Rebekah Vardy: The woman at the centre of the ‘Wagatha Christie’ court hearings everyone is talking about
Tom Peck profiles a footballer’s wife who has built a fortune of her own
At the end of three whole years and millions of pounds of expense, the question of whether it was definitely, unequivocally “Rebekah Vardy’s……… account” behind the leaking of stories about Coleen Rooney to The Sun may not be conclusively settled. Indeed, it may never be so.
But that vast time and money have prized open a window into the rarefied world of the Wag that is exceptionally ugly and cannot now be closed. (Though, arguably, its time is already passing.)
Rebekah Vardy was 34 when she married Jamie Vardy in 2016, days after he had become the folk hero of arguably the most extraordinary football story ever told, namely Leicester City’s astonishing Premier League title.
When she met him, two years earlier, he was not even a Premier League player. To be blunt, Rebekah did not have a David Beckham or a Wayne Rooney on her hands.
The odds that he would go on to achieve what he did are also a matter of football history. He was a 5,000-to-1 shot. All of which is to say that, if one were to characterise Rebekah Vardy as “a gold digger”, as many have, Jamie Vardy was not in 2014 the richest seam to be mined.
Whatever truth comes to be established in the high court this week, what has been laid bare is that, having made a very unlikely ascent into the rarefied world of the England wives and girlfriends club, Rebekah Vardy appears to have been keener than most to capitalise on the opportunities afforded by it all.
Her marriage to Mr Vardy was her third, the prior two being very short-lived, and one doesn’t have to dig too deep to learn of a difficult upbringing that ended with her leaving the family home at the age of 16. She has spoken of how her second husband was convicted of reckless driving after an accident that killed two people.
Vardy denies the vast majority of the allegations against her in this trial. She denies that when she messaged her agent with the words, “I want paying for this x”, with regard to her attempt to sell a story about Vardy’s teammate Danny Drinkwater to The Sun, she was even seeking payment for anything at all. It was, she said, no more than a “fleeting thought”.
But she has built a substantial independent fortune of her own, estimated by the people who make such estimates at upwards of £3m. She has done this through the world of paid endorsements, TV appearances such as on I’m A Celebrity and Dancing on Ice. And, her own WhatsApps would suggest, though she denies, being known to both the journalists and the accounts department of The Sun newspaper, and possibly others.
Vardy’s response to Rooney’s bombshell “Wagatha” accusation was to claim that she would never sell stories to a newspaper. “Not being funny but it’s not like I need the money,” she said. It is hardly the refutation she may imagine it to be.
When, on the periodic occasion that billionaires get involved in politics, their supporters like to make the entirely wrong point that their private wealth supplants them to some pristine place, beyond the financial temptations of mere mortals. But to say a billionaire is not motivated by money is to say the Cookie Monster is not motivated by cookies.
Coleen Rooney’s barrister, David Sherborne, described Vardy and her agent Caroline Watt as “quite a team”. He took her through hundreds of WhatsApp messages which paint a picture of a well-oiled machine, working hard for their tabloid masters, setting up pictures, passing on nuggets of information. Again, she denies those messages ever meant what they say they do.
It is also often said that such people should not behave in this way. They have highly paid husbands, they don’t need the money. Dare one suggest that a woman with two failed marriages already behind her may have a more 21st-century view about generating her own income, however unseemly its source might be?
Mainly, she appears to live in a world on its way out. Wag culture peaked a long time ago, ironically because its shining stars, Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole (as she was known then) were international success stories in their own right, whomever their husbands were.
Most curiously of all, this particular tale sits on a curious confluence over social media and old-fashioned red-top media.
Today’s Wags are significantly less famous than their forebears, probably by design. Whatever level of fame they seek to cultivate, the starting point is their own social media feeds, private or otherwise, and should they so desire, there is money to be made there. Power is shifting.
Rebekah Vardy is 40 years old. If there are other similar Wags out there, they will surely have found the details of this case something of a wake-up call.