Most of us probably know by now that Jade Goody, aged 27, is dying of cancer. She has two young sons, aged four and five, and only weeks to live. Let's hope that the people who called her Miss Piggy and an "evil" racist are now wishing they had not done so. They shouldn't have done it in the first place. Personal comments are pointless and nasty, and racist remarks come from ignorance. I don't care if I sound self-righteous. And Goody doesn't care what anyone thinks of her plans. She's probably beyond caring, but I wonder if she ever did - apart from being obviously upset by the race row. How hurt was she by all the snotty, spiteful comments that have been plastered over the papers since she came into public view on Big Brother in 2002? We don't know, because she just brazened her way through it, made a lot of money, and now here she is, her short life nearly over, and as the curtain goes down on her act, many people seem to have changed their mind about her, or are saying they've changed their mind. Now we think she's brave, admirable, salt-of-the-earth, voice of the underdog, a rare working-class person having cancer all over the papers and telly.
She is all those things, and she's also been everything you're not meant to be: overweight, inarticulate, loud, vulgar. She's the only type that some people still feel comfortable taking the mick out of, and many have grabbed at the chance and ganged up like playground bullies. As if she hadn't had enough of that in her childhood - poor, bullied mercilessly at school, with an alcoholic father who died of an overdose in 2005, and a disabled mother, whom she cared for from the age of five.
The media criticism that Goody has endured would probably have been enough to make anyone else crawl under a stone and stay there, but she has just roared through it and turned her life into a success. Yes, definitely a success. She hasn't been consumed and mangled by the media. She's turned it to her advantage. The whole country knows who she is. Without the fame, she would probably still have had the cancer, but nobody would have known, and her children would grow up with little security, comfort, opportunity or education, as well as no mother.
As it is, she's made a fortune, she has two children that she loves, a partner who wants to marry her any minute now, her own perfume brand and ghosted autobiography, and she's proved that despite her difficult background and disadvantages, she's still able to make sensible and valiant decisions about what to do with the end of her life. She's going to have a camera crew trailing round after her recording her last days, her wedding and maybe even her death - and with the help of Max Clifford, this will all hopefully make her truckloads of money.
Sounds ghoulish, but why not? You don't have to look, and Goody has three perfectly good reasons to do it. The money will make sure her children will be comfortable, secure and well educated (she particularly wants them educated); it will keep her busy and take her mind off cancer and death; and she's hoping it will encourage girls and young women to be more aware of cervical cancer, get themselves screened and inoculated, so that they won't have to go through what she's going through. When Kylie Minogue went public with her breast cancer, there was a 40% increase in breast screening after her announcement. Luckily Kylie survived. Jade's warning will be all the more dreadful and may scare many young women into taking better care of themselves. Since she was diagnosed in August 2008, 20% more women across Britain have had cervical smears. Her big blaze of publicity seems to be reaching everyone, from every class, because everyone's goggling at it. Pain and suffering is always more riveting than happiness, and here we have a huge measure of it.
Yesterday Goody was pictured in her wheelchair, pushed by her fiance, on her way to buy her wedding dress at Armani. She wanted to know why God couldn't have given her more time with her boys. "Just enough to hear them laugh a few more times, to see that they're happy, to write them long letters so I can tell them who I was and how much I loved them and remind them about all the things we did together. Because they might forget me. And I can't bear the thought of that." There's nothing at all inarticulate about that. Hopefully that's the bit her two sons will read when they grow up, not all the other vicious bile written about their mother.
She knows some people may not like what she's doing, but when you are as ill as she is, you should be able to do and say what you want, and perhaps it's now time, at last, to leave her alone to do what she wants without making judgments. But I'm going to make one. She's brave, she'll probably have saved lives, and if she had to live part of her life in front of a camera, she couldn't have ended it in a better way.
• This week Michele saw The Victorians, BBC1: "Turned it on late because I didn't imagine it would be so gripping or that Paxman would be so good at history. We even got the recipe for gruel, which might soon come in handy." Michele is reading Henrietta Howard: King's Mistress, Queen's Servant, by Tracy Borman: "Riveting. What a ghastly husband the poor woman had."
