The themes for today are pink and horsey. Lined up on stage, primped and nervous, are a half-dozen small girls in pink fleeces appliquéd with sparkly hearts. A pink pitchfork and shovel, pink bridle and pink rosettes on straw bales dress the set. Barbie Mucks Out. Meanwhile a number of small, white, fluffy horses are being wrangled into place, as if life has been breathed into My Little Pony.

The crowd watching this tableau of girlie, pink horsiness is solidly male. Forty tabloid and agency photographers jostle stepladders, hoik up bum-exposing jeans, screw on their largest lens. And suddenly they are off. The fusillade of flashes makes me blink and look away. The little girls squint and recoil. The smallest starts to cry and is quickly extracted from shot. The tiny ponies paw the concrete floor.

But the star, dressed in blue hotpants, polka-dot knee-socks and silver stilettos, keeps her gaze very wide, turning her head incrementally left to right, so every snapper gets a burst of eye contact. A true pro.

Yet still the men bellow and clamour. “Oh, you want a bit of cleavage,” says Katie Price, reality star, living brand, the model formally known as Jordan. “I’m not sure… I’m with kiddies today…” But she unzips her velour hoodie a further inch anyway.

By now the girls are not loving the photocall at all. The lights are head-spinning. I pray no one is epileptic. But Price seems unconcerned. “Smile!” she cries, her own mouth flicking between cover-girl beam and porn-star pout. Then, abruptly, the session is over. “Thanks, fellas,” she says without warmth or, now their shutters are still, even a smile.

Later, while I’m pondering Price’s display of brittle business savvy as she launches her new line in equestrian fashions, I see the little girls file out of her dressing room clutching autographs and shiny tote bags from her KP range. They weren’t models, but the daughters of members of Price’s online fanclub – fee £2 a month – which numbers 10,000 people, 80 per cent of whom are women. The girls are beaming, but the mums are ecstatic. “I just love everything about Katie,” says Lisa Jones, 30, mother of six-year-old Maddison. “She’s a good mum, she works for charity. The way she looks. She’s so honest, she’s a workaholic like me.” Lisa’s sister, Emma Whale, chips in, “I have an autistic daughter. Seeing Katie with Harvey, she shows you can deal with it.”

An hour later, I am introduced to what appears to be a teenage girl, huddled very close to a radiator, cross-legged, eating a big bowl of chips lathered in ketchup. The drag-queen make-up has been wiped off and, encased in a T-shirt, the spherical boobs she served up for the snappers form a solid, almost matronly bosom. Her eyes are wide-set and huge like a fawn’s. The most striking thing about Katie Price is that for a glamour model, her demeanour is neither vampy nor even very feminine. She has a tomboyish, sporty mien. Shaking my hand, she takes a sip from her Diet Coke, politely surpressing a burp, and, as she starts to tell me about her childhood passion for horses, I can imagine her straight away as this tough little kid falling off her mum’s friend’s frisky grey pony. “Whenever we got to a field he would just charge,” she says.

“Terrifying,” adds Price’s mother, Amy, who is sitting by the mirror eating a sandwich.

“Then we got a horse on loan, an 18-year-old 14-hand New Forest pony called Star. He was up the road,” Price goes on. “Then my mum bought me an ex-racehorse, 16 hands 2in.”

Did she join the Pony Club, enter gymkhanas? “My mum wasn’t really into all that for me,” she says.

“No,” says Mum. “For one it was too expensive. And second thing is, it was one of these hierarchies where it looked like you could only compete if you had a certain horsebox…”

“I had like this Third World pony, the ugliest, hairiest, oldest pony.”

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