BLOG: On 'lower class' names.

By KATE HUNTER

Oh Katie Hopkins. I do love you.

Mainly because you’ve got such a fabulously inoffensive first name. But also because you regularly pop up in my Facebook feed and make me feel I’m not the blinkered stick-in-the-mud I fear becoming.

You will always hold that title, unopposed. Mainly because of interviews like the one below, in which you explain that your handy time-management tips for parents. i.e. Don’t get pally with a kid called Tyler.

In case you don’t have time to watch the whole clip, some of the clanger quotes include… 

“I do judge children by their names … For me, a name is a shortcut of finding out what class that child comes from.”

“I tend to think that children who have intelligent names tend to have fairly intelligent parents and they make much better playdates for my children.”

“It lets me make very quick decisions about whether these are the sort of children I want my children playing with.”

Katie Hopkins tells her kids that Tyler and Charmaine etc will come from unintelligent families and are therefore not worthy of their company. They’d do better to find a child named Victoria with lawyer parents called Richard and Liliana.

I have many flaws as a person and as a parent, but I don’t judge children by their names. I just don’t. I may or may not LIKE certain names, I might not be able to spell, pronounce or understand them, but as long as they’re nice kids (most of the time), I say come on over.

I say to my kids, if you’re going to be choosy about your mates, make it about something more important than names. Like whether or not they support the RSPCA. Or like Taylor Swift.

As far as I know, there is no proven correlation between a kid’s name and his or her intelligence – or potential.

My husband used to joke that to be selected for the Australian cricket team, you needed to be named Bruce, Graham, Ian or Greg. Then wouldn’t you know it? We had a captain called RICKY.

In Queensland, our Attorney General is a gentleman by the name of JARROD Bleijie.

I wonder what the odds would have been, twenty years ago, of a kid called BARACK OBAMA being elected President of the United States Of America? I’m suggesting slim, at best.

I wonder if his daughters Malia and Sacha would be welcome at Katie Hopkins’ for tea? Would their names pass muster? Or would she avoid the awkwardness and call them ‘darling’ as she passed the milk?

I know, I know, Australia and the USA are simply colonies that have done well and don’t really count. Britain is different. But love it or hate it, people are becoming more creative with their kids’ names the world over.

The naming palette is expanding. It’s no longer restricted to inspiration from royalty or the bible. People are playing Boggle with their baby names and having a ball.

Within  a generation, there will be doctors called Silva Sparrow Smith and QCs named Miami Sequoia Anderson and Easterly Breeze Morris. Odds are there will be a British Prime Minister named Tyler. And he (or she) has exactly the same chance of being great – or a dud – if they were William or Margaret.

Jump aboard the crazy-name train, Katie Hopkins. It’s a lot more fun than trying to stop it.

And a lot less lonely for your kids.