By Allison Pearson

Unstoppable as the Duracell bunny, gobbier than Sharon Osbourne, enjoying the same firm grasp on reality as Mohamed Al Fayed and with more issues than Reader’s Digest, Heather Mills finally announced her divorce settlement of £24.3million with all the shy grace and modesty which we have come to expect of Lady McCartney.

Words fail me. If only they would fail Heather.

Outside the High Court, Mills could have said a dignified thank you, just as her ex-husband did.

But no. She couldn’t resist letting rip about her crusade against the justice system. A system so unfair it had just made this former porn star and pathological liar one of the richest women in Britain.

The poor coppers on duty behind the ranting Heather started to nod off.

On the roof of nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, pigeons slipped into a coma and fell to their deaths as Heather began her 97th sentence without drawing breath.

On and on she moaned. Who says you can’t turn sour grapes into whine?

Paul McCartney had just parted with almost 25 million quid to be shot of this woman.

Worth every penny, Paul, love.

You know what they say: Marry in haste, repent at heather.

Mills is comically oblivious to how she comes across.

In some compartment of that mad fantasist’s brain, she honestly believes she is the big-hearted “Campaigning Girl” raking in alimony to hand it over “to me charities”.

To the rest of us she is the worst kind of Nouveau Celeb - gauche, greedy, self-obsessed and constantly carping about the media while taking out a 999-year lease on the limelight.

Even the judge had to conclude that Ms Mills’s evidence was, ahem, “less than candid”.

How did Heather think it would go down when she moaned that the £35,000-a-year allocated to her daughter would not be enough to fly Beatrice ‘A-Class’?

Puts that little crisis in Darfur into perspective, doesn’t it, pet?

Millions are starving but, for Lady Mucca, hardship is a four-year-old rock princess roughing it in Business.

Besides, thirty-five grand sounds plenty to me.

Enough for a few party frocks and the rest to go on a therapist when the poor kid is old enough to realise what sort of mother she’s been landed with.

Heather may have bagged herself a title, but she never did acquire any class. Chucking water over Fiona Shackleton, Paul’s solicitor, was cheap.

It was also cheap to bitch about the ex-Beatle’s “low offer of 15.8″ (that’s millions, in case you were wondering).

Heather had set her sights on a jawdropping £125 million for an exhausting four years of marriage.

Normally, I am the first person to insist that a divorced wife gets an equal share of the cake. But Heather Mills made a mockery of marriage. She was only two weeks away from her wedding to film-maker Chris Terrill when she announced she was getting together with Paul.

The love for this multi-millionaire was so powerful that, overnight, Lancashire hotpot-loving Heather discovered she had been a vegan all along!

Heather is brilliant at faking it. She could be anything a man wanted her to be. And she saw that what widower Paul wanted her to be was Linda.

No wonder Stella McCartney hated her. Talk about the Wicked Stepmother.

Heather may accuse Fiona Shackleton of behaving in “the worst manner you could imagine”. But it is Heather who is an embarrassment to her sex.

Frankly, I have more respect for Ashley Dupré, who provided escort services to disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer for $1,000 an hour. At least Ashley made her price clear up front and never claimed to be doing it for charity.

As the old joke goes: A gold-digger married the guy for money.

She divorced him for the same reason.

Now, who does that sound like?

… so what is the future for her now?

My guess is she will soon tire of giving away Paul’s money to charity and start missing those big court appearances.

Old patterns may resurface…

2008: Heather appears in the BBC’s new talent show I’d Do Anything, the search to find a Nancy, the tart with the heart, for a new production of Oliver! She pulls out when it becomes clear that the winner doesn’t get to marry multi-millionaire Lord Lloyd-Webber.

2009: After months of failing to get on any U.S. talk shows, Heather suddenly claims her real name is Hayley. She was once a child star and is the daughter of the late Sir John Mills. When the real Hayley Mills makes an angry appearance on TV, Heather admits she may have got herself mixed up with someone else.

2010: Heather holds a Press conference and says that under hypnosis she has remembered driving a white Fiat Uno in Paris on that fateful day.

2012: Heather’s thrown out of the Church of Scientology for being too nutty.

2014: Finally, she finds love! In a private ceremony attended only by close friends, paid employees (they’re the close friends) and Hello! magazine, Heather marries ’soul mate’ Paul Burrell, giving him a special ring.

Two weeks later, she finds it on eBay. Back to court!