The contract cancellations started to come in the next morning. First the big makeup brands dropped Vic, then some TV shows she was scheduled to present over the summer, then a brand of soap and a building society who were using one of her songs in an ad.
It got worse. Doorstepped by journalists, she swore and shouted and spat. Suddenly it wasn't about her father any more, but about "respect for the elderly", or "the drug-addled generation". She gave a garbled interview to a music magazine in which she seemed to be saying that everyone should cut their parents out of their lives.
The hate mail started to arrive: from estranged children and angry mothers and custody-seeking fathers. Suddenly she didn't even represent herself any more. According to columnists she represented a selfish, acquisitive generation, willing to step on anyone's heads to get what they wanted.
And there were the drugs. More every day now. More photographs of her stumbling out of pubs and clubs, of her vomiting in the street, of her shouting and swearing and falling down drunk. There were details of the extravagant sums she'd spent renovating her house at that mountain near Aix-en-Provence, when her poor father was in such need. Some tabloid called her the most hated woman in Britain. I thought: once we used to save titles like that for child-kidnappers or convicted murderers, now we use it to mean "someone we used to admire, who turned out to be human".
She was caught trying to get on the Eurostar carrying a small bag of cocaine. She received a suspended sentence. Her father, half-forgotten already, popped up on television saying what a terrible disappointment she was to him.
