Twelve angry live-bloggers: inside the “Wagatha Christie” trial

By John Phipps

Courtroom 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London is not a glamorous place. The stage for the most-talked-about legal case in Britain, a defamation duel between two footballers’ wives, is a cramped, wood-panelled room with a scuffed floor. The toilets downstairs are clogged with nervous vomit. Because Vardy v Rooney is a civil proceeding, there is no jury. Instead, the jury box opposite the witness stand is crammed with journalists.

The rest of the room is filled with journalists as well; tapping their screens noisily, checking their Twitter notifications and googling images of the celebrities sitting right in front of them. Hacks also huddle outside; photographers in windbreakers and cargo pants look ready for war. The sheer scale of media activity seems disproportionate to the material at hand, even for a saga this juicy.

The events that brought so many reporters here are as follows. In 2019 Coleen Rooney, wife of former England footballer Wayne Rooney, posted an Instagram story accusing Rebekah Vardy, wife of former England footballer Jamie Vardy, of leaking information from her private Instagram account to a tabloid newspaper.

It was hard to hear Rebekah Vardy over the sound of her testimony being written up

Though only a favoured few can see the contents of this Instagram account, Rooney believed that updates from it were finding their way into the Sun. In the manner of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, she decided to root out the mole. Rooney began posting false information to see what ended up in the papers, eliminating everyone except her suspect from the list of people who could see the posts. At the end of this sting operation, Rooney revealed on Instagram that the titbits in the press had been viewed by only one account – and she had the screenshots to prove whose. Then came the big reveal: “It’s……….Rebekah Vardy’s account.”

Tabloid editors have long been concerned with the lives of footballers’ wives and girlfriends – or WAGs, to use the papers’ own blunt acronym. In 2006, a midriff-baring crew of models, singers and reality-TV contestants accompanied the England team to Germany for the World Cup. The tabloids soon realised that WAG news and photos shifted papers and drove traffic, and this became staple content for the red tops (the footballers themselves are also a continued source of succour). Nevertheless, the “Wagatha Christie case”, as it has been dubbed, is a rare feast for Britain’s popular print institutions.

The case was brought not by Rooney – whose personal details were exposed – but by Vardy, who denied leaking it and sued Rooney for defamation. Events took a farcical turn. Even before proceedings started, Vardy said that her agent, Caroline Watt, had access to Vardy’s Instagram account. When Rooney’s lawyers demanded to see Watt’s phone, Watt said she had dropped it in the North Sea and hadn’t been able to retrieve it. Later, in court, Rooney’s lawyer said, “We know that Miss Watt’s phone is now in Davy Jones’s locker, don’t we, Mrs Vardy.” Vardy turned to the judge: “I don’t know who Davy Jones is.”

It’s difficult to understand why Vardy brought this case, in which her dealings with the tabloids and other WAGs were put under a spotlight. One memorable phrase from an interview she gave in 2019 was read out to the court: “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.”

“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”

During the time I spent in court 13, I was struck by how small a presence these protagonists have in real life. The headlines say that Vardy “declared war”, yet in court she was almost inaudible, mostly sitting very still, with her long black hair tied in plaits. Occasionally she burst into tears. Many exchanges concerned technical questions about whether Instagram “stories” are displayed differently from ordinary posts (they are). Testimonies were frequently interrupted so that everyone could locate the relevant Instagram update from a row of dictionary-thick bundles of printouts used as evidence (“Let me just move on now to what is called the ‘babysitter post’”). I found that the easiest way to tell if something important was occurring was to listen to the noise news makes as it happens: a light, massed fluttering of keystrokes. On more than one occasion, it was hard to hear Vardy over the sound of her testimony being written up.

Britain’s fascination with the women romantically attached to its best-paid footballers has invited charges of both snobbery and misogyny. “WAGs: YOU ARE TREATING US LIKE DOGS”, screamed the Mirror in 2006 after the spouses and girlfriends of the England team complained about transport delays when travelling to the World Cup.

Tabloid discourse remains rooted in print culture. These papers are a daily miracle of spatial organisation, puzzled together like a collage. Even the most high-minded journalists respect the red tops’ scoops. Some privately envy the unique house style: a romping, staccato vernacular born of the space-saving imperative that makes children “tots” and scientists “boffins”.

The aggressive antics of the popular press have provided a stream of work for well-paid lawyers in recent years. Hugh Tomlinson, Vardy’s representative (and the sometime translator of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze) has previously acted for victims of tabloid phone-hacking, when journalists were accused of listening to celebrities’ private voicemail messages. David Sherborne, Rooney’s lawyer, represented Meghan Markle in her libel case against the Mail on Sunday, and has secured injunctions against certain paparazzi for celebrities such as Lily Allen, Sienna Miller and Amy Winehouse.

The more real, truer form of the Wagatha Christie drama is being played out not in courtroom 13 but in the live blogs

Rooney had miserable experiences with the tabloid press long before she came to believe it was printing stories based on her private Instagram posts. Giving evidence last week, she recalled that, when she first started dating Wayne Rooney as a teenager, paparazzi would follow her to school. Her relationship with the Sun is particularly difficult: she and her husband are both from Liverpool, a city that has loathed the paper since 1989 because of its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, when 97 fans of Liverpool football club were crushed to death at a game. The Sun incorrectly blamed the fatalities on the behaviour of Liverpool supporters.

“I wouldn’t want to read the stuff they write about me,” said Rooney as she was questioned about the Sun: “I think it’s ridiculous.” There was some brief tapping and rustling as 40 or so journalists noted down the exchange.

Though the tabloids remain powerful, they’ve had a tough 20 years. Sales were traditionally driven by “exclusive” celebrity gossip, but nothing online stays exclusive for long; it only takes a few seconds to copy and paste key details. Advertising revenues slumped in tandem with the fall in print circulation. The emergence of social-media sites like Facebook and Instagram seemed to present yet another problem, undercutting tabloids’ ability to entice celebrities with the offer of a platform. Why go to the Sun when you can talk directly to your fanbase?

The popular press quickly evolved, however. It began to mimic the rhythms of social media, posting floods of insubstantial online updates. It paid droves of young journalists to hunt news on Twitter and Instagram and write short, keyword-heavy articles about them (“Inside the Beckhams’ Miami family holiday”). And it plundered celebrities’ social-media accounts for new details, no matter how trivial: it didn’t have to be a story so long as it was new. As Coleen Rooney put it in court 13: “They pad out one bit of information with another bit of information.” No one wrote that one down.

The result is an all-encompassing ecosystem of content which spans celebrities, journalists, social media and PRs. The media created the celebrities, who in turn sustain the different outlets by supplying an endless source of stories. The murky links between each of the players has been revealed by the proceedings of Vardy v Rooney. (Messages uncovered in disclosure showed, for example, that Vardy had wanted to sell information to the Sun about one of her husband’s own teammates drink-driving.)

Sometimes it seems as though the machine is more powerful than reality. It’s not that the reporting on the case was inaccurate. (The price of the Zara dress Rooney wore to court was correctly identified as £32.99, or $40.) It’s just that the more real, truer form of the Wagatha Christie drama is being played out not in courtroom 13 but in the live blogs of the tabloid press and the viral tweet threads posted by the rest of us. At one point, as Vardy was giving evidence, I saw the journalist in front of me open up the Mail’s live blog. We were in the middle of a long cross-examination, the import of which wasn’t completely clear. I don’t know what the journalist was looking for. But my guess is that he wanted to know what was happening in court. ■

John Phipps is a contributing writer for 1843 magazine

ILLUSTRATIONS: EWELINA KARPOWIAK