KERRY KATONA: Hard-bitten kitten

Kerry Katona is the sort of plucky survivor the English love. Now, in the latest calamity of her short life, she has been the victim of a horrifying burglary at her £1.5 million home in Wilmslow, Cheshire. Three balaclava-wearing burglars surprised her and her second husband, Mark Croft, as they watched a film. A knife was held to her throat as she tried to protect her five-month-old daughter Heidi, while the intruders ransacked the house.

Born in Warrington, Cheshire, to a father she never knew and a suicidal manic-depressive mother, Katona could have succumbed to poverty-stricken victimhood: she contemplated committing suicide at 13. Instead, she has become a rich woman. “I was always determined,” she has said, “to make something of my life.”

Now 26, she spent her formative years in women’s refuges, occasionally being beaten up by some of her mother’s boyfriends but often in care, ricocheting around four sets of foster parents and eight schools. The experience left her adept at making new friends, terribly insecure and desperate to be loved.

At 16 she left school and joined a dance act which toured Europe, where she was spotted and recruited for the girl band Atomic Kitten. Despite accusations – vehemently denied – that she mimed, she had four Top Ten hits with them. She left in 2001 after falling pregnant but also succumbing to depression. In 2002 she married the Westlife singer Brian McFadden, the father of her daughter Molly, in what OK! magazine predictably declared a fairytale wedding at Slane Castle in Ireland. A second daughter, Lilly-Sue, followed.

But it was publicly overcoming terrible homesickness on the TV reality show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! in 2004 that won her lasting public affection and relaunched her career: winning it, she said, was the best thing she had ever done, apart from her babies and marriage.

But more trouble was to follow, as her marriage to McFadden foundered. The man who admitted having sex with a lap dancer on his stag night – for which Katona forgave him – was now rumoured to be seeing Delta Goodrem, an Australian pop singer. A distraught Katona ended up in rehab, fighting against cocaine and alcohol addictions.

Pulling herself up by her bootstraps yet again, she emerged to copious coverage in OK!, for which she now writes a column.

Her publicist, unsurprisingly, is Max Clifford, to whom she found time to talk in the aftermath of the burglary. He was thus able to report that she was distraught, and that it had been “a horrible thing to happen”.

The story of her ordeal, with many inside pages detailing how brave Kerry feared for her baby’s life, will likely be coming soon to a glossy magazine near you.

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