As Katie Price’s self-appointed team of apologists and supporters, their work over the years has been challenging, to put it mildly.

They’ve shouldered the former glamour model through numerous bankruptcies, drink and substance abuse admissions, countless surgical procedures, dramatic weight loss, nine engagements, four marriages and three messy divorces.

But this latest drama? Well, this could be the one that has them beaten.

Katie’s friends and loved ones, I’m told, have finally had enough.

For according to Katie, her new husband Lee Andrews, a 41-year-old ‘entrepreneur’ of nebulous origin, is currently missing.

Not missing in the conventional – and, some might argue, predictable sense, i.e. having done a runner less than four months after a hasty wedding – but, insists his wife, is the subject of an international manhunt, having been kidnapped by persons, and for reasons, unknown.

According to Katie, she first realised her husband had gone AWOL when he failed to turn up to the couple’s first joint interview on Good Morning Britain, on Tuesday, May 12, leaving the mother-of-five to be quizzed by hosts Susanna Reid and Ed Balls alone.

It later emerged that Andrews – a billionaire businessman or deluded swindler, depending on who you’re talking to – may have been detained by police at the airport when he was trying to leave Dubai, where he’s lived for the past 20 years.

But hours later Katie insisted he’d been kidnapped.

Further intrigue was added this week by former Apprentice contestant Luisa Zissman, who lives in Dubai and is a friend of Andrews. She said in a Facebook post that she’d noticed Andrews’ social media had been active very recently. ‘It does indicate his kidnappers are definitely letting him have access to social media,’ she wrote with some relief.

Katie was quick to react with a social post of her own, though not to express her gratitude that her husband might be safe and well.

‘I have Lee’s Facebook. It’s not him on this, it’s me,’ she said, rather gleefully.

If Katie’s friends and family had had any doubt before, this latest move has convinced them that she is ‘in on the act’ and that the kidnap is, in fact, yet another attention-seeking publicity stunt.

Katie, for her part, denies that Andrews’ disappearance is a ruse. However, I’m told her friends no longer believe a word she says, and label her claims that Interpol is now searching for him as nothing more than ‘a load of b*******’.

‘The kidnap story of him being tied up in the back of a van, it’s all just absolute rubbish and we are not buying it,’ says one friend.

‘Even members of her own family don’t believe her right now. There is no way that Katie doesn’t know where Andrews is.

‘This really is something else. She’s got everyone talking, which is all she ever wants. She’s been doing this for almost 30 years.’

Most wives would be frantic with worry if their husband was missing for 11 days but, say friends, Katie – never a follower of the conventional path – saw an opportunity.

She recently signed a six-figure deal to promote CBD oil – a legal food supplement extracted from cannabis or hemp plants, and used to regulate mood and sleep – which she promotes across her social media platforms.

One week after the alleged kidnapping on May 19, she took to TikTok, on which she has 1.8million followers, to post a surreal video of her lying on her bed, with her hair wrapped in a towel: ‘Wow, what a week I am having. I’ve just had a bath, I really need to relax,’ she said. ‘I have really been relying on my CBD oil.’

The video received nearly 30,000 ‘likes’, but left many bewildered.

‘Girl, this isn’t the time for ads, we need answers,’ wrote one follower.

Another joked: ‘I’m dreading when it’s my turn to marry her.’

Yet her friends and family failed to see the funny side. One described it as a ‘disgusting cheap shot’.

‘Who on earth would do that when their husband is missing?’ said one horrified associate of Katie’s.

Then, on Thursday there was another about-face, when Katie announced on The Katie Price podcast that she was taking a step back from the limelight ‘for her own sanity’.

That didn’t stop her taking to Instagram on Thursday night, however, for one last publicity push – this time offering ‘a 40 per cent discount on all orders with my code Katie40’.

I’m told that Lee’s family, including his mother Trisha – who works as a medium – and sister Kelly are both ‘deeply annoyed and upset’ at Katie, chiefly because she announced he’d been kidnapped without telling them.

Trisha, 61, is said to be seething. Underneath a Facebook post promoting her new psychic show, one fan wrote: ‘Think everyone needs to leave her [Trisha] alone as she’s not responsible for Price’s drama queen antics.’

Trisha responded: ‘Thank you. It’s Katie exploiting, and I get all the backlash.’

Katie stunned everyone in her social circle when she married Andrews at the One and Only Royal Mirage, a hotel on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah Island, in January in what was her fourth wedding.

Her friends and family, meanwhile, were deeply worried. Who was this dashing, young suitor, with the dazzling veneers and mahogany tan who’d swept her off her feet?

Their fears increased when his claims to be a billionaire with a PhD from Cambridge didn’t stack up.

Four months on, still very little is known about Andrews – other than, as revealed by the Daily Mail, that he is the son of a coal miner.

Friends who grew up with Andrews in the small village of Edwinstowe in the edge of Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire, remember him as a lad with big ideas, and a hunger for high living.

‘He didn’t want to stay there,’ says one. ‘He had huge ambitions beyond Edwinstowe. He would dream of having a bigger life, one that is glamorous. He also wanted to be rich.’

Meanwhile, I can reveal that Katie’s son Junior, her second oldest son from her marriage to singer-turned-reality-star Peter Andre, 53, has ‘had enough’ of his mother’s antics.

The 20-year-old, who is described as ‘extremely sensible and levelheaded’, has remained staunchly loyal to his troubled mother. But the events of the last week have really tried his patience, and he is very angry with her, it’s said.

Meanwhile, Katie’s daughter Princess, 18, is apparently slightly calmer about the situation, with those who know her saying: ‘She loves her mum, she always will but of course it’s very hard for her.’

Less sympathetic though is Katie’s first husband Peter.

According to those who know him, Peter doesn’t have a problem so much with Lee Andrews – he has long become inured to the car crash love life of the mother of his oldest children – but is furious at the timing of the drama.

For there is, I’m told, a very upsetting domestic issue playing out within the family right now, which everyone feels should be the real focus of Katie’s attention.

‘There is a lot of anger from people close to her because she has bigger things going on in her life that should be her main priority instead of getting herself caught in the circus that is her marriage.’

As well as the deeply sensitive development, friends tell me that Katie’s mother Amy – who has dedicated her life to looking after her disabled grandson Harvey, now 23 – is ‘very, very poorly’ in hospital with a terminal lung disease, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.

In 2023 she received a life-changing lung transplant but still struggles with her health.

‘Amy is very unwell and where is Katie? She’s making videos and going on the television to defend her husband, you couldn’t make it up,’ says a family friend.

I’m yet to speak to anyone connected to Katie who doesn’t think things are going to end very badly for the star – regardless of what happens with Andrews.

Friends, family and work associates all tell me they think she is far too frail physically and that her mental health is not currently in a good place.

‘You talk to anyone who knows Katie,’ says one pal. ‘There are genuine fears for her health. She won’t stop having surgery. She’s literally one anaesthetic away from death. It’s harrowing but she simply won’t listen.’

Today was Katie’s 48th birthday, and it passed without a mention from her husband. There was, however, more activity on his Instagram, when he appeared to be ‘following’ a glamorous mystery woman, leaving Katie fearful that he’d set his sights on a new target.

More stage management from Katie or a riddle solved? The next instalment in the Katie Price life drama won’t be far off.

But according to friends, it could be one drama too many.