JAN MOIR: There are losers, bad losers - and Rebekah Vardy

There are losers, there are bad losers and then there is Rebekah Vardy, who is in a loser class of her own.

If Rebekah were competing at the Flop Olympics, Eddie the Eagle would be pinning the Golden Dud medal on her impressive embonpoint as we speak.

She'd be breasting the tape in the All-Comers Stupidity Sprint, she'd be trouncing the opposition in her speciality event, the Fingers-In-Ears La-La-La Hope-For-The-Best High Jump.

And just watch that girl gallop ahead in the Turkeys Who Vote For Christmas Trot. First past the post again! There is just no stopping her.

Ever since the Wagatha Christie saga began in 2019, Rebekah has shown a chronic lack of common sense fortified by a doomed resolve to prove her 'innocence'.

This is despite all evidence to the contrary, including text messages from her which read, 'I would love to leak those stories' and 'I want paying for this'.

Let's all stroke our chins in a united Sherlockian gesture, while wisely nodding our heads. Hmmmm.

When Coleen Rooney publicly outed her as the person selling stories to newspapers about her private life, Vardy sued for libel – and lost. She was then ordered to pay a share of Rooney's £1.8 million costs.

Add this sum to her own legal bills and Rebekah soon found herself paying north of £3million to turn herself into a national laughing stock and I can't say we didn't all enjoy the spectacle.

Now she has gone back to court to challenge Rooney's legal costs – and has lost again. Indeed, instead of getting some money back, Mrs Vardy has had to shell out even more cash.

The judge told her lawyers she must hand over a sum of £100,000 to her former friend-turned- nemesis. If this carries on, her poor husband, Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, will have to keep playing until he's 100 to tackle her legal bills.

Still. The intransigence is impressive, even if hard to understand. Why carry on? Why not gracefully accept defeat and get on with your charmed life?

The law decided that on the balance of probability Rebekah was indeed the mole, but even the dimmest moles know to stop digging when they are in a big hole.

Meanwhile, many of us personally know a budgerigar capable of better strategic thinking than Rebekah, possibly even two of them. And if such a comparison is rude to budgies, I apologise.

What I liked best was that part of Vardy's ire focused on the fact that during the libel trial some of Rooney's lawyers had stayed in the five-star Nobu hotel in London. They had also used the mini-bar – how very dare they.

Behold the outrage of a woman who recently stayed at a £7,000-a- night resort in Thailand, carries a £10,000 Birkin as a matter of course and wears £800 trainers just because.

With that kind of attitude – do as I say, not as I do – surely a Downing Street pass and a role as chief adviser to Keir Starmer can't be far off.

Despite the new claims brought by Vardy, the court decided there was no financial misconduct – a Premier Inn nearby was charging the same nightly rate – and anyway, the only items taken from the mini-bar were bottles of water.

Read More

JAN MOIR: I'd feel sorrier for Phillip Schofield if he didn't feel so sorry for himself

I don't know why no one ever managed to convince Vardy that issuing proceedings was a bad idea. I don't know who advises her or even if she is minded to listen to any advice at all.

Those voices that come rushing into her head, that bubbling babble in the wee small hours? That doesn't count.

And neither do the galpals who urge her to go for it, babes, after a few Vimtos and an encouraging bottle of rosé or two.

People such as Vardy, people whose celebrity and wealth give them a misplaced sense of security and self-righteousness, have no idea of the gravity of the business of law.

Litigation is expensive. Challenging legal costs is expensive. Yes, by all means embark upon this path if you burn with injustice and absolutely know you are in the right. However, surely on some level, she must have known she was in the wrong.

Yet she was the one who dragged this whole mess into court, she was the one who insisted ongoing to trial, she was the one who instigated these ruinous proceedings.

And if you activate all that, is it really your place then to turn around and complain about your opponent's lawyers' mini-bar bills?

One supposes you can be as foolish as you like when your indulgent husband earns £7.2 million a year and you can always pick up a few bob from a reality show yourself, but even Rebekah's kind of stupid has its limits – and its price.

She lost before, now she has lost again, and no doubt she will keep on losing because she's on a Wagtastic lifelong losing streak.

She reminds me of the Black Knight in Monty Python's The Holy Grail film, the chump of a stump who fights on despite losing both arms: 'Tis but a scratch!

And then both legs: A mere flesh wound! Come back here and take what's coming to you!

And it is still not over. The Wagatha case is set to return to court next year for a line-by-line assessment of costs, with some rulings yet to be made.

Yes, Rebekah might claw back something, but the money she expends in doing so will surely cancel out any financial gains.

