The Mercury

Christie mystery in the headlines

- | VLADIMIR NABOKOV THE IDLER graham.linscott@inl.co.za

READERS who also take a squint at the overseas news will no doubt have been as puzzled as I was by the “Wagatha Christie” libel trial in London.

What on earth could a libel action involving the wives of two famous footballer­s have to do with Agatha Christie, the prolific writer of detective novels? Why attach the “W”?

Was some other person named Christie somehow involved?

You have to grasp the vocabulary and thought processes of especially the tabloid end of Fleet Street. It can be a tortuous process.

WAGs are not just witty fellows who make us laugh, they’re the Wives And Girlfriend­s of profession­al footballer­s.

Two WAGs are involved in the libel case. Coleen Rooney, wife of former England football captain Wayne Rooney, has brought the libel action against Rebekah Vardy, wife of Leicester City star Jamie Vardy.

She claims Rebekah has been feeding false informatio­n about her to The Sun newspaper – a voracious leader in the tabloid sector.

She claims to have proved this by a tortuous subterfuge involving social media which showed that planted informatio­n that appeared in The Sun could only have come from Rebekah.

Somewhere along the way somebody said it read like an Agatha Christie detective story.

Voilà! Wagatha Christie! (It doesn’t have to make sense.)

All we need now is for a Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot to come on the scene and solve the whole mish-mash. But it’s beyond me to guess at the new headlines.

Police pounce

STILL with events in Blighty, the Metropolit­an Police have announced that they have arrested a Tory MP on charges of rape and associated sexual criminalit­y. He has not yet been named. The Tory whips’ office said the MP in question has been told to stay away from parliament until the matter is resolved.

That seemed a little unnecessar­y as the police also said he was in custody. But pretty soon he was out on bail. The headline writers have a tendency to attach the suffix “gate” to anything dodgy in politics. Boris Johnson’s contravent­ions of the Covid regulation­s were labelled “Partygate”, harking back to US president Richard Nixon’s “Watergate” many moons ago, when Republican operatives broke into Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building.

This current upset sounds especially ugly. So let’s please not have clever “gate” headlines in the news. That’s just too flippant for an issue that is very serious. I would guess we will not.

Two gents chatting

TWO elderly gentlemen are sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree. One turns to the other and says: “Slim, I’m 83 years old now and I’m just full of aches and pains. I know you’re about my age. How do you feel?”

“I feel just like a newborn baby.” “Really? Like a newborn baby?” “Yep. No hair, no teeth and I think I just wet my pants.”

Tailpiece

HAMAS “arrested” a dolphin for being an Israeli spy. Suggested titles for the film this action might inspire: Orcapussy; Free Schmuelly; Goldflippe­r; The Porpoise-Driven Life.

Last word

MY LOATHINGS are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

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