She was a contestant on the third series of the reality show The Apprentice in 2007; following further appearances in the media, she became a columnist for British national newspapers, including The Sun and MailOnline.

[10] Hopkins was permanently suspended from Twitter in June 2020 for what the company described as "violations of our hateful conduct policy",[11][12] but her account was reinstated in November 2023.

[24] Hopkins rejected Sugar's offer of a place in the final episode of the programme, citing problems regarding childcare provision for her daughters, and withdrew from the competition at the end of the penultimate task.

The comments were directed at her fellow contestants, viewers of television shopping channels, maternity leave,[27] fake tans, and overweight people.

Michelle Mone, the founder of lingerie company Ultimo and a guest on the panel, criticised Hopkins, calling her "exceptionally selfish", said she was not to be trusted, and accused her of giving "businesswomen a bad name".

[37][non-primary source needed] In June 2007, Hopkins lost her job at the Met Office, which said she did not meet the required standards to complete her probationary period, and it confirmed that her performance on The Apprentice and confessions about her private life were a factor in her dismissal.

[37] After her appearance on The Apprentice, Hopkins signed two deals to sell her story, one with the News of the World newspaper and the other with EMAP, the company behind Heat and Grazia magazines.

[40] She made a similar claim of hypothetical victory in an interview with Fiona Phillips on the morning of the final Apprentice episode, although Sugar had said that if she had wanted to press on, he would have fired her, whoever she was competing with.

[50] In 2015, she deliberately gained and lost 3 stone (42 lb; 19 kg) over the course of several months, in an attempt to show that obese people can diet successfully.

[55][56] "The snarling facade remained", wrote Fiona Sturges for The Independent in April 2015 after one such broadcast, "but even Hopkins knows when to tone down the panto villain act".

[61][62] Since appearing on The Apprentice, Hopkins has frequently featured in the media for making controversial remarks, being described in The Guardian, HuffPost, and MTV as a "professional troll".

[67] Early in her public career, Hopkins wrote a column for Exeter's Express & Echo newspaper, but her articles ceased after an online poll in October 2007 found 84 per cent of readers wanted the feature to end.

[71] The Daily Telegraph contributor Bryony Gordon wrote in April 2015 that media organisations have "a tipping point here, where the marketing men and women don't want to be associated with reality TV's very own Adolf Hitler.

[75] In a late November 2017 statement from her employers to the Press Gazette, it emerged that Hopkins's Mail contract had not been renewed "by mutual consent".

[78] In her first column on her own Hopkins World outlet, she wrote: "When so many platforms are under the control of the Saudis, tied to fickle commercial advertisers or beholden to special interests and religious lobbyists, it is a real thrill to find a place for us to speak without censorship".

[13] Since appearing on The Apprentice, Hopkins has frequently featured in the media for making controversial remarks, being described in The Guardian, HuffPost, and MTV as a "professional troll".

[105] Criticising the Notting Hill Carnival in 2016, she said: "I don't buy multiculturalism at all", stating that a "London bubble" believed in it and "the liberal left wing press, the BBC, they love it!

[121] On 31 December 2014, police announced they were investigating complaints they had received concerning Hopkins's tweets about Pauline Cafferkey, a Scottish aid worker who was diagnosed with Ebola after returning to the UK from Sierra Leone.

[139][140][141] In November 2015, Peter Herbert, chair of the Society of Black Lawyers, reported Hopkins and The Sun to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

Hopkins was questioned and not charged, and subsequently criticised the police for purportedly criminalising opinion, and stated that she would set up a Society of White Lawyers.

[147][149] When asked by BBC's Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil in a December 2015 interview to name the "swathes" of Britain that are no-go areas for non-Muslims, Hopkins replied that she couldn't for "legal reasons".

Although the tweet was deleted, users of the social media site circulated screenshots of what appeared to be a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.

[154] In August 2016 she urged the London Mayor Sadiq Khan to use water cannon against Black Lives Matter protesters at Heathrow Airport, who had chained themselves to the tarmac of an approach road.

She tweeted, and then deleted, an image of herself with a Defend Europe activist also present in Sicily at the time, a man known as Peter Sweden, initially reported to be an active Holocaust denier.

[170] Ankita Kulkarni of Logically commented that Hopkins "has often negated the effects of climate change or resorted to fearmongering regarding measures aimed to reduce carbon emissions".

[9] Mohammad Tariq Mahmood, his brother and their children were stopped from boarding a Norwegian Air flight from Gatwick to Los Angeles on 15 December 2015.

[183][184] The columns published at the time of the incident falsely claimed that officials were right to stop the family flying to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland because the two men were connected to al-Qaida, and that their stated plans were a "lie".

[182] In a statement from the family's solicitors, Carter-Ruck, they said: "matters are not helped when sensationalist and, frankly, Islamophobic articles such as this are published, and which caused us all a great deal of distress and anxiety.

At the time of her sacking the Australian Government was investigating whether she had violated the conditions of her visa, and both senior ministers and the federal opposition were calling for her to be deported.

After derogatory comments about the appointment of Michelle Mone to the House of Lords, she said: "Frankly, I don't really mind if we seal up the room and gas the lot of them".