Deirdre Kelly, better known to most of us as White Dee, the undisputed star of Channel 4’s Benefits Street, opens the door of her home in Handsworth, Birmingham, resplendent in enormous baby-blue sheepskin slippers. To those who know anything at all about Kelly, the slippers – they’re like two great barges anchored at her ankles – will not come as a surprise; she is not, and never will be, a great one for dressing up. But her tired terraced house just might, given the cash she’s said to have made since her appearance on the controversial series (when she joined Celebrity Big Brother some months later, the tabloids suggested she’d received a £100,000 fee). “Yes, it’s not exactly a mansion, is it?” she says, her face crumpling into laughter. So, Dee, where has all the loot gone? Her voice rises indignantly. “It’s all exaggerated, Rachel. You don’t get paid every time you open your mouth, you know. In any case, hand on heart, I don’t need a big house. I’ve put the money in two bank accounts, so it’ll be there for my children if they ever need it.”
The house in question is 10 minutes from James Turner Street, where a team from Love Productions spent 18 months filming residents, the better to show what life on benefits is really like (or something). It belongs to a friend, who offered it to Kelly when things down the road got too much. “Channel 4 just put our addresses out there. I started getting what I call ‘jail mail’: letters [from prisoners] saying ‘you and me could spend the rest of our lives together’. Yes. Eeew. But it was also really scary. All they had to do was write ‘White Dee’ on the envelope: everyone knew where I was.” She pauses. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes, the fact of having to weigh the fury she feels towards Love Productions and Channel 4 against the fact that their not-so-subtle editing has provided her with an income (she hasn’t received welfare since May). “They lied to us,” she says. “They told us the series would be about community spirit, which we had in spades. We didn’t even know what it was going to be called until three weeks before it went out. Only when we watched it did we realise we’d been stitched up. But how can I knock it now?” She spreads her arms to suggest the vast riches that have unaccountably fallen into her lap, a gesture that’s oddly touching in the context of her spartan living room.
She claims to dislike fame. “I’m a very private, shy person,” she says, somewhat unconvincingly. “The second someone has spotted me – like they did at Toys R Us the other day – the blood rushes to me head. Hand on heart, I still don’t see what the fascination is. I’m a middle-aged woman who’s never done anything amazing in her life.” Still, the fascination is not yet at an end: early next year, Channel 5 will screen a documentary about her, having trailed her ever since she left CBB, and the requests for appearances continue to roll in. “I was asked to switch on the Christmas lights in Stourbridge the other day. But I didn’t do it. I’d been knocked for six by flu.” She’s picky about what she takes on: “The depression [the reason she was on benefits in the first place] hasn’t left me just because there’s money on the table. It’s not to do with money; it’s to do with if it feels right. I don’t want to be standing around in a nightclub every night, which is something I could do [for money] if I wanted.”
She spoke at a fringe meeting on benefit reform at the Conservative party conference because the Tories were the only people who asked her. “Yes, the liberals and Labour have all been very standoffish! But credit to the Tories, I was topical and outspoken and they asked me even though I’ve always been Labour.” How will she vote in May? “I haven’t got a clue. I’m pissed off with them all. I’m sick to the back teeth of the constant squabbling. I’m not a supporter of Ukip, but you don’t see Mr Farage squabbling. I think he’s playing a very clever game, meeting the people. He talks the talk, and he walks the walk.” What did she make of Emily Thornberry’s infamous tweet? “Oh, my goodness. I thought she was being very snobby. This hardworking man with his own business and his St George’s flags, and she thinks it’s hilarious. That’s no way to get voted in.” Does it worry her that she’s been appropriated by the right as a symbol of what our so-called benefits culture does to people? “Well, if that’s true, it has backfired on them, because I’m not a supporter of their policies at all. I back people on benefits to the hilt.”
How will she look back on 2014? “As the craziest year of my life!” The best part was being able to take her family – Caitlin is 17, and studying sport science; Gerard is eight – to Benidorm for a holiday, the first time they’d ever been abroad. The worst part has been learning that people often let you down; she is less trusting now. Has her peculiar and unlikely new role in our national culture – only the other week, she popped up on Andrew Neil’s late-night political show, This Week – made her reassess her life? She’s smart and articulate. Does she wish now, say, that she’d had the chance to go to university? “Hand on heart, no. I wouldn’t change anything about my life. My past is what’s made me.” And what does she plan to do when the circus finally moves on? Because it will, one day. “I do want to be something… but I haven’t got a clue what. I think I’d like to work with school leavers. After all, they’re our future. But I’m not having a makeover [to get a job]. What would be the point? The second I open my mouth, people say: I knew it was you.”
