There’s a moment in every Greek tragedy where the main character suddenly realises things have, to use WAG parlance, gone totally tits up.
Oedipus, for example, on realising he’s killed his dad and slept with his mother.
I think Rebekah Vardy, wife of footballer Jamie, might have had a flicker of this horrific revelation on Thursday, when she realised, two and a half years after the rest of us, the deleterious, hubristic folly and personal cost of dragging fellow WAG Coleen Rooney to court.
Not only because of the millions both parties have spent on this libel case, nor the screaming embarrassment of the whole world raking through your boneheaded WhatsApp messages ("I swear she better not c*** me off … that’s falling out material"). But the fact that even if she wins, she has still, really, lost. All that terrific effort to be someone – gone. And to think it all began as part of a misguided attempt to secure “positive coverage”.
At 3pm in London’s Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday, Vardy put her face down on the witness stand and sobbed.
The Wagatha Christie trial is the mother of all “yeah-but, no-but” Vicky Pollard arguments. It is fish lips at dawn. It is “falling out material” carried to nuclear extremes, a dispute about gossip in which no great principle is decided, no great truth is revealed, no lesson learnt, unless you count “don’t use social media” or “don’t pick fights you can’t finish”, and it is utterly engrossing.
It began on Tuesday morning with Vardy’s lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson QC, a gentle sheep of a man, warning us: “There is going to be very little legal argument in this case.” I’ll say.
For four days this week, sitting feet from Wayne, Coleen and Rebekah in Court 13, a twee chocolate box of a courtroom with top notes of death penalty, I watched him and Rooney’s barrister, David Sherborne QC thrash out matters such as the significance of Danielle Lloyd’s holiday to the Maldives in 2019, whether it was Lloyd or Coleen or someone else Vardy had called a “nasty bitch”, and why Coleen was “buzzin” after she wrecked her Honda.
“I’m not snobby,” said Coleen uncertainly, “It wasn’t because it wasn’t a nice car.” It … was.
Sherborne, in particular, enjoyed mining the detail, asking Vardy why she called Peter Andre’s penis a “chipolata” in an interview after a fling. ("It was something I was forced to say.")
We spent at least a half an hour contemplating the true impact of what Vardy meant when she texted her infamous agent and former co-witness, Caroline Watt, that the “lads are fewmin” following a sudden drama around a Leicester player not turning up for training – gossip that ended up in the papers.
And then there was the anger over photoshoots. Why was the despicable Vardy so happy doing pre-arranged pap shots outside a maternity hospital in Leicester just after she had given birth? Was it because she was a chipolata-shaming, fame-hungry attention-seeker? Why wasn’t she sitting down at home giving her interviews like a lady?
“I’m not too sure I was in any position to sit down,” sassed Vardy.
To say Vardy couldn’t be more different from Rooney is to try and compare a cut-out bikini to an all-in-one hooded kaftan. The only thing that unites them is a searing, world-destroying obsession with how people see them.
Vardy arrived at the start of the case dressed, essentially, like a cat burglar: sleek hair, arch body con, pointed black jackets, her solicitor piling up the files on the desk around her to make a fort so the Rooneys couldn’t see her notes as per in middle school. On Friday, her wardrobe was Clytemnestra via the Midlands, with a hint of Victorian riding accident.
Rooney, by contrast, wore whatever Kate Middleton chucked off yesterday. She is small, startlingly pretty and from the moment she arrived with Wayne in tow it was obvious she was very, very angry.
“I don’t want to be in this court today, I didn’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, but Mrs Vardy has brought me here,” she said in an initially nervy cross-questioning on Friday. She explained that when it had dawned on her that someone was leaking “private information” after looking at her Instagram account, she was “fuming”, much like the lads.
She made the matter public out of rage at the fact that someone she trusted had been leaking stories to “this scum of a paper”. But as Vardy’s agent put it in her WhatsApps: “It wasn’t someone she trusted – it was me”.
This case turns on whether Rooney can prove that it was, in fact, Vardy, and not Watt, who leaked the messages from her private Instagram to The Sun, leading to Rooney’s explosive public bollocking in which she posted a social media message claiming “it was … Rebekah Vardy’s account”. It is a mountain to climb, not least because it requires forensic dissection of the bottomless, spaghetti interactions of the world’s most vapid humans. It involves trawling through the constant trail of tangential microdramas – one piece of evidence, for example, is “a diagram to show the seat allocations” at the Euros in 2016 where Vardy was said to have engineered sitting behind Rooney in order to facilitate a superior pap shot, one of her party telling an official at the time: “We can sit where we like, f*** off.”
