I was at a party on Wednesday night, talking to a writer friend who has impeccable feminist credentials. The subject of the BBC show The Apprentice inevitably came up. “I really like Katie,” she said. “Why on earth does everyone hate her so much?” She looked at me, genuinely puzzled. I looked back at her, with my mouth slightly open, amazed.

This is the woman – Katie Hopkins, not my friend – who, when reminded that on her CV she’d answered the question “Have you ever lied or cheated to get what you want?” with “Yes, to get someone else’s husband because I wanted him”, nodded enthusiastically and looked immensely pleased with herself.

Whether this was because she felt bringing her sex life into an interview was an ingenious and dazzling masterstroke – easy, tiger – or whether it was because she felt that nicking people’s husbands was a stupendous achievement, is not clear.

I strongly suspect that, like so many self-styled “bitches”, she was incredibly unpopular at school and is spending her adult life showing she can get one over on women who weren’t – which would make her transparently needy and faintly tragic, rather than brilliantly go-getting and ruthless, but which would explain a number of things about her, not least the fact that she broke up three marriages.

Oddly, Katie, who has two young children, is single. In her book that probably makes her too hot to handle. In anyone else’s it tells you quite a lot.

Either way, there’s no denying that Hopkins made brilliant television until her self-sacking last week. (For those of you who don’t know, she was offered a place in the final and asked by Alan Sugar whether she was genuine about wanting to work for him; there has always been a suspicion that Hopkins, who already has a £90,000-a-year job, hungered for fame and a showcase for her talents, rather than a job at Amstrad). It would, he explained – with more insistence than an equal opportunities lawyer might be entirely comfortable with – mean uprooting her family from Devon to Essex. Fine, she said.

But it wasn’t. Within a few minutes Katie had changed her mind. She explained that her childcare arrangements were not in place and excused herself from the competition. This was weird: surely if you go on a television programme that lasts 12 weeks and has the possibility of a job at the end of it, you sort the childcare first? But anyway, Katie was out, and although there was much whooping nationally it’s undeniable that, monstrous as she is, she did deserve her place in the final: nobody gets a job in business because they’re a lovely human being.

The problem with Katie is that she is immensely dislikeable for an almost infinite number of reasons. But she is also intelligent, articulate, quick, determined, outspoken, supremely confident and, above all, unafraid.

All of these things presumably endeared her to my feminist friend, and in isolation they are indeed impressive attributes. They are also why everybody has been talking about Katie for the past 11 weeks: women, in particular, felt they ought to be on her side but were mostly massively put off every time she flirted – gruesomely – with Sugar, got it on briefly with a chinless Hooray (a fellow contestant), derided the north and its inhabitants, mocked people who buy things from TV shopping channels, sneered at stay-at-home mothers, and was vile about the other contestants.

Her fascination also lay in her absolutely unreconstructed 1980s world view: lunch is for wimps, Sloanes roam the earth, turning up your collar is super-stylish, blue eyeshadow is sexy, never met a bloke I couldn’t have, glass ceiling here I come: I will smash you by pretending I’m a man, etc.

It was utterly cringe-making to watch, but it worked: she was offered a place in the final and would probably have won the whole show. And she’s the contestant people will be discussing long after the real Apprentice is announced. So in a way she’s a winner, but a winner most people despise.

And, of course, she’s a woman: the best woman for the job. That’s a pretty uncomfortable thought in 2007, because it would suggest that really employable women are unsisterly bitches who lie through their teeth, back-stab like a pro, and look like they’d always sleep with the boss if it even hinted at the possibility of advancement.

It’s not pretty, but it’s one way of getting ahead, and I think we all know at least one woman just like this – they seem to model themselves on heroines of 1980s bonkbusters, as if those fictions were in fact a mixture of reportage and lifestyle manual – and you’ve probably worked for one. I know I have (more than once), which is why the idea of sisterhood in the workplace is such an adorably deluded notion.

The truth is that most women are horrible to work for, in the opinion of most of the women I know who work in offices. Men aren’t bitches; women are. Men don’t stitch you up; women do.

It’s extremely depressing and it pains me to say it, but it happens to be true. Katie Hopkins worked that one out long ago and played it to her advantage by dismissing them all as irrelevant. She turned herself into the biggest bitch of all – impossible to out-bitch – and although you wonder whether she has any friends, there’s no denying it has worked for her on the professional front.

So what are we to make of her, apart from mincemeat? Tenacious, fearless heroine, or an embarrassment to her sex? A bit of both, I think. Everything about her story, from her clothes to her manner, is like entering a timewarp: she’s a depressing reminder that, in business, nice girls still finish last.

But I almost felt sorry for her last week – almost – when, in appropriately retro style, what put paid to her hopes (if she ever genuinely held them) of working for Sugar was her gender and the fact that she had young children, whom she clearly cared about enough not to want to uproot them for the sake of her career.

The other woman finalist, Kristina Grimes, made a great point of explaining that her child was now an adult, at university and out of her hair. In 2007, on a show watched by millions, the message is still that if women will be tiresome enough to want to reproduce, it’s going to scupper their chances of professional success. And that is even more depressing than the fact that women like Katie Hopkins exist.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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