The final plot twist in ‘Wagatha Christie’ case

Tom Peck, The Independent

Turn down the sound in Court 13 and stare upon its cold stone walls; its towering leaded light windows; its ornate oak panelling and wrought iron chandeliers. Observe the grandiose men in their gowns and wigs and one sees a fully formed tableau of an entirely Dickensian world. At the end of cases that have borne every outward resemblance to this one, it would not have been uncommon to see an unfortunate man transported to Botany Bay for life for the theft of a loaf of bread.

The grand oak clock high up on its walls has turned through 150 years or more. If it contained a photographic camera, the roll of film within would scarcely have recorded the change of actual centuries of human life.

That the set of this mad drama has not been redressed since the days of the workhouse only makes the script more startling. The clipped tones of public school barristers have rung around this room forever. They have never before been called in to arbitrate over what amounts to very little more than a very high stakes Instagram bitchfest that’s somehow been allowed to run up a bill of three million quid or more.

Certain phrases punctuate the memory. At one point, the judge, Ms Justice Steyn (who is more used to presiding over the fates of Guantanamo Bay inmates, or the possibly illegal sales of arms between nation states) was asked: “Does her ladyship appreciate the difference between Instagram stories and posts?”

She has sat up there for around 35 full hours, spread over seven days, looking rarely anything other than expressionless as she has heard who was “buzzing,” who was “fuming,” who’d “unfollowed” who, who’d “blocked” the other. She has heard — deep breath now — all about the “resting bitch face”, and the “secret to England’s success being getting your leg over”. And all this played out against the usual celebrity Instagram background mood music of the McDonald’s “Mum Of The Year” awards and some kind of pyjama deal with Matalan.

It is worth observing that three million quid’s worth of libel trial doesn’t happen by accident. It is, undoubtedly, a clear mark of societal progress that the case’s lead participants were not born in possession of so much as a sniff of the cash that all this will cost them. This kind of very flowery justice has not been available to such people for very long.

(The same, utterly inevitably, cannot be said of the lawyers who will receive said funds. One more pleasing vignette, on the case’s final day, was when the Rooneys’ legal team apologised on the Rooneys’ behalf for them not being there. They had gone on holiday, having been advised — by their legal team — that the case would be concluded by now, which it self-evidently was not.)

As it happens, it was not long after this courthouse was built that newspapers set themselves up on Fleet Street, which begins just a few yards from the court’s front entrance. They set up there precisely because of their proximity to the courthouses, and the drama to be found there (though the scandalous stuff mainly happened not at the Royal Courts of Justice, but down the other end of the street at the Old Bailey).

Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney: such people are the modern stars of what were once the society pages. It is their lives that people now covet, not the daughter of the third marchioness of wherever’s, and that is no bad thing, even if the somewhat trashy reality of it is demeaned by the same people who then voraciously consume it.

It is also something of a landmark moment for the very small number of people who are into UK libel law. We are now decades into a new reality in which all people are media barons, and everything that is required to run a media empire sits in a person’s pocket. This case, of course, involves the leaking of information to a major newspaper, but that is almost irrelevant. It could have been about anything. The potential libel happened on Instagram, the publisher was not a newspaper but a private individual. What a mess.

It is not easy to speculate on who will win a libel trial. Get it wrong and you’ve probably committed libel yourself. But it is easy to observe that absolutely no one is going to win this.

The judge has already set an upper limit of 70 per cent of the winner’s costs to be payable by the losing party. She has also indicated that the damages that might be payable on top of that will range between £15,000 and £70,000. Given costs are already thought to be well over a million each, Wagatha Christie is a six-figure lottery in which a ticket costs 10 times more than the jackpot payout.

If Rebekah Vardy wins, it will be because Coleen Rooney has been unable to prove that she knew for sure it was “Rebekah Vardy’s ……… account” that had leaked the small number of fake stories in question.