Heather – not just her own worst enemy

Uh-oh. Whenever Heather Mills appears in this magazine we know it can spell trouble. Now Paul Carter’s got his teeth into her…metaphorically only, of course

Brace yourselves readers, but our old friend Heather Mills is at it again, crusading valiantly for us poor, helpless disabled folk on national TV. And I’m not talking about pratting about on that ice-skating programme either.

She wants to make a programme in which celebrities are given “fake” disabilities, and have cameras follow them around.

Mills apparently told that flagship campaigning and current affairs organ, This Morning: “We would get a chef like Gordon Ramsay, blindfold him, and put him in the kitchen for a week.”

Now, I’m not sure about you, but that to me sounds less like a celebrity disability programme and more like some sort of twisted slavery show, where celebrities are held captive in less-traditional locations. Think Keith Harris and Orville in that scary warehouse part of Ikea that nobody understands, or Paul Daniels banged up in an iron maiden on the third floor of Saffron Walden’s multi-storey car park. I’d watch it.

However, I also like the idea of having a chef in my kitchen, but that’s purely to satisfy my own gluttony.

It gets worse though. She also told Eamonn Holmes (yes, yes I know) that she wanted to “get people like you and get you to spend a week in a wheelchair. To see what it’s like to live with a disability. You would have to be looked after and pushed around by your wife”.

Who on earth would want to watch Eamonn Holmes being pushed around in a wheelchair? I know Big Brother has its dull moments but that surely would be a televisual low. And “looked after”? Stone the crows. I don’t need looking after thanks very much Millsy, though you’re welcome to come and push me round for a bit if I can’t be arsed walking home from the pub on a Friday evening.

The biggest problem with the whole thing is that it’s ultimately as futile an exercise as trying to teach karate to a horse. Fun, but pointless.

The very concept sounds like a hideous throwback to 1980s equality training, where actual information useful to people was jettisoned in favour of some bizarre mix of empathy and sympathy. Here’s an idea, Heather. If you want to show the rest of the world what it’s like for disabled people, USE REAL DISABLED PEOPLE. I’d happily demonstrate my chimpanzee-like supermarket shelf-climbing skills. For a few quid obviously.

Disabled people are already aware of whatever difficulties we might face, we live with them every day. And non-disabled people, well, I think most of them had already worked out for themselves that being a blind chef might present unique challenges - it doesn’t take a craggy-faced chef in a blindfold swearing and waving a meat cleaver to teach us that.