his is not entertainment,” Rebekah Vardy’s barrister, Hugh Tomlinson QC, declared at the opening of the trial referred to at the Royal Courts of Justice as Vardy v Rooney, but known everywhere else as theTo borrow a favourite linguistic flourish of Vardy’s: not being funny, but what are you on, my learned friend? For seven days, I sat in the front row of the multimillion-pound libel trial and, to be honest with you – another favourite phrase of Vardy’s in all my many years of covering fashion...
This end-of-season episode of Footballers’ Wives did not stint on the drama. Vardy dabbed her eyes in the witness box when recalling the mean things people online said about her children, and collapsed entirely when Sherborne pointed to alleged inconsistencies in her claims that she doesn’t leak stories to the Sun; Rooney didn’t even blink when asked, repeatedly, about her husband’s infidelities.
Rooney refused to back down. So did Vardy, and in June 2020 she launched a high court libel case. In English law, the burden of proof falls on the person who made the defamatory claim, meaning Rooney had to prove what she claimed.
Libel cases are not tried in front of a jury, so the other journalists and I were seated in the jury box, about two yards from Vardy and her team of lawyers, three yards from the Rooneys, and facing directly opposite the witness box. This proved a little awkward at times, such as on the first day when Vardy sat on the stand facing me and was asked by an apparently outraged Sherborne why she told the News of the World in 2004 that Peter Andre is “hung like a small chipolata”.
The husbands visibly, palpably, wanted to stay well out of this fight, and last May, Wayne sent a dove to Jamie via the romantic medium of, in which he wrote that Jamie should be in the England team: “I know some will be surprised at this, especially with the legal case between my wife and Jamie’s wife, but this is my honest football opinion.” But no doves were to be found in the courtroom.