Lily Allen on her demons, divorce and laughter

“I actually thought my label would drop me, but they didn’t.”

Lily Allen laughs. She laughs a lot.

All those acerbic, combative comments you see on her Twitter feed? Imagine them with an almighty guffaw at the end – because that’s probably how they were written.

Not that she’s one to shy away from a fight. Her most recent Twitter clash was with Piers Morgan, who called her “reprehensible” for wearing a machine-gun necklace.

“I’ll stop wearing the necklace,” she shot back, “when you apologise for hacking the phones of dead children.”

When Morgan pointed out “that was another newspaper”, Allen reminded him of how he got sacked from the Mirror for publishing hoax photos of the British military.

Later that day, Allen’s upcoming appearance on Good Morning Britain was cancelled.

So what’s the shortest amount of time that’s elapsed between her sending a tweet and her publicist phoning in a panic?

“I don’t think anyone’s ever called me up like that,” she says.

“The people who work with me know me well enough to realise that if they call up and tell me not to do something, I’m going to do more of it.”

So she tweets about Grenfell, the Calais refugee crisis, Brexit… whatever’s on her mind. Allen has a restless personality, and Twitter keeps her occupied.

“That’s me on holiday: Refreshing Twitter, laying into some racists,” she says, laughing again.