Katie Hopkins humiliated by mass walkout at Brunel university

Students at London’s Brunel University staged a mass walkout during a speech by controversial right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins.

The university lecture hall was packed ahead of Hopkins’ address. As she made her opening comments, however, students stood and turned their backs on her before filing out in protest.

The debate had been due to discuss whether or not the welfare state still had a place in Britain, and was being held to mark the university’s 50th anniversary.

“It was mainly that we didn’t feel that she fitted the debate and she wasn’t the right person to be speaking,” Joe Nicell, Brunel Students’ Union communications manager, told the Independent.

Nicell said the protest had been planned for some time after students first raised objections in October.

Speaking to the paper, Brunel Students’ Union President Ali Milani called Hopkins the “physical manifestation of online trolls” who offered no “valuable intellectual insight” to the discussion.

“The inclusion of Ms Hopkins has been met with widespread outcry from the student body and the Students’ Union,” Milani said.

In one of her most controversial recent tirades, Hopkins was roundly criticized for calling refugees “cockroaches” in a column for the Sun newspaper in September.

“No, I don’t care,” she wrote. “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”

Some of her other hits include proposing the House of Lords be gassed, saying holidaymakers stranded in Egypt following the Sinai air crash were “betting their family’s lives on cheap tan” and suggesting “euthanasia vans” might be the answer to Britain’s ageing population.