Dear God, what an utter waste of the court's time, everybody's time, my time and your time.

Florida is ravaged, the Middle East is on fire, the Labour Government is going to bankrupt the country and James Blunt is re-releasing his debut album.

Life is happening elsewhere, Rebekah! And when will the realisation dawn that while you carry on losing, it is only the lawyers who win.

A shockingly good feeling

At Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, I saw a preview performance of Oedipus, Robert Icke’s modern-day adaptation of the Sophocles tragedy. It stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, runs for two hours straight without an interval and is such an intense experience I was still trembling when I got home.

In a recent interview, Manville described it as ‘a slow-boiling pot of water and it just gets hotter and hotter, revelation after revelation, an epic play’.

She wasn’t kidding. From the moment Oedipus (Strong) first kisses his wife Jocasta (Manville) onstage, the tension builds and builds towards the mother of all exposures. Of course, the audience know the terrible, incestuous truth about their relationship and can only look on in queasy horror as events unfold.

Yet what makes this night so special is that it takes place in the sanctity of a proper theatre: a place where mobile phones, interruptions and random chatter are forbidden. A place where people, generally, still know how to behave.

Theatres are just about the last public spaces left where audiences can still enjoy the purity of a collective experience; of being in the moment together, focused as one on – in this case – the unbearable, unfolding horror. It is becoming a rare occurrence – and therefore so much more precious.

‘Everyone is cruel,’ says Oedipus at one point, ‘it’s just that children are more honest about it.’ We all gasped at the monstrous truth of that. Together.

At the age of 51, television star Miranda Hart has found true love at last – with the building surveyor who came around to fix her mould during the pandemic.

Oh, I do love a bit of old-fashioned romance! And a man who knows what to do when he spots a damp patch. ‘I’ve got my best friend to do life with and that is wonderful,’ said Miranda, who secretly married her mystery man. It is all so wonderful!

At moments like this, only a classic love poem by Lord Byron will suffice. As the great bard almost wrote:

He walks in beauty, like

a summer

Of cloudless climes and

starry skies;

Fair maidens everywhere hail this greatest prize

A hunky handyman-

cum plumber

Congratulations, Miranda!

Renters' rights... a wicked distortion of the truth

On Wednesday, the Renters’ Rights Bill debate in Parliament was a depressing affair. Labour MP after Labour MP stood up to applaud the Bill, each of them citing the terrible cruelties inflicted by wicked landlords on their les pauvres constituents.

According to them, there was no end of single mothers thrown on the streets by evil landlords, legions of children in rags crying in the rain with only a leaky pram to call home.

Cripples were being kicked all over the shop while dutiful sons were unable to protect their apple pie-baking grandmothers from no-fault evictions. There was mould, there was widespread damp, there were probably rickets and scurvy, too. They painted a picture of Dickensian horror, Gin Lane levels of deprivation. And when they weren’t going on about Little Match Girls begging for a lump of coal outside one of Jeremy Hunt’s rentals, the righteous Labour MPs were frothing about the ‘vested interests’ of the previous government.

Renters need protections against rogue landlords, agreed. But this Bill – which Angela Rayner has promised to push through – takes it to extremes. If a dodgy crackhead with three kids, no visible means of support and a pet boa constrictor wants to rent your property, landlords will have no choice in the matter. By being motivated by bitter ideology instead of good sense and by punishing bad landlords instead of helping good landlords, all the Government is doing is making rented properties scarcer.

Many private landlords will either sell up or shut up shop, reducing the housing stock available. They don’t need the hassle!

Meanwhile, the mega-rich have already put their properties up for sale and have moved away. This Government is on track to crash the property market which will, in turn, crash the economy. God, they are utterly terrifying.

Huw Edwards’ wife has filed for divorce and put their £4.7 million family home in South London on the market. It’s a lovely property, with tasteful French Grey windows, a 26 ft kitchen and oak floors. There is a mature garden, six bedrooms and tragedy seeping through the walls. No more family dinners in the charming dining area, no cosy nights watching films together in the TV nook. He has been disgraced; his wife is devastated and life as he knew it is over. What a tragedy for his family, for his victims and yes, for him, too. What a sad mess he has made of his once-shining life. 

No matter how successful, adored and famous a pop star becomes, there will always be a grump in the corner moaning that they can't see what all the fuss is about. Usually that grump is me, but not when it comes to Taylor Swift. I love Taylor's songs and her admirable, demented work ethic, which crested this month with the release of two new albums — The Tortured Poets Department and The Anthology — both written, recorded and made while she is in the middle of her worldwide Eras tour, performing on stage for three straight hours at every show.