but all quite maintainable when her career was at its height.
When she fell for singer Peter Andre while appearing on I’m A Celebrity in 2004, the cash register went into overdrive.
She was a single mother to her first child, Harvey, by former Manchester united star Dwight yorke at the time. Having had her first boob job at 18, she was looking to leave her alter- ego Jordan behind and together with Andre she was commercial gold dust.
The duo spawned several reality TV shows, magazine spreads, commercial deals.
Meanwhile, she had her own business interests (she is, it must be said, a doggedly determined businesswoman) — a string of autobiographies and novels (ghostwritten, of course) made her one of Britain’s most successful ‘authors’ with sales of more than £26 million.
underwear, perfume, clothing, magazine columns — you name it, Katie’s put her name to it. And all were a natural progression from the Jordan days, when merchandise included ironing board covers with her bikini top disappearing when the cover got hot.
But the first indication of things turning sour came when she accused Andre on the Graham norton Show of having an affair with their agent Claire Powell. She was forced to pay libel damages to Powell for the claim, which was completely untrue.
By then the marriage was over. Within weeks Katie was engaged to cross-dressing cagefighter Alex Reid, whom she married in Las Vegas. But it was all over within a year, amid more acrimony.
She was dealt another heavy blow after her mother Amy was diagnosed with a terminal lung condition.
Her financial woes escalated. Two divorces, and soon a third, don’t come cheap.
She’s also said to be £100,000 in arrears on her mortgage, with monthly repayments of £10,000. And she admitted bailiffs had visited her home over a £3,000 bill.
At the heart of the latest court hearing is a bill to HMRC, which may or may not relate to her company Jordan Trading Limited, which was put into liquidation in 2017 after Companies House records revealed the business owed £200,000.
Where did it go wrong? A
well-placed observer says Katie, who has always been proud of doing things her way (‘no one’s going to tell me what to do and how to do it’), has fallen prey to the curse of reality TV.
‘I’ve seen it again and again with reality TV stars. And really that’s what Katie is — she was in the first wave of structured reality with those fly- on-the-wall shows she did,’ the source said. ‘It was money for old rope and she thought the tap would never be turned off.
‘But everyone gets old. everyone has a shelf life. Katie made the mistake of thinking she was immune, and she was spending money like it was water. Horses, cars, ridiculous gifts for the men in her life. Unfortunately for her there was a series called The Only way Is essex which blew the lid off her little family business.
‘Suddenly there were a whole load more like her out there, who were younger, better looking and — most importantly of all — cheaper.
‘Katie’s never had a USP [unique selling point]. She just got lucky. So when she was getting people to write books in her name and flogging the sixth autobiography it was all a great laugh.
‘The problem is that when you earn easy money, it’s easy to forget you need to put some aside. when there were all those headlines about her being worth £45 million, she used to love it. She kept spending on the basis that she had assets to fall back on.
‘Then, when the work started to dry up, she was chipping away at the assets. Remortgaging the house. And eventually selling off the family silver. There’s an unfortunate little detail called tax which tends to catch out people like Katie in the end.’
Her representative told the Press Association: ‘Katie is aware of the [bankruptcy] hearing and is working with her advisers to resolve her financial issues. She hopes to be in a position to do so and reach agreement with her creditors.’
For her part, Katie has always insisted she’s ‘ not flash’ and the sheer determination with which she has assailed the heights having embarked on a modelling career as a 16- year- old would suggest that writing her off as a fading reality television star may be a little premature.
‘when you come from a background of no money, there is always part of you that thinks you could go back to that place,’ she said in 2012. ‘I like to think I’m generous, but not stupid, with money.’
She said much the same two years later: ‘I have a nice house, but my money goes on my kids, holidays and into the business.
‘You have to know your worth, too. It’s why I wouldn’t advise anyone to be a model any more because the money has all gone. And then you have to keep reinventing yourself.’
Given all the many faces we’ve seen of Katie Price so far, perhaps there is another reinvention just around the corner.