Coleen in a fury at her rival’s £900k Wagatha war chest
She attacks Rebekah’s budget as they fail to settle row out of court
REBEKAH Vardy’s £900,000 budget for her War of the Wags legal battle was branded ‘grotesque’ by Coleen Rooney, the High Court heard yesterday. Mrs Vardy is suing Mrs Rooney for libel after she publicly accused her of leaking stories about her private life to the tabloids. At the preliminary hearing yesterday, it emerged that an attempt to resolve their differences through mediation had failed and plans for a full trial are now being drawn up. Lawyers said the total estimated legal bill for the case stands at £1.3million. This is made up of £897,000 for Mrs Vardy’s estimated bill, while Mrs Rooney’s predicted costs stand at £402,000. In the event of a trial, whoever loses will probably have to meet the other’s costs as well as their own. Potential damages could take the loser’s bill to over £2million. Mrs Rooney’s barrister John Samson asked the court to reject Mrs Vardy’s budget ‘because, in the words of my lay client, it is grotesque’. He said: ‘The difference between the budgets are stark. To date, the claimant’s litigation has been run at a disproportionate cost.
‘[Her] proposed budget is demonstrably bloated – its excess is in the far reaches of fantasy. There are too many lawyers working far too many hours.’
Judge Roger Eastman said the budgets for both Wags were ‘extraordinarily large’ and asked them to try again to settle the case without the need for a trial. But legal papers submitted to the court said that Mrs Rooney, 34, ‘does not consider further mediation to be cost-effective’.
The bitter dispute started in October 2019 when Mrs Rooney, wife of former England captain Wayne Rooney, publicly accused Mrs Vardy, 39, of leaking stories from her private Instagram account.
In a ‘sting operation’ that earned her the nickname Wagatha Christie, Mrs Rooney carried out her own detective work when leaked stories about her appeared in newspapers. The mother-of-four planted fake posts on her private Instagram account, then blocked all of her followers except Mrs Vardy, who is the wife of former England striker Jamie Vardy.
When the stories appeared in the Sun, she posted: ‘For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing the Sun newspaper of my private posts and stories.’ Of the fake posts, she added: ‘I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them. It’s... Rebekah Vardy’s account.’
It sparked a bitter rift between the former friends and Mrs Vardy received death threats as a result, court papers show. Mrs Vardy, who was seven months pregnant, denied being the source of the leaks and said the incident left her fearing she would suffer a miscarriage.
Mrs Vardy is suing Mrs Rooney, claiming aggravated damages and is seeking an injunction preventing her from repeating the allegations. Yesterday her lawyer Sara Mansoori defended Mrs Vardy’s estimated bill, saying it ‘reflects the complexity, scope and scale of the legal and factual issues’.
She said: ‘Mrs Vardy’s cost budget reflects the very serious nature of the highly damaging defamatory allegation made against her, which continues to be published by Mrs Rooney.
‘It has caused enormous distress to Mrs Vardy and led to her being targeted by hostile and abusive online messages.’
Mrs Rooney’s defence also raises ‘a huge number of additional matters’, including claims that Mrs Vardy has ‘close relationships with a number of journalists’. But Mrs Vardy’s lawyer said those allegations were not relevant and should be removed from her defence, the court heard.
Both Wags have employed experts to give evidence on how Instagram works and how posts can be made public or private.
Judge Eastman has given both sides until June to submit revised budgets. The next hearing will be on July 2.
‘Excess in the far reaches of fantasy’
BORIS Johnson faced a backlash from Tory MPs last night after ruling out a ‘new Cold War’ with China and pledging to strengthen trade ties with Beijing.
Unveiling the Government’s longawaited Integrated Review of foreign and defence policy, the Prime Minister acknowledged that China’s Communist dictatorship posed ‘a great challenge for an open society such as ours’.
The review described China as ‘the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security’ and warned that sensitive sites and technology would have to be given greater protection from hackers sponsored by foreign governments.
However, the PM said, with UK-China trade already worth more than £80billion, the Government had to ‘strike a balance’ in its approach to Beijing. He stressed: ‘Those who call for a new Cold War on China or for us to sequester our economy entirely from China...are, I think, mistaken.’
