Katie Hopkins

It's not a regular occurrence that I foray back in time and dredge up the past.

No, I'm a firm believer in sticking to, and making the most of, the future.

And despite this, I'm still keeping tabs on the love of my life last year, Katie Hopkins from the Apprentice.

I still think she was the most deserving winner and clearly the most intelligent.

On pushing her name through Google this morning I came across an article in which a selection of female writers aired their views on her.

Finally somebody can say what I feel in better words than my own:

Lisa Jardine, academic

I'm a fan of The Apprentice and used to bore my colleagues by telling them how much they could learn from how shrewdly Alan Sugar set tasks, and judged the candidates on their outcomes.

I also have a bit of a crush on Margaret Mountford, Sugar's right-hand woman. She is consistently authoritative and shows the kind of shrewdness, calm, and lack of fuss that distinguishes experienced senior women in the workplace. I just love the air of no-nonsense she exudes, and invariably agree with her ruthlessly to-the-point assessment of the team she has been shadowing.

So, not surprisingly, Katie Hopkins (she is a bit like a younger Margaret) was my favourite from the start in this series - a woman of character who spoke her mind. She could face down the kind of male bullying that often intimidates women in the workplace, and was clearly managing admirably to juggle family and her high-powered job. I would hire her tomorrow, if I could afford her.

I took with a pinch of salt her fellow contestants' complaint that they couldn't decide who was "the real Katie". It seemed to me that they were reacting to her keen sense of how to turn occasions to her advantage, task-wise. In a man that would be called "business acumen"; in Katie it was called "being manipulative".

Sugar's handling of Katie in her final interview was disgraceful. She was bombarded with questions about her children, her willingness to relocate in order to work for him, and whether she was sincerely committed. None of these questions is any longer allowed in respectable interviews.

No wonder she wobbled and decided to stand down from the final - under that kind of pressure I would have done so too. If we were to take it seriously (which I hope we will not), Wednesday's show set back the cause of equality in the workplace and, in particular, senior women's employment prospects by about 20 years.

Deborah Hargreaves, business editor

Katie Hopkins, alpha female - good on you! Katie has become the outspoken star of The Apprentice. This week, in a supreme moment of well-calculated brinkmanship, she bowed out rather than go on to the final. I always suspected her motivation was not a job in Alan Sugar's boardroom. She has her sights set much higher. Her acerbic asides to camera throughout the series appear to have been directed at a wider audience. A media career now beckons. I hope Katie ends up running a big company - an ambition she revealed in last night's show. She also admitted the extent of her ruthlessness. She stole another woman's husband because she wanted him and she rated that an eight out of 10 on the ruthlessness scale. How much further would she go? You don't get to the top in business - or any area of public life for that matter - without being ruthless.

She could certainly get people's backs up. This is why I think she would be good at running a start-up or a small company, either of which requires a powerful personality. Her determination and spirit would be useful in negotiating with bankers and securing financing. She has also shown herself to be extremely versatile, which is important when running your own show.

Many profess to be shocked by Katie's naked ambition. But is that because it is so unusual in a woman? I believe that many women do not get to the top because they are far too nice. Nice is good in one's personal life, but nice people tend to get shafted in business. It is interesting to note that out of the three women running FTSE 100 businesses, two of them - Marjorie Scardino at the publishing group Pearson and Cynthia Carroll at the mining giant Anglo American - are from the US, where it is more acceptable for women to show their go-getting side.

Katie is clearly bright, interesting and outspoken. You can't say that about some of the grey men at the top of British business today. Way to go, girl. I am right behind you.

Lucy Porter, comedian

I have completely changed my mind about Katie. I didn't like her to start with because I had read in the tabloids that she was "a gold-digging home-wrecker". At first glance I thought that meant she tore down houses and looked for buried treasure in the foundations, but it turns out to be much more unpleasantly mundane than that. It just means that she has allegedly slept with married men who are rich.

Despite my earlier disapproval, I now find myself sticking up for Katie. This is partly because I am getting really tired of the current trend for setting up contestants in reality-TV shows as national hate figures. She has had so much stick for being vile and bitchy, when surely that is the whole point of The Apprentice. People in "business" aren't nice.

Katie's only crime is being ruthless and clever. Retiring from the game when she knew she had made the final was a masterstroke - all that publicity and she gets to stay in lovely Exeter rather than move to Brentwood. Yet she has basically been represented as the whore of Babylon in blue eye-shadow. Even the screenwriter Richard Curtis said he wanted to "kill that posh bird" in his Bafta acceptance speech, which seems a bit harsh. And hypocritical when we all know that he lives in a palace made of gold in Notting Hill.

I find it quite refreshing to see any woman on TV saying that she actually wants to work for a living rather than just become a Wag. So let's lay off Katie and all the other reality-TV contestants.

Although what about Emily from Big Brother, eh?

Kira Cochrane, women's editor

Judging Katie Hopkins feels to me like judging a pantomime character or a cartoon. Deep down she must have a soul, or a hint of humanity, but there is something uniquely unknowable about her. She comes across as an entirely self-created being, a triumph of mind over matter, duplicity over emotion, a cold, hard surface, reflecting back whatever she thinks her audience is looking for.

Watching her, I had to pinch myself occasionally as a reminder that I hadn't gone to sleep and woken up in the 1980s. Katie resembles at least three of the decade's biggest icons - the most obvious, of course, being Margaret Thatcher. Like her, Katie is ruthless, tough, unbending, but I suspect even Thatcher would have balked at some of Katie's jibes about her rivals. I can't be the only one who finds it shocking to hear someone wish violent death on another human being, however camp the delivery.

Another icon she recalled was Princess Diana, whose trademark head-tilt and eyelash-flutter Katie regularly adopted. This never seemed genuine when Diana did it, and the effect was the same with Katie - it was so clearly an act of determined flirtation that it was often quite difficult to watch.

Finally, though, as Katie power-walked and power-talked through the interview phase of the programme this week, her muscular shoulders cleaving the air, I realised who she most reminded me of: the Terminator (both the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Patrick versions). Like them, she seems to home in on her prey and take them out cleanly and efficiently (not a surprise, I suppose, since she was trained as a killing machine at Sandhurst). And yet, somehow, despite her cyborgian resolve, I found myself feeling sorry for Katie, wondering what had made her like this (she was reportedly bullied as a child) and what she was really like. It was at that moment I realised that Katie is a woman capable of playing to every audience, however sceptical.