DID JIBES ABOUT PLAYERS’ INFIDELITY TRIGGER ROW?

REBEKAH Vardy – all brass, grit and big mouth – isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But until only a few months ago, she and Coleen Rooney enjoyed a perhaps surprisingly cordial relationship.

The two women, arguably England’s leading WAGs, got to know each other during the 2016 European Football Championship, which both attended to cheer on their footballer husbands.

‘They are not best friends, but they were on good terms – until all of this happened,’ said a friend yesterday. ‘Becky still absolutely cannot believe it.’

‘All of this’, of course, is the bombshell allegations made yesterday by Coleen Rooney, who launched a social media attack on Rebekah Vardy, revealing how she set up an elaborate sting on Instagram to ‘catch’ her leaking fake stories.

It’s fair to say these two WAGs are now at war, with Becky preparing to fight for her reputation. She has made the bold move of instructing her legal team to look into suing Coleen and is after a full public apology. How quickly things can turn sour. It was only back in January 2017 that Coleen, 33, sent Becky and footballer husband Jamie a gift to congratulate them on the birth of son, Finley. Motherhood certainly was common ground between them. Coleen has four sons and Becky, 37, is expecting her fifth child.

A friend said: ‘The bizarre fact about this whole Instagram thing is that if Becky had wanted to sell stories about Coleen, she has seen her and Wayne enough in person to have stories to sell, and Coleen knows that full well. But she would never breach her confidence.’

Friends of Becky confirm that she and Coleen were Instagram friends for the past few years, but deny that Becky was the mole who leaked stories from it to a tabloid newspaper, as of course does Becky herself. Her view is that Coleen – much cheated-on and a stay-at-home mum – is ‘clutching at straws’ by trying to draw Vardy into what her camp feel is an unhappy, rather paranoid narrative.

‘Why should she sit back and take it?,’ asked a friend of Vardy’s. ‘If she doesn’t hit back, then people will think that she was responsible.’

The WAGs first got to know one another in France in 2016, at the Euro championships. Wayne was at the tail end of his international career and Coleen was coming to the end of her reign as Queen WAG. Jamie, meanwhile, arrived in the England camp amid huge expectations following his heroics for Leicester City, when they won the Premiership in 2016. His new wife Becky was glad to grab the limelight with a column in a newspaper, and gave numerous interviews – a media habit which she has kept going ever since.

But Becky has always declined to talk about the Rooneys. Which is why her comments this summer might have seemed unwise, when she boasted about her faithful Jamie. ‘My husband isn’t like the rest of them... I love and trust him,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t stand for it if my husband

cheated on me, I wouldn’t put up with that in a million years. If I was prepared to put up with that behaviour, where would my self-respect be? What example would I be to my kids?’ Honestly held views, no doubt. But how will they have gone down with Coleen, famously forgiving of Wayne’s indiscretions which included a threesome with prostitutes while she was pregnant?

Yesterday, as the dust began to settle on Coleen’s extraordinary allegations against her, some in Ms Vardy’s camp are looking back on that interview with new eyes.

So why are the WAGs, who superficially have so much in common, at war? And where will it all end? Both love manicures, fake tans, diamonds and expensive handbags. Both also live in a mega-mansions – Coleen and Wayne’s is in Cheshire and they are preparing to move to a larger, €22million property, which has been unflatteringly compared with a Morrisons supermarket, while Becky and Jamie live in a €2.8million mansion in Lincolnshire.

Both are hot-tempered – Coleen can be aggressive in an argument. But underneath, they are quite different people. Coleen has been with Wayne since she was 16 and is extremely close to her family and Wayne’s. Although at one point she had a range of jewellery in Argos and presented Coleen’s Real Women on TV in 2008, these were more a dabble in media stardom rather than a determined effort at launching her own career.

Becky, on the other hand, is a tough, selfreliant survivor who has come through penury, depression and sexual abuse and is thoroughly enjoying her celebrity status. Born Rebekah Miranda, her father was a window cleaner and her mother a BBC local radio DJ. As a girl, she moved between Norwich, Reading and Oxford. Her parents split when she was nine. She rebelled, and recalls: ‘I got into trouble at school for fighting, drinking and behaving badly. I was unhappy and very confused.’

A sporty teen, she had a chance to try out for the British javelin squad aged 14, but said no one had the time to take her up to London for the trials, so she gave up. She has said that from the age of 13, a family friend started to sexually abuse her. ‘I would freeze every single time, terrified. I bottled it all up,’ she said.

She took an overdose of drugs at 15 and told her mother about the abuse, but according to Becky her mother accused her of lying. Aged 16, she left the family home, and started working in a bar. Aged 19, she married electrician Mark Godden, but the union quickly failed. She then had an encounter with pop star Peter Andre after he spotted her in a restaurant and took her number – and she was less than flattering about his performance.

She married for a second time to Steve Clarke, her boss at a timeshare company. They tied the knot she was eight months’ pregnant by another man. Then came a six-year romance with former Oxford United player Luke Foster, who is the father of her son Taylor. When she met Jamie Vardy she was working as a club promoter and turned him down several times. She has worked hard on building her media profile, going on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

Rather memorably she and Georgia Toffolo managed a barnstorming bushtucker trial munching through fish eyes, worms, sheeps’ anus, vomit fruit and a huntsman spider. She said: ‘If you cross me, you will know about it.’ As Coleen will now no doubt discover.