It is hard to feel much sympathy when one reads that "Jordan" (or Ms Katie Price for our younger readers) "could be on the brink of losing her home due to her continued financial woes", as Jasper Green in The Sun reports. Of course we wish her no ill, but the celebrity spendthrift is doing herself no favours.
Apparently, "the 40-year-old reality star could have as little as two months to find a new place to live if she doesn't work throughout her cash crisis", says Green. Although worth £40m at the peak of her fame, Price now faces huge debts as the result of failed business ventures and tax bills.
She has already had to beg courts for a delay in bankruptcy proceedings and has been reduced to selling off farm equipment and animals from her rural mansion. She is now reliant on "creditors' goodwill to get out of the situation". Indeed, "if at the end of October, they don't accept her plan to get out of this mess, then she'll be declared bankrupt".
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And yet as Price sails "dangerously close to bankruptcy", she has done nothing to curtail her spending habits, says Frances Kindon in the Daily Mirror. She is "haemorrhaging money splashing out a supposed £2,000 a month just to keep the heating on 24/7". She also spends £11,000 a month on staff, including a housekeeper, stable-hand, gardener and two nannies, a hefty £10,000 a month on the mortgage, £1,500 on "twice-weekly manicures and pedicures", £1,000 on "getting her hair done", £800 on "massages every other day", £800 on a make-up artist, £400 on facials and £500 on "age-reversing treatments".
Preening is the day job
But it's hardly surprising Price is unable to curtail her spending her image, and therefore her career, depends on it, as Mark Frith says in The Daily Telegraph. After all, "what is Katie Price without the bling" or "the carefully created tabloid persona"?
Given that her whole appeal is (or rather was) due to the fact that she allows readers to "live vicariously through her and marvel at her confidence and crazy life", cutting back and moving to "the three-bedroom house and practical run around car" is "unthinkable". Overall, it's clear that "the business of being Katie Price works fine when you're on the up, less well on the way down".
Celebrity money-machine stalls
Still, something is going to have to give since she can't rely on the celebrity machine to bail her out any more. Previous "money blips could be handled by a swiftly negotiated big-money celebrity magazine deal". However, that was in the nineties and early noughties, when demand "was far outstripping supply". These days "those magazines don't pay that amount of money any more".
Indeed, even the latest staged photos of her canoodling with her lover in the sea would have earned her "a thousand or two at most". In the end, the story illustrates the importance of planning ahead, since while "virtually all celebrities put something away for the rainy day that will surely come", Katie Price "just kept spending".
Tabloid money loan sharks are still a threat
It is outrageous that so many of the contestants on this year's Love Island TV show availed themselves of cheap cosmetic "procedures" abroad in places such as Turkey, says Rachel Johnson in The Mail on Sunday. There, a butt-lift of the kind that led to the recent death of a 29-year-old woman, costs about £3,000, as opposed to £10,000 in Britain.
The Love Islanders advertised the results to their impressionable young audience. That's more shocking than the fact that size 26 model and campaigner Tess Holliday (pictured) is gracing the cover of October's Cosmo, driving "fat-shamers" into fury. Calm down, dears. She is a big and beautiful woman. The cover is a cool two-fingers up to the twin cults of tyranny (youth and beauty) that can dominate and destroy lives.
For years, so-called "payday lenders" such as Wonga have made the lives of millions a misery, says Labour MP Stella Creasy in The Sun. As Wonga goes into administration, now is not the time to celebrate, but to call for action to make sure no-one else gets hooked by the other legal loan sharks now circling consumers.
Thanks to the crackdown on exploitative payday lending, it's the sharks themselves who are fearing a knock at the door as claims mount over earlier debt-collection practices. Rather than mend their ways, those same companies that offered eye-watering rates of interest are now simply changing the label on their loans to evade the regulators. Wonga may be going under, but unless we act now, sharks are still a threat.
Five of the top seven Leave-voting constituencies that now have a majority of voters in favour of remaining in the European Union, according to some polls, are in the North, says Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror. That may be down to the dawning realisation that when EU funding to the poorest areas dries up after Britain leaves, the Tories won't inject fresh cash.
Between 2007 and 2013, Brussels funded more than 20,000 projects in the North can you see the Tories matching those sums? They couldn't give a flying ferret about the needs of anyone who can't keep them in power. So, if you live in an area where Tory votes are thin on the ground, don't expect many golden leaves to fall. The saddest part is that the people most affected voted for their fate.
