Katie Hopkins' 2am apology to the Muslim family she smeared was thoroughly un-British

What remains to be seen is whether the affair will have a sobering effect on Katie Hopkins, whose entire public persona is based not only on an uncanny ability to spew bile unremittingly, but also on the notion that she 'tells it like it is'

‘You want me to apologise for my views? Never,’ Katie Hopkins said in September. She last night apologised (Getty)

Sorry seems to be the hardest word for poor Katie Hopkins, who chose the hour of 2.07am to tweet an apology to a family she had libelled. If this was done in the hope that people might not notice, Hopkins was as mistaken as she was in the articles which led to the apology – the power of the retweet has been proved once again.

The truth perhaps is that no apology from Katie Hopkins is likely to go ignored. Her output has its fans, Donald Trump among them, but it attracts huge amounts of opposition too. An admission of error is a gift to her critics.

Indeed, it is one of the benefits of the digital age that corrections and apologies by media outlets can gain the kind of traction that would never have been possible in pre-internet days. Even when newspapers started to improve the prominence granted to corrections a decade or so ago, a person wronged by the media might still end up feeling that any redress in print was inadequate set against the original transgression. Now, an apology can go viral to such a degree that its placement in a particular location in a newspaper or on a website becomes almost irrelevant. Still, for Hopkins to tweet her sorrow at two in the morning was hardly likely to be met with insouciance.

Hopkins, of course, is no stranger to stirring controversy. This is the woman who described migrants as “cockroaches” in a hateful article for The Sun back in April 2015, and who said she admired the “efficacy” of Ebola.

The apology made by Hopkins and MailOnline in the early hours of Monday concerned two articles published in December last year, in which Hopkins suggested that US officials were right to prevent two Muslim brothers, Mahmood Tariq Mahmood and Mohammed Zahid Mahmood (and nine children) from boarding flights bound for Los Angeles. She suggested the brothers were extremists with links to Al-Qaeda who were lying about their stated reason for wanting to travel to America – a trip to Disneyland. All those allegations, and others concerning other family members, have now been withdrawn. MailOnline has also paid substantial damages, reported to be £150,000, and the family’s legal costs.

Yet what remains to be seen is whether the affair will have a sobering effect on Katie Hopkins, whose entire public persona is based not only on an uncanny ability to spew bile unremittingly, but also on the notion that she “tells it like it is”. In this case, that has been accepted manifestly not to be so. The danger, though, in a time when truth seems to have become an ever more debated commodity is that Hopkins’ supporters simply conclude that Britain’s libel laws are an ass, rather than that Hopkins was talking out of hers. Such is the way of things that those who persecute are the first to turn victim.

In response to previous criticism of her opinions, Hopkins tweeted last September: “You want me to apologise for my views? Never. I am not sorry. I put British people first.” There is a strain here of the kind of yah-boo nationalism which has become all the more prevalent in the past year, which dismisses critics, liberals, elites, experts and minorities with one fell swoop, lumping them together as PC-gone-mad, anti-patriots.

Much of this anti-establishment, “patriotic” sentiment is underpinned by a vague idea of wanting to step off the globalisation treadmill and to revert to an older, simpler time in which “real” British values can once again come to the fore. Yet surely what more British characteristic can there be but the stiff upper lip, sincerely made apology? After all, rigid manners are so much a part of our national stereotype that several leading British actors have made entire careers out of queuing, over-apologising and playing generally decent types.

Katie Hopkins likes to play the patriot. But by her endless attacks on minority groups and by condescending to those she wronged by tweeting an apology while the rest of the UK slept, she appears to embody values which are decidedly un-British.