There was a lingering mystery about the origins of Jade’s cancer. Like many
young women, she carried inside her a latent risk of developing cervical
cancer because of an earlier infection from the sexually transmitted disease
HPV — human papilloma virus. It is a matter of medical fact that the disease
could only be caught from sexual contact, but Jade recalled in her
autobiography catching the disease and having it treated before she began
having consensual sex at the age of 16. That raised the possibility of
something happening to Jade before she became sexually active. Perhaps she
had been abused during this vulnerable period of her life.
Jade used to talk as if her life began when she became famous after winning
Big Brother 3 in 2002. She had come of age in the Big Brother house,
literally, celebrating her 21st birthday there on day 13. She had entered as
a dental nurse from Bermondsey, but was on her way to becoming a tabloid
phenomenon long before she left.
The talent agent John Noel had been connected to Big Brother through his
representation of the host Davina McCall, and early on Noel began to “pick
up” many of the young people emerging from the Big Brother house to enjoy a
brief moment in the celebrity sun. Usually they were quickly forgotten — who
now remembered Craig Phillips, Brian Dowling or Kate Lawler, the successive
winners of the first three series? None of them were quite like Jade; none
were quite as enduring. Yet it was easy to forget how unwelcome Jade had
initially been on the national stage.
Within months of leaving the house, Jade was voted the fourth-worst person in
Britain in a poll for Channel 4, only just behind Tony Blair, Jordan and
Margaret Thatcher. Somehow, Jade rose above the tabloid abuse and endeared
herself to millions of tabloid and celebrity-magazine readers. Her life then
seemed to be a never-ending story to be packaged and sold. Her father is
released from jail (March 2003); her father is back in jail (May 2003);
there is a bidding war for pictures of her first-born son, Bobby (June
2003); Jade and her baby’s father — a young television presenter, Jeff
Brazier — are arrested for drunk driving after arguing in a car (July 2003);
they split up (May 2004); their second child, Freddie, is born (September
2004); and Jade’s father dies in a KFC toilet (August 2005).
She had been barely literate in the early days, could not even read the
figures on her first contract, and had no idea how much it was worth. John
Noel had brought in a tutor to help teach her to read and write. It really
had been that basic, though what she lacked in academic skills she made up
for with native intelligence. And she soon caught on about the money. At
first she had been shocked at her new-found earning power: “ ’Ow much?!” But
soon it was: “Is that all? Can’t they give me a bit more?”
Noel’s agency felt that it had been fair to Jade, and did not always feel
honourably or indeed honestly treated in return. She swore blind to them
that she hadn’t had liposuction when she had, and the agency once briefed
libel lawyers when she denied a tabloid report that she had been having sex
with a professional footballer, before she admitted that it was true after
all. You have to be able to trust your clients in this business. They
suspected Jade was selling stories on the side, too — articles that would
appear about her, apparently with her connivance, without the agency’s
knowledge.
Noel reckoned Jade her earned around £2.5m during her time with him, from Big
Brother 2002 to Celebrity Big Brother 2007, when the bottom dropped out of
the Jade market so suddenly and completely. She had been his agency’s
biggest earner in some of those years, the agency in turn making a tidy
profit in commission.
Nobody I asked seemed quite sure where Jade’s money had actually gone, except
that she was generous, had expensive tastes — a Bermondsey girl in a Bentley
— and was “not very good with money”. She had once hired a baby-sitter, Luke
Rustem, who razored cheques out of her chequebook and stole thousands to
sustain his online gambling addiction (“Jade gutted over chequebook fraud” —
April 2006). Apparently, he had been a friend of her mother’s and, indeed,
the crime — “kiting”: stealing cheques, forging signatures — was something
that Jade’s mother had done while her daughter was a child. Jade was always
looking after her mother, Jackiey, and was endlessly forgiving where she was
concerned. “Jackiey’s bonkers,” said Max Clifford. “Yeah, but lovely
bonkers,” said Max’s colleague in the PR game, Mark Thomas.
Jade might have carried on earning millions, but for her ill-starred decision
to go on Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007, when she had become the
object of national revulsion, after much-publicised on-screen outbursts and
widely perceived racism against the Indian cinema actress Shilpa Shetty. If
you didn’t know better, you might have thought the whole Shilpa Shetty
thing had been orchestrated by Max — he had taken Shilpa on as a
client just before the start of Celebrity Big Brother. She had entered the
house unknown outside the Bollywood audience and, thanks to Jade’s
unpleasant outbursts, had emerged a winner, and, more significantly from
Max’s point of view, far more famous than when she went in.
None of Jade’s friends or colleagues were prepared to concede to me that she
had been racist. In their view, that ugly display of Jade’s in the Celebrity
Big Brother house had been all about class. It was Shilpa Shetty, with her
snooty Indian middle-class airs and graces, and her petty lies and concerns,
winding up the common-or-garden Jade. Jade had black friends. Jade was
mixed-race herself (her late father had been half-Jamaican). How could she
be racist?
Here was one part of Jade’s invective stream from the programme transcript:
“I’m common and I need… I need to go and get elocution lessons because I’m
common? How dare she turn her nose up at me? I’m not one of her pissing
servants. She’s in a house with nine other people, which are normal people.
Jermaine Jackson is a f***ing legend — you don’t hear him talking down to
people. You don’t hear him turning his nose up to people.”
