Is there a more pitiful par able for our times than Katie Price’ s car crash of a life?

FEW people would emerge from a courthouse jubilant that they had ‘only’ been handed a three-month driving ban and a £1,500 fine.

But by the standards of Katie Price’s car- crash existence, this latest humiliation is indeed a triumph. She said it herself: ‘I thought I was about to get two years.’ A sentiment echoed by many, I suspect, who are revolted at the leniency of her sentence.

For those readers who have avoided the travails of this exglamour model, Price was found — knickerless, naturally — in a state of considerable intoxication on the back seat of her Barbiepink Range Rover last October.

Her boyfriend was in the passenger seat. The driver, she claimed, was a friend of his who had ‘run off’ after an argument.

Despite there being no clear evidence to suggest the presence of this person, and both Price and her boyfriend being reluctant to furnish the police with a name, she was insistent it was not her behind the wheel when the car executed a wonky three-point turn, riding up on the verge and hitting a VW Golf.

As to the fact there were bits of shrubbery and vomit on the outside of the car, that was apparently also nothing to do with her. Nothing whatsoever, occifer, honest.

Even more extraordinary is that she already had a ban — for driving while disqualified and without insurance. Not that she minds. In fact, it seems to have worked to her advantage.

‘I chose to be disqualified for three months because it adds on to my disqualification that I’m already on, which means I get my driving licence back on the 24th of May which means I can go car shopping,’ she says.

The sheer shamelessness of the woman is astonishing. But then what else do you expect?

This is someone who has made a career out of being brazen. She is a poster girl for all that is wrong with our celebrity-obsessed society. She’s proof that, if you have enough front — and Price certainly has a good deal of that — you can get away with almost anything.

The tragedy of Price is that she could have made so much more of her life. She may have looked like just another brainless bimbo, but beneath all that Botox was a sharp business brain. She built up a £45 million empire based around ghostwritten autobiographies and novels, her many reality shows and lucrative fashion and beauty merchandising lines. Not bad for a girl who left school at 16.

There are people with multiple PhDs who could never hope to make that kind of money.

But that’s the heart of the problem. Success such as Price’s is built on sand, a mirage predicated on an ever-decreasing spiral of self-debasement as she is forced to give more and more of herself away in pursuit of ever less.

Not quite A Harlot’s Progress, perhaps; but if William Hogarth were alive today . . .

On one level I can’t help feeling a little sorry for her. At 40, the looks that made her famous are fading fast, not helped by her penchant for drink and drugs.

SHE has three failed marriages under her belt — and two of her five children are living with their father, Peter Andre.

All the money she made seems to have been lost or squandered. Last year, she narrowly avoided being made bankrupt — and her capacity to pull herself out of the mire is dwindling as her behaviour continues to spin out of control as fast as her car.

Perhaps that’s why she seems so jubilant: once again the world’s gaze is upon her, even if it is tinged with horror and opprobrium.

No doubt she will find some tawdry way of capitalising on this latest escapade. But however she justifies her actions — blaming it on the stress of her sick mother, or the challenges of bringing up her disabled son — the truth is that unless she gets to grips with her life and faces up to her failings there is only one end to this tale.

And it’s not a happy one.