Tory MPs welcomed the review, but
‘Challenge for an open society’
warned it did not go far enough to counter the threat posed by Beijing.
Julian Lewis, chairman of Parliament’s intelligence and security committee, said the desire of previous prime ministers to forge a ‘golden era’ of relations with China appeared to be alive and well despite the danger posed by Beijing. He said the desire for deeper trade links ‘unfortunately demonstrates that the grasping naivety of the Cameron-Osborne years still lingers on in some departments of state’.
Tobias Ellwood, Tory chairman of the defence committee, said he had hoped the PM would usher in a new Cold War in which ‘we finally call out China for the geo-strategic threat that it is’.
Former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was not enough to designate China ‘simply as a systemic challenge’ given the ‘terrible events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang’. The PM said he was ‘clear-eyed’ about the threat posed by Beijing and voiced ‘deep concern’ over the treatment of the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region where China has been accused of genocide.
Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger warned there was no hope of China’s Communist dictatorship responding to diplomatic overtures from the West.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘There’s no doubt that China represents the generational threat and the reason for that is that the idea that China will become more like us as it gets richer or as its economy matured is clearly for the birds.
‘That’s not going to happen. On the contrary, I expect China’s
Communist Party to double-down on its ideology in the future.’
Yesterday’s 110-page review set out the Government’s vision of Britain’s place in the world after Brexit. It said Russia remains ‘the most acute direct threat to the UK’, with Moscow deploying a ‘full spectrum’ of menaces including disinformation and cyber-attacks as well as a conventional military threat and attacks like the Salisbury poisoning.
In a series of recommendations, the report said preparations should be bolstered for another pandemic, which was a ‘realistic possibility’. Chillingly, it predicted terrorists are ‘likely’ to succeed in mounting an attack using chemical, biological or nuclear material by the end of this decade. The review said the UK nuclear stockpile should be increased to deter the threat from rogue states, adding that Britain could launch nuclear strikes against regimes that sponsor attacks using weapons of mass destruction.
It recommended that the controversial target to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on foreign aid should be reinstated ‘when the fiscal situation allows’ and a national cyber force should be established to build and deploy digital tools to ‘detect, disrupt and deter our adversaries’. It insisted that tackling climate change should be the UK’s ‘No1’ international priority while Britain’s diplomatic and economic focus should be ‘tilted’ away from the West towards the fast-growing Indo-Pacific region.
It added that UK’s military should be ‘modernised’, with a new focus on cyber and space warfare that is likely to lead to the Army shrinking by 10,000 troops and Britain should help lead a new diplomatic push to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.
The review called for the UK to aim to establish itself as a ‘science and tech superpower’ by the end of the decade and warned that paramilitaries in Northern Ireland could seek to exploit current political tensions, adding to the ‘major threat’ already posed by Islamic terror groups and other extremists.
The review was designed to carve out a new role for the UK in a crumbling international order. The document, which took a year to produce, warned that the world is ‘more fragmented’ than at any time since 1945, adding: ‘A defence of the status quo is no longer sufficient for the decade ahead.’
In a speech today, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will warn democracy is ‘in retreat’. He will call for the West to make the case
for democracy, adding: ‘This decade, the combined Gross Domestic Product of autocratic regimes is expected to exceed the combined GDP of the world’s democracies – but think about what that means for a second. Tyranny is richer than freedom and that matters to us here at home.’
In the Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister said Britain’s history and status as a trading nation meant it had no option but to engage with the world, however dangerous. He stressed: ‘For us, there are no faraway countries of which we know little. Global Britain is not a reflection of old obligations, still less a vainglorious gesture, but a necessity for the safety and prosperity of the British people in the decades ahead.’
IT’S hard to argue with Boris Johnson when he says we don’t want to start a new Cold War with China. But as the Government’s own review of foreign and defence policy points out, China constitutes a major threat to the UK’s economic security.
It is an aggressive surveillance state which oppresses its own people and spies obsessively on other countries. So if we are invited to sup with the Dragon, we must use a very long spoon indeed.