Katie Price, aka Jordan, is a paradox: a surgically enhanced sex kitten whose mostly female fans adore her for being ‘real’. Janice Turner wonders at the ‘common sense’ and force of will that have made her a £30 million fortune

The themes for today are pink and horsey. Lined up on stage, primped and nervous, are a half-dozen small girls in pink fleeces appliquéd with sparkly hearts. A pink pitchfork and shovel, pink bridle and pink rosettes on straw bales dress the set. Barbie Mucks Out. Meanwhile a number of small, white, fluffy horses are being wrangled into place, as if life has been breathed into My Little Pony.

The crowd watching this tableau of girlie, pink horsiness is solidly male. Forty tabloid and agency photographers jostle stepladders, hoik up bum-exposing jeans, screw on their largest lens. And suddenly they are off. The fusillade of flashes makes me blink and look away. The little girls squint and recoil. The smallest starts to cry and is quickly extracted from shot. The tiny ponies paw the concrete floor.

But the star, dressed in blue hotpants, polka-dot knee-socks and silver stilettos, keeps her gaze very wide, turning her head incrementally left to right, so every snapper gets a burst of eye contact. A true pro.

Yet still the men bellow and clamour. “Oh, you want a bit of cleavage,” says Katie Price, reality star, living brand, the model formally known as Jordan. “I’m not sure… I’m with kiddies today…” But she unzips her velour hoodie a further inch anyway.

By now the girls are not loving the photocall at all. The lights are head-spinning. I pray no one is epileptic. But Price seems unconcerned. “Smile!” she cries, her own mouth flicking between cover-girl beam and porn-star pout. Then, abruptly, the session is over. “Thanks, fellas,” she says without warmth or, now their shutters are still, even a smile.

Later, while I’m pondering Price’s display of brittle business savvy as she launches her new line in equestrian fashions, I see the little girls file out of her dressing room clutching autographs and shiny tote bags from her KP range. They weren’t models, but the daughters of members of Price’s online fanclub – fee £2 a month – which numbers 10,000 people, 80 per cent of whom are women. The girls are beaming, but the mums are ecstatic. “I just love everything about Katie,” says Lisa Jones, 30, mother of six-year-old Maddison. “She’s a good mum, she works for charity. The way she looks. She’s so honest, she’s a workaholic like me.” Lisa’s sister, Emma Whale, chips in, “I have an autistic daughter. Seeing Katie with Harvey, she shows you can deal with it.”

An hour later, I am introduced to what appears to be a teenage girl, huddled very close to a radiator, cross-legged, eating a big bowl of chips lathered in ketchup. The drag-queen make-up has been wiped off and, encased in a T-shirt, the spherical boobs she served up for the snappers form a solid, almost matronly bosom. Her eyes are wide-set and huge like a fawn’s. The most striking thing about Katie Price is that for a glamour model, her demeanour is neither vampy nor even very feminine. She has a tomboyish, sporty mien. Shaking my hand, she takes a sip from her Diet Coke, politely surpressing a burp, and, as she starts to tell me about her childhood passion for horses, I can imagine her straight away as this tough little kid falling off her mum’s friend’s frisky grey pony.

“Whenever we got to a field he would just charge,” she says.
“Terrifying,” adds Price’s mother, Amy, who is sitting by the mirror eating a sandwich.
“Then we got a horse on loan, an 18-year-old 14-hand New Forest pony called Star. He was up the road,” Price goes on. “Then my mum bought me an ex-racehorse, 16 hands 2in.”
Did she join the Pony Club, enter gymkhanas? “My mum wasn’t really into all that for me,” she says.

“No,” says Mum. “For one it was too expensive. And second thing is, it was one of these hierarchies where it looked like you could only compete if you had a certain horsebox…”
“I had like this Third World pony, the ugliest, hairiest, oldest pony.”
Amy continues “…and I didn’t want her to be snobby. I just wanted her to enjoy riding.”

It must be something of a two-fingered salute to the county set that Price’s range of blingy riding gear is now sold in the posh Derby House catalogue. Or that she has performed dressage at the Horse of the Year Show, now owns several classy mounts and her own pink, sparkly horsebox. (“It’s ’orrible,” says Mum.) But Price is too breezy and self-assured to be chippy. She is still fuming at being barred from the Cartier polo tournament, even after she’d spent £6,000 on a table.

But that wasn’t horse folk – she has since been invited to Gatcombe Park by Princess Anne – just the stuck-up jewellery company sponsor. A year ago, she expressed her intention to compete in dressage at London 2012, but that has been shelved and when I speculate that if she’d been a rich child, she might have made the Olympic squad, she shrugs: she just loved her riding.

Queen of reality TV
I meet Price the day after Jade Goody has died, leaving her the undisputed queen of reality TV. And Price, who recently slammed Goody for bad taste in selling her cancer battle story, is now cautiously commending her for “making money while she could to make sure her kids are set up”. She adds that Goody’s cervical cancer has prompted her to book a smear “because I’ve never had one”.
“Yes, you have,” says Mum. “But you’re due one.”
Price and Goody shared a similar strand of fame, but little else. While Goody grew up in Inner London in the derelict, drug-addicted, criminal underclass, Price is the product of a hard-grafting, honest and cheerful working-class family from just outside Brighton. Her mother – a good-natured, open woman, who worked in personnel – divorced when Price was three and it is her stepfather Paul, who runs a fencing firm, whom she calls Dad.

The family are clearly close: Amy helps out with Harvey, Price’s son by footballer Dwight Yorke, who was born with septo-optic dysplasia, a condition that means he is autistic and almost blind.
Price’s brother, Dan, who has a business degree, runs her website and finances: “He tells me how much I can spend; he won’t let me buy anything on HP.” Since Price is reportedly worth £30 million, she is unlikely to need to.

