I’d got to a point where I thought that things were never going to get better
The New York Times did a major profile on her as “Britain’s austerity celebrity” and the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn lampooned her 42p kale pesto pasta and described her experience on benefits as “a lifestyle choice”. Her tales of food-bank Britain caught something of the spirit of the times, a make-do-and-mend heroine for the cut-the-deficit George Osborne years.