There is a disturbing website called "When will Jade Goody die.com". You type in the date and time, and if you are correct in predicting when this 27-year-old woman is going to lose her life and leave behind her two young sons, you win a 3G phone.

The content in this site is very critical and abusive towards Jade, and displays sentence after sentence of crude vitriol towards her. They like to stress the point, at the end, that they don't actually want her to die; they just feel she does not deserve a second of the publicity she is getting. They "want her out of our newspapers and off our TV screens as there are more deserving people out there."

How could anyone write such vitriol about a young woman who is dying? Well, Jade has always polarised opinions.

From the day she walked into the Big Brother house as a loud, brash 21-year-old, she was prepared to reveal every single thought and feeling about herself. I remember vividly the moment when I realised that this young girl would do anything for publicity.

One evening in the reality house in 2002 she was playing strip poker with some of the other house mates. She lost hand after hand, and what started as an outrageous game turned into uncomfortable, pathetic, car crash television, with Jade completely naked on the couch, trying to hide her bits with her hands.

Over the nine weeks in the Big Brother house we laughed at her ignorance, but then applauded her unwillingness to hide it. When she told us that she thought East Anglia (or as she pronounced it "East Angular") was somewhere foreign, oh, how we chuckled. Jade somehow brought out the worst in viewers -- smugness, snobbery, disdain, hatred. She also made us warm to her, and as a result of these extreme reactions, stayed in our psyche from that day on.

Jade Cerisa Lorraine Goody was born in 1981 in Bermondsey, London. She and her mother Jackie lived in a run-down estate and she would say a lot of her childhood was taken up with looking after her mother, who after a motorbike accident lost the use of her left arm and the sight in one eye. Her father Andrew left her mother, Jackie, when Jade was was just two years old. He spent time in Wandsworth prison for robbery.

I met Jade a couple of times in London. I had been in Big Brother two years previously to her and we now shared the same agent. I walked into the office one morning and there she was, with her new baby tucked under her arm as she was talking to the PR girl about a tabloid report that was inaccurate and she was asking if they could they do a piece with a rival tabloid?

She was a tough girl, with one thing on her mind -- to make as much money as humanly possible. She wasn't complaining about the intrusion of the press in her life, just that they got the information wrong.

Jade has never said that the press were encroaching on her life; she has been happy to fill the columns of tabloid newspapers and the frames of spin-off reality shows, including her programme on (the ironically named channel) Living TV, Jade.

I have been cynical about Jade over the years. I remember when the race row broke out, in Celebrity Big Brother 2007, in which she referred to her Indian housemate Shilpa Shetty as Shilpa Poppadum. I predicted she would have her own show soon after, travelling around India learning how to make poppadoms, with Ms Shetty.

I'm sorry, but when you saw the lengths Jade would go to for publicity, nothing was too far, too funny, too ridiculous. And hey presto, there was Jade, last year, invited over to India, to be in the Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother, presented by -- you guessed it -- her victim, Shilpa Shetty.

And that's where Jade, and the rest of us, learnt that she had cancer. In the Big Brother house. For the world to hear.

The girl never went away. Every bad decision was turned around and she somehow benefited from it. From her initial performance on Big Brother, through to her public births, finding love, family feuds, and now illness, Jade and the people behind her have all made a fortune from her very simple life.

When the race row was happening, Gordon Brown was in India at the time. He condemned the programme saying he didn't want any type of programme to bring down the reputation of Britain. He was obviously very embarrassed.

Yet just last week, Gordon Brown publicly praised Jade Goody for her handling of her illness, and told us all how we should applaud her. "She has been extremely brave and very, very positive about organising her affairs," he said. He must be referring to the offer by Elton John of his house for the wedding. The girl can even have the prime minister of England change his attitude to the world's most famous reality star.

Jade has made a fortune. But it takes more than one person to achieve that. Actually it takes just one more person to achieve that -- Max Clifford.

When I left the Big Brother house, my partner was in touch with Max Clifford (I never found out who called who) and we were offered £40,000 for a double-page spread in a tabloid paper to reveal all. All being... I'm not too sure. But I was not interested. I didn't feel the need or urge to tell the country all my inner thoughts. And basically, I didn't think my thoughts would be of interest to anyone.

If I had gone down that road, I would have had to continue the revelations, and open up my life for all to view. It makes you feel exposed, and it makes you feel wanted. The monetary rewards might have been good, but I didn't want that life. Jade did. She has felt wanted for the last seven years and that must make her feel good.

It is incredible the effect her cervical cancer has had on young women in the UK and Ireland. It has been reported that testing for younger women in Ireland has increased by 50pc over the last two weeks. I myself, in fact, booked a smear test just yesterday.

Numerous articles have been written about the way in which Jade has publicly shared her illness, her treatment and her imminent death. It brought home to me the absolutely disgraceful turnaround by our Government to stop plans to give the cervical cancer vaccine to young women in this country.

Jade's life has been a modern day fairytale -- rising from the estates of Bermondsey to becoming the talk of the nation. Losing it all and then winning back the hearts of the nation and the money of the tabloids.

But in many of the best-known fairytales, people die. And with our sadness, guilt, dislike and admiration for Jade, we all accept she is going to bow out in the next couple of months.

It is a tragedy for her -- and a compelling story for the millions who will read every word about her last days. Thus she will die in the same way as she lived -- shrouded in the publicity she craves.