Growing up, Price wanted to be a model or a singer. “I always knew I wouldn’t be doing a normal job. I knew I wasn’t normal.” Many 17-year-old girls have gone topless for Page 3, but none has played the tabloids so perfectly. Katie became Jordan, the cartoonish chav princess, loud and lewd with her 32F chest, forever falling out of nightclubs and tiny tops. She made a fortune as the queen of glamour, but attempts to parlay her sexual allure into a broader career failed.

And then in 2004, she took part in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here! where in the Australian rainforest she proved an utterly fearless and, crucially, non-whingeing contestant, chomping down bugs, mucking in at camp and delighting the nation by falling in love with sweet but washed-up Peter Andre. Almost overnight her fan base, which had been 80:20 men to women, reversed.

To many feminists Price manifests a mainstream culture sodden with pornographic values. She has surgically sculpted her body into the ultimate sex toy. That she is beloved by working-class women – her PR, Diana, tells me hundreds queue at her book signings – is baffling. Yet for women lacking education, whose only routes out of financial struggle are their bodies, street smarts and force of will, Katie Price – who admits, “I am thick, but I have common sense” – is a beacon of possibility.

Lately, through Facebook, Price contacted kids from her school, the brainy ones. “And they don’t do nothing!” she says. “Or they work in Tesco’s.” So won’t she care whether her own daughter goes to university? “I still think she should have a good education. Pete wants her to be a nun. I’m like, ‘She’ll be doing Page 3.’ I’m only winding him up. She wouldn’t be allowed. Pete’s family are Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
At this Amy explodes. “She’s repeating everything we ever said! Good education and all that. We went ballistic with her when she did glamour. My son disowned her. He said you’ve ruined the family’s reputation.”

Fans love Price, not for succeeding, but for suffering along the way. From her books we learn she was sexually abused as a child by a stranger, beaten by a boyfriend, had an abortion, a miscarriage, postnatal depression.

Money has not given her airs. To fans she remains one of them, just richer. And most importantly, she is the most prominent mother of a disabled child. Amy tells me how hundreds of desperate parents, having no other source of comfort, write to her daughter for help.

Price talks about Harvey with utter straightforwardness, even amusement in quirks which must be trying to live with. “He’s not a chore,” she says. “He’s my son.” Aged almost 7, he weighs around eight stone. “I still reckon he has Prader-Willi Syndrome [which makes a sufferer eat compulsively],” says Price. “If you put a loaf of bread or a chocolate cake in front of him, he’d eat it all. He doesn’t know when he’s full. Pete is always telling me off for buying him chocolate muffins. But I like to do it.” She smiles. “Every time he gets a cake he sings Happy Birthday to himself.

“And the amount of tellies we’ve gone through. If he doesn’t like what’s on, he gets angry and he’ll throw the TV and break it. He’s very strong. He goes, ‘Oh, broken.’ He doesn’t understand.”

Apart from her mum, when Harvey’s not at his special school, she and Andre look after him. No staff live in. Harvey is expected to be 6ft 4in when fully grown and with his tendency to lash out, they need to get his temper under control. He has a chill-out tent to calm down in when he feels a tantrum coming on.
Does his father, Dwight Yorke, ever see him? “No, because he’s a w*****. Can you put that in The Times?” she says.

Is Yorke ashamed of Harvey’s condition? “I think it is that. He finds it quite hard,” says Amy. “He has another child now,” says Price. “But Harvey is such a fun little kid, you just have to know how to deal with him. I mean, there’s a way you talk to Harvey. It’s like Harvey language.”

She gives me a lecture on her parenting style: she’s big on the naughty step, sends her son Junior to the local village school, regards boarding schools as disgusting, wants to have “at least four more babies” with Andre because she loves newborns though loathes being pregnant.

She tells me what she wants to do for Children in Need. “I’m gonna sing an opera song. Even Pete says I could sing better in opera than in pop. What’s that famous song?” Er, Nessun Dorma? “Yeah.”
“Oh, you won’t be able to sing that!” says Mum.
“Challenge me!” declares Price.

And she will probably do it. Because Price doesn’t seem to care – as most of us do – about aiming high and turning out to be rubbish.

She has the assurance that people don’t love her not because she is good at anything, but because she is Katie. They will watch her and Pete on their reality show – the latest series of which records their recent sojourn in LA – just talking about sex; playing with Harvey and their own kids (Junior, 4, and Princess, almost 2); bickering; shopping; sacking their nanny; eating breakfast. Pictures of their wedding sold to OK! for £2 million. At 30, she has published three autobiographies selling 3.5 million copies. Her name can flog anything: perfume, haircare, fitness DVDs, underwear, pony care manuals.

“I haven’t got an English – whatyoucallit? – literature degree. So of course I’m not going to write a book. But I say how I want it, I speak it into a Dictaphone and then Rebecca [Farnsworth, her ghostwriter] writes it up.
“For example, if I wanted to do a serial killer, I could say something like, ‘I want there to be this girl and she ends up cutting up animals from a young age.’ And she fills in the gaps, for example stuff like, ‘It was April 16th, the sun was out, the daffodils were starting to bloom.’ And then I approve each chapter.”

Talking to Price, I find myself thinking that if her hair wasn’t pulled up so tight in a scrunchie, hardening her face, she’d be stunning. Middle-class sensibilities are offended by her attainment of huge riches for no talent, but also because she violates conventional aesthetics, that female beauty should be soft, natural and understated.