‘Wagatha’ is a grotesque symbol of me-me-me Britain
The court battle between the Wags illustrates everything that is wrong with our increasingly narcissistic society
LHaving stories leaked about you can be a bit of an occupational hazard for any Wag
ike most controversies these days, it started with a tweet. “This has been a burden in my life for a few years and now I have got to the bottom of it,” posted Coleen Rooney on October 9, 2019.
It was the same day that the Nobel Prize for chemistry was jointly awarded to John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, but naturally no one was talking about the development of the world’s most powerful lithium-ion battery or the fact that Goodenough had become the oldest ever winner at 97.
Instead, it was the hashtag #Wagathachristie that was going viral on social media, as the wife of the footballer Wayne Rooney laid out the results of her Miss Marple-like detective work. I won’t recount the painful amount of effort she put into identifying who she thought had been responsible for leaking stories about her to The Sun newspaper. But her social media message ended with the immortal line: “It’s ... Rebekah Vardy’s account.” Rebekah Vardy is the wife of Leicester City star Jamie. And at this stage, Coleen should have been thanking her lucky stars that it wasn’t a member of her own family squealing to the tabloids – or worse still, that rubber-catsuit-wearing, grandmotherly former acquaintance of Wayne known as “Auld Slapper”.
Having stories leaked about you can be a bit of an occupational hazard for any Wag, but I would imagine you are especially vulnerable when your husband has got up to all sorts of mischief. (England’s leading goalscorer of all time has apparently spent most of the week in court “staring into space, carrying his wife’s bag”.)
Rather than working things out over a glass of Lambrini, the pair did what women with improbable foreheads and outsized lips tend to do when they have got too much time and money on their hands. They consulted their lawyers.
Two and a half years on, and we should be grateful to those selfless, paid-by-the hour briefs for bringing us the ultimate test case for the Instagram generation.
It may not be as seminal as Donoghue vs Stevenson or even Carlill vs the Carbolic Smoke Ball Co but the late, great Lord Denning would be hard pressed to disagree that Vardy vs Rooney sets a new precedent for crimes against humanity.
Charles Darwin himself would struggle to explain how it came to this; that we evolved from apes to become a society fixated by the idea that Peter Andre’s genitalia might, in fact, resemble a chipolata sausage.
(Andre, never one to shy away from the spotlight, released a video on Instagram on Thursday insisting “there would be outrage if a man said this about a woman”, unintentionally plunging himself into the “canwomen-have-penises debate” which is similarly emblematic of our evolutionary back-pedalling. Well, we always knew he was a Terf, didn’t we? Singing about that Mysterious Girl when he clearly should have referred to her as “a person who menstruates”.)
But back to Chanel handbags at dawn. I suppose what irks me most about what this case represents is how seriously people tend to take themselves these days.
So seriously that they are willing to squander millions arguing the facts of a matter so trivial that part of the case seems to rest on the difference between a “laughing” and “crying with laughter” emoji.
I understand that having people hear your “truth” has been all the rage since the Duchess of Sussex produced her own unique series of “facts” in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, but in what world do any of these women think anyone actually gives a damn?
In this narcissistic, vacuous era of “me, me, me”, filters are applied to faces, but not to thoughts.
Consequently, we have entered the age of oversharing, when everyone has to let everyone else know if – and when – they have been wronged or offended, rather than doing the more sensible and less self-indulgent thing of simply sucking it up.
When did everybody become so thin-skinned? I get that Vardy presumably feels Rooney subjected her to a Twitter pile-on. We’ve all been there, love. But honestly, who cares what a bunch of anonymous trolls think of anything? Take a couple of Kalms, block, mute and move on.
By refusing to let this lie in a bid to restore her reputation, Vardy only appears to have succeeded in tarnishing it by highlighting her absence of little grey cells. From her confusion over the identity of Davy Jones, to her suggestion that she couldn’t “confirm nor deny” whether she had “potentially switched phones”, among many she has become a laughing stock as a result.
You do not protect your image – or indeed preserve your privacy – by having the intimate details of your life paraded around in open court. Just ask Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, who have similarly both gone down in everyone’s estimation after mistaking the dock for some sort of masochistic therapy session, with judge and jury playing the combined role of marriage guidance counsellor, psychiatrist and AA mentor. Have none of these people ever heard of mindful colouring, for pity’s sake?
Look, I’m not suggesting that these courtroom confessionals don’t make great fodder for the newspapers and celeb-spotters alike, but only the truly over-pampered could afford to humiliate themselves so extravagantly.
Lest we forget, they could have settled this costly case months ago.
It has only ended up in the High Court because both sides refused to agree to a settlement that would have saved them what most people would consider to be life-changing amounts of cash.
It is all the more depressing when you consider that both came from pretty humble beginnings. Vardy was raised by a single mum and ended up homeless at 15 while Rooney was brought up in a modest terraced house on an estate in Croxteth, Liverpool.
Yet now they are married to men who earn so much their salary is calculated weekly, they appear to think nothing of squandering thousands on a hostage to fortune in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
It wasn’t long ago that we were having a debate about the “Wag” tag. Coined at the Euros in 2008 to describe the likes of Victoria Beckham and caricatured in the tongue-incheek ITV drama series Footballers’ Wives, by the time last year’s Euros came round, the term seemed as outdated as Chris Waddle’s mullet.
As the Macmillan dictionary points out: “Wag usually has derogatory overtones, used mainly in the context of sarcastic scrutiny of the extravagant lifestyles afforded by amazingly large footballer salaries.”
Yet you could hardly say this case advances the cause, not just of women married to star strikers, but women in general. The weaponised Whatsappmanship we have witnessed in court has only served to expose just how awful women can be to one another.
Exposing some of the jealousies and bitterness that often come to define rivalrous female relationships, it suggests that in the hollow world of social media, unknown followers are more important than actual friendships.
Far from being some Beyoncéesque demonstration of the power of sisters doing it for themselves – the relationship between these two wives and mothers, who have so much more to bind them than divide them, has been reduced to a sort of girlish handbag fight.
Agatha Christie was right: “To count,” she wrote in Evil Under the Sun, “– really and truly to count – a woman must have goodness or brains.”
This case has demonstrated it is probably preferable to have both.