From a mother’s perspective, Jade Goody’s decision to live out her final days in the limelight are totally understandable, says Lucy Richardson.

I DIDN’T think I had much in common with Jade Goody, but her last-ditch attempt to cash in on her fame for her boys had my full support. If I was staring death in the face and had the opportunity to make a fortune to secure my daughter’s future, I would do it too.

To some, she has prostituted her notoriety with a string of tasteless media deals worth a reported £1m chronicling the end of her battle with cervical cancer.

To others, she was the bubbly girl next door who went into a reality television show as a dental nurse and came out as a Cinderella for our time.

I neither loved nor hated Jade Goody; she was tabloid fodder from a new generation of “celebrities” who have become famous for, arguably, doing nothing. It was her role as a mother with which I identified, and why I backed her controversial move to use the media for all she could in the run-up to her death and beyond the grave.

My four-year-old is not much younger than Jade’s second son, and it breaks my heart to think about having to say goodbye to her forever.

Riddled with a terminal disease that spurned aggressive medical intervention, mobilising a media frenzy was one of the few ways she could control her fate.

It is a mother’s natural instinct to protect her young and fighting to guarantee that their financial needs were taken care of was a way of ensuring that she will still have a big input into the lives of Bobby, five, and Freddie, four.

I am convinced that her decision to publicise the end of her life was not a crass ploy to hog the limelight, but a sincere attempt to provide a future for her children the only way she knew how.

After numerous magazine and newspaper headlines, we have had Living with Jade, then Jade: Bride-to- Be, Jade: the Wedding and now a twopart Jade: with Love all screened on satellite channel, Living. Her death, ironically on Mothers’ Day, is being followed later this month with Jade Goody’s Diary: Forever in My Heart, a book detailing the last months of her short life.

SURROUNDING herself with familiar camera crews would have curbed her loneliness and focused her attention on “work” after being given the most terrifying news imaginable, that her cancer was terminal and she had just weeks left to live.

Her sons have been left a visual legacy of their 27-year-old mother which will leave them in no doubt about how much she loved them.

To the rest of us, her legacy in death will polarise opinion as much as it did when she was alive.

Her meteoric rise to fame saw her catapulted into the public arena on Big Brother 3, only to fall from grace on the celebrity version of the same show years later.

Her ignorance endeared her to the public and repulsed it in equal measure. The woman who thought horseradish came from horses caused outrage with 44,000 complaints after verbally abusing Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.

To her fans she was the first reality star to turn her 15 minutes of fame into a career with a string of successful business ventures including a perfume range which outsold fragrances by the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears.

But to her children she will be always be the best mummy in the world and that is how I would want to be remembered too.