Forget fiction, Wags case is perfect escape from trials of our daily lives

IHAVE a confession to make: I can’t tell my Kardashians from my Jenners. In spite of occasionally poking fun at the family’s ridiculous outfits or lavish celebrations on this page, I couldn’t tell them apart in a line-up.

I might just about eyeball Kim – but as far as any real interest in them goes, the rest of the sisters and half-sisters are just a cacophony of Ks to me. They glide in a different orbit to mine and honestly, I couldn’t care less about them and most of the famous-for-being-famous semi-celebrities that surround them.

So why I am hungrily devouring every delicious crumb of the Wagatha Christie trial is something of a mystery to me. By the end of last week, I was checking in with the court reports as soon as I opened my eyes each morning – putting it ahead of my Wordle and my rigorous checking of the weather forecast to ascertain whether there is good drying out for the day ahead.

At least I’ve stopped that madness this week: for the last couple of days, I’ve been reading the court reports at lunchtime and at the end of the working day. Because I just can’t wait.

When it became clear that Rebekah Vardy was going to take her slight all the way to London’s high court, I was one of many voices protesting over how many millions would be racked up over the eight-day action and how much good it could do elsewhere.

But watching Vardy walk into the court building on Monday, wearing an outfit and clutching a handbag that would have left her with only pocket change from €4,000, it was clear that neither Team Rooney nor Team Vardy was ever going to divert their obscene wealth down philanthropic channels.

And besides, the entertainment the women’s spat is providing to the wider public suddenly seems like tremendous value for money.

Conversations With Friends cost a lot more and if the initial social media reaction is to believed, doesn’t offer nearly as much bang for its buck.

When it comes to capturing the collective imagination, it seems Arguments With Enemies is a far more tantalizing prospect.

I haven’t dipped too deeply into Depp versus Heard, a tawdry litany of two damaged people in a toxic relationship washing filthy laundry in public. But with Vardy versus Rooney, there is a sense that the result, however it goes, won’t have the same devastating (and possible career-ending) fall-out on either warring party.

If Vardy wins – which seems unlikely but is scarcely impossible – I’d imagine Mrs Justice Steyn might award damages that will make Albert Reynolds’s infamous penny, awarded by the same court after the former Taoiseach won a libel action against The Sunday Times in 1996, seem generous. If she loses, then she may lick her wounds for a while before surely reemerging with some sort of lucrative serialisation of her tale of woe.

THERE has been cannon fodder – the unfortunate and absent PR agent Caroline Watt, daily thrown under the buses passing on The Strand and poor Peter Andre, freshly humiliated for no good reason – but neither of the principals feels like a victim and perhaps that’s why their legal matchup is so compelling.

And with glamour, wealth, and drama in spades – to say nothing of two former England footballing colleagues in differing stages of mortification – it’s undeniably hard to look away.

There’s Wayne bursting out of his clothes and carrying an enormous handbag while the court discusses his infidelities. There’s Coleen swapping out Zara and Chanel and dangling a crucifix. There’s Rebekah, calling Coleen ‘my love’ in her WhatsApp direct messages and a ‘c***’ in her indirect ones. Jamie, late to the party, grim-faced and uncomfortable looking. And the exhausting ‘sting’ itself, worthy of a crime novel and giving the court proceedings the feel of a Sunday night BBC drama and not a series of real and unfortunate events.

And all of this – and here’s what you won’t read in the court reports – when almost every other news story in the world is relentlessly grim. It’s that, I think, that makes Vardy versus Rooney a perfect storm in a tea cup; floating in a roiling sea of unprecedented, almost unbearable bad news.

We have enough fear and loathing and war and tragedy and hardship to fill every page and every news site on the planet.

Who can blame us for turning to Rebekah with a K, Coleen with one L first?