I’m beginning to wonder whether Amy Winehouse’s father is more interested in fame than he is in his daughter. Rarely does a week go by without Mitch Winehouse popping up somewhere in the media: in-depth interviews on Sky News, guest presenter slots on BBC radio, and countless exclusive interviews with the tabloids and magazines. As I explain in my biography of Amy, taxi driver Mitch – whose mother dated Ronnie Scott – is an amateur singer who as a young man dreamt of fame himself. Well, over the last year he has certainly begun to taste it, and now there are reports that he is trying to break into acting on the big screen.

As well as his love of the limelight, could it also be a nagging guilt that is driving Mitch to behave this way? In her smash hit song Rehab, Amy sings: “My Daddy thinks I’m fine” to explain why she didn’t check into rehab in 2006. Since then her life has spiraled into overdoses, punch-ups, arrests and dramatic late-night hospital visits. Far from immediately admitting his colossal misjudgement, Mitch backed it up, saying: “Her previous management company said she should go to rehab but she didn’t think she needed to, and I agreed.” Rehab isn’t the only time Amy has sung about her Dad. She says that her song about rubbish guys called What Is It About Men is about “all the shit” her unfaithful father put her mother through.

Mitch is fast becoming as familiar name as his daughter and in itself this is harmless enough. But he seems entirely unaware of the walloping great contradiction between his complaints about press intrusion, and his tireless quest for more media spots to make headline-grabbing announcements and continue his very public squabbling with Blake Fielder-Civil’s parents.

More importantly, while he chases fame, his daughter staggers from disaster to disaster, seeming to all the world a woman without anyone looking after her.

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