This whingeing jailbird’s worst crime is blaming men for EVERY female crook
YOU PROBABLY thought you’d seen the l ast of Vicky Pryce, didn’t you? When she had finally finished dragging her ghastly cheat of an exhusband through an unedifying airing of their dirty laundry, all the signs were that she, as well as former Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, was finished.
Not only was she jailed for perverting the course of justice but the Queen personally intervened to strip her of the title of Companion of the Order of the Bath.
Enough, you’d think, to leave her sufficiently shamed to retreat once and for all from the public gaze.
But no. Vicky, you see, doesn’t actually do shame. Vicky does headlines. And if nobody else is going to write them for her then, dammit, she’ll write them herself.
Which is why Vicky has put pen to paper and written a whole book about her prison experiences, designed to cash in — oh, sorry: designed to demonstrate the value of courage in the face of adversity.
Unfortunately, all that is really demonstrated is just how far this exasperating woman has flown away with the fairies.
It’s not a particularly original idea. Those among our prison population with a reasonable claim to literacy have often shared memoirs of their incarceration: Tories Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken and the shamed DJ Jonathan King prominently among them.
But at l east with the chaps, you absorbed their accounts and believed that they had seen the inside of a cell or two. Vicky Pryce, bar the odd inconvenience — golly, those payphone calls to her chums were so expensive! — apparently had a whale of a time.
Take her arrival at Holloway prison, where her handbag had to be searched. She freely admits to having little clue as to what l i es at the bottom of her handbag; indeed, many women would admit likewise.
When the contents were sorted, however, there was fully £100 in loose change and, in between diaries, packets of tissues and the usual rubble: ‘We brought out a tenner here, a £20 note there, the odd £50 note (the odd?) and a few fivers.’ In the end, the grand total was £1,490, in cash, that she didn’t even know she had.
We can only wonder how many women would admit to that. It made checking in all the more fun, mind; in the resulting ‘relaxed and humorous’ atmosphere, there was ‘huge amusement’ from the security guard. Well, of course there was: that’s equivalent to six weeks of a prison officer’s takehome pay. She must have found it hilarious.
Then it was on to a quick bout of fingerprinting and other practicalities. There may be no strip searches any more, but Vicky would soon discover that there are rules, oh yes there are; eventually, she was allowed to take in 18 books although, sadly, when it came to clothes, ‘I was allowed to keep just 12 tops and six bottoms’.
Don’t you love the ‘just’?
THERE could almost have been a hiccup with her accommodation when the television in her private cell was found not to be working — but the drama was quickly resolved and another cell found, just in time for Vicky to watch the coverage of her own case before drifting peacefully off to sleep.
The minutiae of her daily routines continue in the same tedious manner, so let us not trouble ourselves with very much more of them.
Of rather greater interest, in any case, is Vicky’s insistence t hroughout t hat s he was tremendously welcomed by ‘the girls’ — which is what she calls her fellow prisoners — as something of a star; admired to the point that they showered her with secret stashes of gifts and goodies.
To any who have been inside Holloway j ai l (to declare experience: I have, albeit in a professional capacity) this claim to popularity within its notoriously tough environment stretches credulity to its limits. A wealthy economist — and she’s treated like a Homecoming Queen?
It is very, very difficult to believe. Except, suddenly, the emphasis on the sisterly solidarity starts to make perfect sense when she says: ‘There was huge sympathy from all and a general desire, it seemed to me, to make me feel better about being there.’
In the same vein: ‘ No one seemed to think I should have been in prison at all and wherever I went girls would shake my hand and offer support.’
And now we reach the nub of it: ‘I was shocked at the number of cases where the girls had done somet hing wrong but usually for, with, or forced t o by t heir husbands, boyfriends, brothers or fathers. These girls needed help, I thought, not incarceration.’
Thus, t he l i ght dawns. Vicky Pryce’s own defence throughout her trial was that her husband, Chris Huhne, had ‘made her’ take his speeding points as her own and subsequently lie about it.
So here she is in Holloway where, funnily enough, she discovers that this is in fact a commonplace travesty of justice and that women who break the law because their husbands ‘made them’ should be treated as the innocent victims they surely are.
Subtext: especially, naturally, Vicky Pryce.
It’s a nice try, we’ll give her that. There is, however, a glaring problem with it.
There are 500 inmates in Holloway jail. Vicky Pryce was one among them for four days. Yes: four days. It is inconceivable that in such a short time she would have met more than a fraction of the population, let alone had the chance to learn the details of their i ndividual cases or to draw widespread conclusions about patterns of guilt or otherwise. The truth is that, in those four brief days before being moved to a lovely open prison — ‘in a beautiful Elizabethan house’ — she had no chance whatsoever to gain enough insight to write a book that is anything other than one more measly shot at declaring, yet again, how hard done by she has been.
Bully for her, you have to concede, if a publisher was prepared to take her on in the belief that there are enough people around who want to fork out 17 quid to read about it once more.
But it’s a bit depressing to realise that, whether you believe prison to be about punishment, rehabilitation or both, when it comes to Pryce and Huhne neither appears remotely to have worked.
CHRIS Huhne bounced back into public life after his release with a lucrative management j ob, a national newspaper column and a pathetic appearance on the Today programme in which, rather than show a shred of remorse for breaking the law, he whined that he had been done up like a kipper by the wicked old media.
Now his wife does the same with, no doubt, a hefty advance fee for a thinlyveiled reminder that she was also done up like a kipper, i n her case by her husband — yes, love, we heard you the first time. Stuck records, the pair of them, scratching in the same old groove.
At the time of their unseemly spats and trials, it was widely observed that these two self-obsessed nincompoops thoroughly deserved each other. The pity of it is that, prison notwithstanding, on current showing they still do.