Do you think there is life after death?” I ask Jordan, aka Katie Price, beauty, millionaire, author, celebrity. She thinks. She is very practical, this beautiful young woman, and not overly given to speculation.

“Pete thinks so,” she says. That’s Peter André, her beloved husband, the Australian pop singer. “He was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He sometimes goes to meetings. But I think once you’re dead, you’re dead. I mean, coming back as a fly? Why?”

Why, indeed. I can see her coming back as a large-eyed gazelle, perhaps, or, in defence of her children, a fiercely elegant snow leopard, but a fly? No. Some would: they already see her as one, buzzing and provoking, feeding on rubbish, a reminder of “everything that is wrong with society today”, of our shoddy, lookist, celebrity culture, our worship of airbrush, gloss and consumerism: a shape-shifter, a forerunner of some sinister alien invasion where everyone will have 32G boobs one day and 32D the next. Jordan, née Katie Price, has her enemies as well as her millions of devotees.

I have interviewed one or two A-listers in my life. Glenn Close, Jamie Lee Curtis, of loping gait, Catherine Deneuve, so translucent you could hardly see her - all stars of the silver screen. And now I am interviewing Jordan, star of the gossip mags. And what an eager buzz it has created among friends and colleagues, more than for any mere A-lister. “What, Jordan? What’s she like? Has she really deinflated? Will you meet Peter? Do her teeth still hurt? You know the maid has spilt the beans? Did you see the chat show - she outvulgared Graham Norton. Did you know her last novel outsold all last year’s Booker shortlist put together? Surely the death of literature.”

Jordan has produced a third volume of autobiography, called Pushed to the Limit. Hence this interview, though the book is embargoed, so I haven’t been able to read it. But I am given the other two, glossily packaged; on them, a high-coloured Jordan, airbrushed into a shape that no real woman ever was, come-hithering with green eyes. I pick them up with initial distaste, but stay to read them with pleasure. They are surprisingly readable, simple tales, partly ghost-written - she talks, someone else records and embellishes - of straightforward lust and rejected love. Books don’t best-sell for no reason.

The interview is not at her home, alas, but in the local pub, a wasteland of oak beams and horse brasses. The rumours are right - she is no way the Page 3 Jordan of a decade ago: today she is Katie Price from Brighton, looking like any pretty, lively, well-bred girl in blue jeans, a modest bosom well-covered by a plain white T-shirt and only her nails spectacular: long, crimson, curved and dangerous. When she opens her mouth and the original Jordan vernacular comes out, it’s a surprise - one expects the accent of the counties. But no.

“This is a bloody good pub. I come here a lot. Me and Pete, we like the log fire. I’m going to sneeze.” She’s so immediate and full of enthusiasms. This is her real attraction. “I love book tours, really love them. Once, it was all men, now it’s all women. It’s great.”

And someone has done something intelligent but minimal with her face, so it’s more square: like a kitten, and less like a horse than it used to be. She is, after all, a twin, a Gemini: Katie is the flip side of Jordan, and racing ahead of her, sleaze left far behind. A competent businesswoman of 29 years, determined to be independent and provide for her family - there is now a Jordan range of lingerie and haircare products, not to mention the money-making books - a good wife and mother of three, with extra-long legs and a mere D bosom. “I’d like to take them down even more,” she says, looking down to see what’s there. But they look just about right to me.

I remember good things about her. How she suddenly surfaced in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here, with her face covered in insects, eating them live to earn her fellow castaways their dinner. How she fell in love with André, and how her face changed from tough to vulnerable as one watched. I remember the public courtship, culminating in that guileless, Barbie-style, fairy-tale wedding - and how she loves pink, which rules her out of the high-fashion stakes.

“I’m really honest about everything,” she says. “I think that’s the best way to be. People say I’ve got a big mouth, but that’s me.” She is about to sell her old G implants on eBay, for £1m. I must have looked startled. “Someone will buy them,” she says, reassuring me. “There’s always someone.” She adds she has put them in a nice display case. I can see I’m out of touch, that there’s a market even for used artificial body parts, so long as they’re blessed by celebrity. In a world without God, fame does instead. Forget all that nonsense about fate dealing you the cards at birth, and you playing them as best you can. The thing is to alter the cards.

