One Foot In The Grave?
November 3, 2007
You know how, sometimes, you look at the newspaper stands and think to yourself, “Now, that’s a bad move – and I think that I can see what’s going to happen next”. So it was on Thursday morning, when I stopped off at the newsagents and saw that Heather Mills had been on a grand tour of daytime TV, slating the tabloid press over the amount of negative press that they have been affording her lately. The backlash was, it has to be said, fairly predictable. If there is one thing that the tabloid press, it’s people having a go at the tabloid press in the media (even if the behaviour of the tabloid press has been fairly reprehensible) so, on Thursday morning, the gloves were off. If you were an an alien that had chosen to land your ship in WH Smiths, you could have been forgiven for thinking that you had landed in 18th century Salem. As far as the tabloids were concerned, their work had been done for them – Heather Mills was a mentally unstable and witch, and should be burnt at the stake.
To an extent, Heather Mills is an exercise in how to not run your life – in terms of PR, at least. I don’t know (like everyone else) the details of what did and didn’t happen during her marriage to Paul McCartney, but her combative posture upon confirming that she wanted a divorce was an own goal. Taking such a stance against a national treasure is never going to win you many friends and, in the black vs white, good vs evil world of the tabloid papers, she had done the papers’ work for them, managing to get herself portrayed as a borderline psychotic, money-grabbing, attention-seeking harpy. In the world of the tabloid papers, everyone has to pick their side and choose who they back, and they are (and were always going to be) on McCartney’s side. What I find amazing is that someone, somewhere, failed to stop Heather from thinking that this was somehow a good idea.
Heather Mills is not going to “lose” as a result of divorcing Sir Paul McCartney, and I don’t know what the motivation behind her eccentric behaviour of the last few days is. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t get 50% of his money – she’ll have enough to retire tomorrow and live comfortably for the rest of her life no matter what. I suspect, though, that we haven’t heard the last of this yet.
