It was at the baggage reclaim carousel inside Malaga airport I first witnessed the toll Peter Andre had taken on Katie Price. The pain was etched across her face. She was heartbroken at how he had ended their marriage.
‘He dumped me and I don’t know why,’ she told me. It was the summer of 2009, she was 31 and sobbing at the start of what should have been a happy first holiday with her then-new boyfriend martial artist Alex Reid.
Price went on to tell me just how tough the split had been and how she didn’t know if she would ever get over it as he had seemed completely enthralled with her. ‘I loved him so much,’ she said.
Yet, at the time Andre’s PR team were briefing any journalist who would listen that Andre was a ‘great guy’ who had been treated ‘appallingly by his wife’. In short, he was being portrayed as a ‘saint who had put up with Katie for far too long’, according to his camp.
Meanwhile, Price’s friends took a different approach – that she been ‘used’ to boost the singer’s career after they met while appearing on I’m A Celebrity in January 2004.
Andre, then aged 31, had spent almost a decade in the wilderness and those close to Price described him as ‘nothing but a one hit wonder, two if you’re generous’ until his union with her in front of 10 million viewers on the ITV reality show.
Peter Andre and Katie Price during their stint on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here in 2004, where they met and fell in love
Katie Price, right, with her son Harvey and her mother Amy Price during a This Morning interview in 2015
Princess Andre chats to Claire Powell, Peter’s highly ambitious manager, during her ITV show The Princess Diaries
‘Remember who the famous one was,’ added a friend at the time. ‘And she’s the cash cow.’ They also questioned how ‘nice’ Andre actually was.
Katie’s loyal mother Amy Price wrote a book called The Last Word in 2023 where she claimed Andre ‘manipulated’ her daughter to become rich and famous, then left her when he had achieved that.
‘I’ve lived on the sidelines for years, forced to sit back as lie after lie has been printed about my daughter,’ she wrote. ‘Her marriage to this man left her at her lowest ebb and set the scene for further toxic betrothals.
‘He wanted to be rich and famous, and my daughter unwittingly became part of the plan. My daughter is no angel, but she became a sacrificial lamb in a celebrity slaughter the moment she paired up with Peter Andre.’
Price’s mother claims Andre ‘saw an opportunity’ by coupling up with her daughter as his ‘career was in decline’.
She wrote: ‘From the word go, something didn’t feel right about Peter; I had an inkling that he wasn’t who he claimed to be.’ She also claims she had an ‘unusual’ lunch meeting with Andre’s ambitious manager, Claire Powell, while Andre and Price were filming in Australia. Powell suggested she manage Price too, should the two of them get together.
When indeed they did, Price parted ways with her long-time manager Dave Read – the man who had made her millions thanks to her alter ego Jordan – and went with Powell.
‘Claire got her mitts on Katie,’ says one industry source. ‘Katie felt trapped.’
I recall meeting Powell in Blackpool in the summer of 2004, just a few months after Andre and Price got together. Andre was on his comeback music tour and Powell looked rather pleased with herself as she pointed out to me that the venue had sold out. Price, of course, was watching from the sidelines as the dutiful girlfriend.
Soon after, Powell had the couple signed up for their very lucrative ITV2 reality show, Katie & Peter – something that would have been impossible for Andre had Price not been at his side.
Katie Price, Peter Andre, and Katie’s son Harvey in 2009 in Los Angeles. Peter has been accused of mocking Harvey, who is autistic and disabled, some time during the mid-2000s
The fall out between Price, 47, and Andre, 52, who were wed in a £1million ceremony at Highclere Castle in 2005, has been reignited courtesy of their daughter Princess’s reality show The Princess Diaries, which aired two weeks ago on the same network as her parents’ programme.
Price was banned from appearing on the show, and also not invited to Princess’s 18th birthday which featured in the four-part series made by Powell’s company.
Her ban from the show prompted a bitter war of words between Price and Powell, with Andre hitting back with a damning statement. Writing on Instagram, he said: ‘For sixteen years, I have stayed silent in the face of repeated lies from my ex-wife and her family, out of respect for my children and loved ones, but staying silent has been incredibly frustrating. That ends today.
‘The latest comments about my children’s welfare and living arrangements compel me to set the record straight. For well-documented reasons, and for their safety, Junior and Princess came into my care in 2018 and remained with me until they reached adulthood.
‘In 2019, the family courts issued a legally binding order to enforce this arrangement. I have never made this public before, out of respect for my children.
‘Unfortunately there are many more lies and baseless accusations I have yet to address. Those will now be dealt with in the coming months.’
Andre must have thought he had won the PR war. But on Sunday a historic clip, recorded sometime between 2005 to 2009, emerged of him mocking Price’s profoundly disabled son Harvey.
The clip shows Andre likening his stepson, who was seven years old in 2009, to the wheelchair-bound character Andy played by Matt Lucas on the once popular but now increasingly controversial TV comedy series Little Britain. Harvey is seen sitting in a wheelchair, and being asked to say, ‘I want that one’, mimicking the catchphrase from the sketch in an apparent joke about his multiple disabilities.
The resurfaced clips show Peter Andre allegedly mocking Harvey, likening his then-stepson to wheelchair-bound spoof character Andy from Little Britain
Andre then bursts into laughter when Harvey, who suffers from the early brain development disorder septo-optic dysplasia and the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome, mumbles the phrase back at him.
The video shows Andre saying ‘a bit Matt Lucasey, ayy’, before Price walks into the room and defends her son with the words: ‘No he doesn’t, he’s my Harvey’.
Social media users have been quick to label Andre ‘disablist’.
Also circulating the internet is a clip of Andre having a conversation with Junior, his 20-year-old son with Price, when he was a little boy. Andre tells him: ‘If you are a girl, that means you can’t kiss girls.’
Junior replies, ‘You have to kiss boys’, and Andre says: ‘Yes, and we don’t want you to do that.’
Peter Andre and his NHS doctor wife Emily MacDonagh on Loose Women in 2024
Following his split from Price, Andre, now married to NHS doctor Emily MacDonagh who is 16 years his junior, came across as the hard-done by father and claimed to ‘love Harvey like his own’. He also claimed not to use his own children for his own fame.
However, in 2010, Price was forced to hire lawyers to stop him using Harvey in his documentary Peter Andre: My Life.
She ordered shots of the then seven-year-old to be cut from almost three months of fly-on-the-wall footage in the show.
Later that same year, Price was also forced to instruct top divorce lawyer Fiona Shackleton to stop Andre from taking Princess and Junior to Australia for the entire Christmas period. The children were just three and four years old.
One friend of Price’s tells me: ‘It’s undeniable that Peter made a huge amount of cash off the back of Katie and now he’s making out he’s the perfect parent.
‘But imagine if Katie hadn’t signed up to the jungle and met Pete, where would he be now?’
I think we all know the answer to that.