Mind you, Price was dealt a truly remarkable hand at birth. She eats what she wants and stays slim. For lunch, she has shepherd’s pie, peas and spinach, and orders a large glass of milk. She drinks and eats unselfconsciously: a girl with appetites. She is athletic - a horse person - and has a new mount, bought sight-unseen on a whim from an advert in Horse and Hound, her favourite read. Now she needs lessons in dressage. Oh, and in how to fly a helicopter. She wants to be one of the very few women in the country to have a licence.

She seems nervous about Pushed to the Limit; she apologises in case people find it miserable. It’s about her sudden postnatal depression after the birth of Junior, her second baby; Pete with meningitis; a miscarriage, a death in the family - so many bad things happened at once. “I was just crumbling up.” But a real depression - how, why? She’s not a depressed kind of person. Never was.

I explain how the past can catch up with you suddenly, and you can get a kind of emotional rerun of past distresses and it floors you - it’s a notion that hasn’t occurred to her. She nods. So that’s why the man at the Priory kept asking her about her childhood. She seems relieved. At any rate, it’s over now. She is back to normal. “I’m not a depressed person now at all.”

But they did put her on anti-depressants; she still takes a mini dose in case it happens again, though, when Princess was born (the little one, seven months old), everything went smoothly. She has painted Princess’s toenails pink, but not her fingernails - after all, she sucks her fingers. And, yes, Katie wants more babies, and more and more. She can support them, look after them, so why not? We talk about the empty-pram syndrome, maternal craving. “I think you know when you’ve had enough, and I haven’t. I know I haven’t finished with kids yet. Pete’s the same.”

Harvey, the eldest of three from an earlier liaison, was born near-blind and autistic. She knows there are no happy endings, that there is no disguising Harvey’s plight, but there are moments, albeit short-lived, when they can all be happy as a family. She runs herself as a family business. Mother helps with Harvey, she mentors her young sister, Sophie, in the glamour business, and her brother runs her finances. “I say to my mum, ‘Mum, Dan won’t let me have any money,’ and my mum goes, ‘Good, you’re not having any.’ I don’t mind. I’m more of a high-street girl anyway. I don’t really need designer stuff.” She is planning a Katie Price credit card, though. “Pink and girlie. Why not?”

She signs a book for the waiter, a firm, determined signature - Katie Price’s Perfect Ponies, one of a series explaining to little girls how to look after their horses. The series caused near hysteria in some papers, because it was brought out around the same time as her novel, Crystal. The feeling was that Jordan was somehow trying to introduce little girls to the ways of carnality and sin. She wasn’t - she was writing the books she had wanted to read as a child and was trying to sell them. But she doesn’t see anything wrong with carnality and sin in the first place, or a world in which all our children want to be is rich and famous, slim and sexy - probably why she gets so much flak. Besides, for any one individual to be beautiful, young, rich, successful, popular, wholly amoral, have passed no exams and sell books by the million is more than many can endure. It seems so unfair.

Does she mind being a role model? Not at all, she is pleased. “I love it. I’ve come from nothing, and I’ve made something of myself, and I don’t stop. You do have to tell people to be realistic. But I don’t think there is anything that I’ve wanted to do that hasn’t happened yet.”

Her face breaks into a genuine, enchanting smile. So, she thinks she makes a pretty decent role model. I think so, too, as Katie Price, if not Jordan. Self-supporting, hard-working, uncomplaining, cheerful, courageous, a humble girl made good who sticks by her man - himself probably not easy, any more than she is. More than half the girls in this country don’t go to college. They get jobs, have love lives, sex lives, make mistakes, long for a good time and have a hard time getting it. If they want to copy Jordan, wear her fantasy lingerie, buy her hair products, take her advice about sex and horses, read her “searingly honest, unmistakably frank” books, and make her richer still, I reckon they could do a whole lot worse.

She and her attendant, Nicola, are off to buy a new wheelchair for Harvey: a simple one, easy to manage, like the one offered by an over-security-conscious airline on the flight back from Australia. They leave, Katie with her elegant posture, and slim, liposucked thighs: I’ll bet all that remodelling hurt, and also that she never once complained. As she goes, I swear the light dims. She is a new kind of star, a bright comet, losing bits as she flies, perhaps.

Jordan: Pushed to the Limit by Katie Price is published by Century at £18.99. The Spa Decameron by Fay Weldon is published by Quercus, and What Makes Women Happy by Harper Perennial, both at £7.99

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