Then there is the consideration of literally thousands of images taken by women the point of whose lives is, simply, to take images. At one point, Rooney said she had “over 100,000” photos on one phone. You’d need several fields filled with computers in some far-flung corner of Idaho to download that ring cycle, which, of course, they haven’t.
Both have somehow lost data while transferring an unprecedented number of messages, selfies and/or pictures of Wayne. Both seem unable to explain how they lost that data, even though, from evidence in this trial alone, I’d say they had a more sophisticated knowledge of tech affairs than Elon Musk.
Vardy miraculously appears to have lost the most potentially incriminating messages she sent to Watt, who herself has said that she lost her own phone in the North Sea when a wave hit the boat while she was “filming the coastline … in Scotland in August 2021”, just days after Rooney’s lawyers asked for it. This means Rooney’s case is now “lying at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’s locker”, as Sherborne put it on Wednesday.
“Who’s Davy Jones?” asked Vardy, concerned this was a winger at Luton Town she needed to be aware of. The judge told her not to worry.
There is one person who looks as if he has gone to the bottom of the sea and back and that is Wayne Rooney. Sitting hunched, like a giant cauliflower, next to his wife, he spent 15 hours straight looking directly ahead of him, only pausing once to write a single message in Coleen’s leopard print notebook.
They say great sportsmen must have huge reserves of self-control and concentration but that goes nowhere near explaining the sheer determination England’s greatest goalscorer appears to exhibit in not looking at anyone to do with Vardy or indeed Vardy herself. Only when Coleen began to talk about the temporary break-up of their marriage did his demeanour vaguely begin to shift. As she explained how there was “wrongdoing by my husband [and] I didn’t know how it was going to work out”, he spent a few minutes touching his eyes and for a moment I thought he might be crying.
What does Wayne think when he surveys the mad disaster and cost of all this? Perhaps he simply imagines an entire garage of supercars on fire. Perhaps he doesn’t understand half of what people are saying, because while WAGs use mysterious words like “mugged off” and “buzzin”, lawyers too have their own bizarre way of speaking. One person can spend one moment courteously referring to the judge as “milady” and the next having to read out sentences such as, “oh wow, I just saw. Wow. What a c***”.
Vardy herself evocatively said at one point: “If I’m to be honest, milady, I had been drinking quite a bit that day.”
The ghost at the feast is Caroline Watt, a generic showbiz type who is like five tabloid TV editors rolled into one. She appears to spend all her waking hours trying to contribute half-sentences to low-level coverage in The Sun, while Vardy, who at any given point is distractedly hosing down one of her five children, or watching “Gemma Collins faceplanting” on Dancing on Ice, appears either greedy, stupid or sneaky enough to get swept into helping her ("I want paying for that x” read one of Vardy’s messages). You might think this is a story of Vardy’s toxic relationship with Coleen Rooney, but it is in fact the story of her toxic relationship with Watt, who’s not party to the trial.
The moment Vardy met her was the moment her world went from third-tier WAG whose only concern was which cream jacket to wear to suddenly behaving like some junior showbiz reporter, dragged into a tabloid netherworld where people horse-trade all sorts of guffy “private information”.
One of the extraordinary hallmarks of Vardy’s cross-examination was the constant insistence she had nothing to do with any of this, repeating again and again obviously pre-prepared answers that she couldn’t recollect things or remember the time, while suddenly recovering her memory for her own barrister on Friday morning, when she could remember single words from six years ago.
She said of Coleen the day after Rooney made her gotcha post: “Arguing with Coleen is like arguing with a pigeon. You can tell it that you are right and it is wrong but it’s still going to shit in your hair”. The same could be said of her.
Tomorrow we return to the court where Coleen will conclude her evidence. We will hear more about “the biggest WAG fallout since Nicola McLean whipped off her 32FF superbra”, as reported by The Sun in 2019. We will no doubt be read more of Rooney’s florid lawyer’s letters ("the genie of confidentiality cannot be put back in the bottle"), more of what Vardy thought of Coleen and vice versa, and I will lap up every minute of it.
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