How Rebekah Vardy went from underdog to ‘Cry-Bully’

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers.

I was vaguely on Team Vardy to start with; childhood abuse, broken home, homeless at 15, teenage bride, three times married, mother of five, eventually finding fame, fortune and Fendi by marrying Jamie Vardy. Coleen, on the other hand, seemed the boring good girl who had been with Wayne since they were schoolmates – before he had money, even, thus confounding those who might ask ‘What attracted you to befuddled, brothel-creeping multi-millionaire Wayne Rooney?’ It was easy to see her as a doormat – even if it was a deluxe doormat who got taken to Barbados several times a year – for putting up with wayward Wayne’s habit of ‘playing away’.

But somehow during this trial, Mrs Vardy and Mrs Rooney changed places. Rebekah came dressed as an Amish bride; Coleen as a transvestite line-backer. Vardy’s tears, pity-play and emoting showed her as a thoroughly modern snowflake; Rooney’s matter-of-fact charging into the court each day, metaphorically rolling up her sleeves – and the fact that she never wanted the case to go to court in the first place – made her appealing. Wayne was now literally and metaphorically brought to heel, mutated from giant toddler to proud dad at Sports Day.

In a way, this case was about the modern tyranny of hurt feelings – Vardy – against the fact that there is an objective truth which cannot be magicked away if someone bangs on about their emotions enough. Vardy – who always seemed such a tough broad – was reduced to bleating about ‘anxiety attacks’ despite the fact that she once accused her I’m A Celebrity camp-mate Ian Leigh of playing the sympathy card when he talked about his depression. To be fair, it was Mrs Vardy who provided – albeit unintentionally – the laughs during this grim business, with ‘Who is Davy Jones?’, claims that her agent’s phone was ‘dropped in the North Sea’ and her playing of the ultimate sympathy card ‘I ended up in hospital three times, and I ended up with kidney stones.’ One would need a heart of stone not to laugh at this absolute embodiment of my splendid phrase ‘Cry-Bully.’ And what about poor Peter Andre’s Mental Elf? It surely wasn’t improved by having his manhood mocked as a chipolata.

What does the future hold for the battling brunettes? Though the expenses Mrs Vardy faces run into the millions, this is loose change to a woman whose husband is reputed to earn £160,000 a week. She is a woman who likes to present herself as Strong & Independent – but she’d better get used to living off a man as she won’t even be making chump-change in future now that she has been branded a liar in the courts, and the poor fool knows this; in a witness statement, on the ‘impact’ on her of the trial she whimpered that the case has ‘impacted on my work… I had a midwife company lined up to make placenta capsules and they pulled out weeks before the birth.’ Painful! But would you buy placenta capsules – let alone a used car – from this woman?

Vardy now has something in common with Oscar Wilde, at least – both were ruined because they complained about people saying things that were true, and no amount of waterworks over being trolled can outrun the truth. Vardy might consider a warning tattoo which reminds her not to speak ill of her alleged friends; the phrase which this greedy woman and her overpaid spouse reportedly tried and failed to copyright, ‘Chat s**t, get banged’ (an 'expression used to humiliate people who hate on someone’, according to the Internet) will do nicely.

As for Mrs Rooney, it’s been the making of her; no longer the soppy wife forever standing by her man but a warrior woman forced into a fight she didn’t want but came out of triumphant anyway. It’s not going too far to say that in the future her yearly income might outdo her husband’s, as the commercial offers will be coming in thicker and faster than texts between a snitch and the Sun gossip desk. Still, it hasn’t been an edifying spectacle for anyone, considering what’s going on the real world.

And could the young Lionesses make the old WAGs look any less relevant? Seeing these bold young women take such pleasure in their hard-won sport, the kept women of the soccer scene might reflect that there’s a lot more to life than buying handbags and going on holiday, like having dreams, ambitions and passions that money can’t buy. And, most of all, the importance of paying your own way in life, depending on no man, be he husband – or libel lawyer.