My drama-filled call with Rebekah Vardy that blew up her row with Coleen Rooney – and how I know they’ll NEVER forgive each other. Read ALISON BOSHOFF’s definitive Wagatha account

So Coleen is in the jungle, Becky is living like a queen in Dubai, and the Wagatha Christie saga that has entertained us so richly since October 9, 2019 is back in the news.

I’m A Celebrity starts on Sunday and one of the big questions it can answer will be whether Ms Rooney has overcome the experience of being taken to court by Becky Vardy over that infamous ‘It’s… Rebekah Vardy’s account’ tweet .

I had a role to play in the drama that unfolded and can say with confidence that neither woman will ever forgive the other for the events that brought them to justice in the summer of 2022.

The legal action over Coleen’s costs, which Becky must pay as the losing party, continues. Becky says the costs are ridiculous – Coleen says it’s because she’s made the case so complicated. “It’s her shit” is the attitude.

There is still a vivid revulsion, resentment and, in Coleen’s own inimitable words, she remains ‘fewmin’ about the painful way it played out.

ITVX is now streaming the three-part Disney+ documentary, made just after the case concluded when Becky lost her defamation suit.

In it, Coleen steadily and calmly explains for almost two and a half hours how she suspected a ‘sneak’ into selling information from her private Instagram to The Sun, and how she set a trap to catch her ‘traitor’. .

It is remarkable to see how the affair, which was perceived by the media and the public as an absurdly entertaining spectacle, was very serious and very traumatic for her. She cries as she recalls the toll the business, which she was warned she would likely lose at some point, took on her, and how her father said she “wasn’t herself anymore.”

I’m sitting in the doctor’s office discussing the day, October 10, when Becky Vardy called me from her holiday in Dubai and famously said that ‘arguing with Coleen is like arguing with a pigeon.’ You can say you’re right and you can say it’s wrong, but it still shits in your hair.’

It was a sentence so extraordinary that I wasn’t quite sure if I had heard it right and I couldn’t imagine for a moment how I would write the word pigeon in shorthand. But it was typical of Becky, as combative as they are, even in that vulnerable moment.

I came to interview Becky after a series of run-ins with her agent, Caroline Watt.

You may recall that Caroline was not well enough to appear in court to explain how her phone had been knocked out of her hands into the North Sea, causing the loss of evidence about it.

A number of text messages between Caroline and Becky came to light in court, including a conversation in which Becky asked Caroline to leak a story about a football colleague of her husband Jamie’s and told her: ‘I want to pay for this.’ In another conversation, Caroline mocked Coleen’s complaint that someone she ‘trusted’ had sold stories about her, telling Becky: ‘It wasn’t someone she trusted. It was me.’ Coleen’s lawyer David Sherborne memorably argued that if you buy a gun, load it and hand it to someone else to shoot, you are guilty.

Caroline wasn’t a professional publicist – she was a friend of Becky’s who did the work – and when I wrote an unflattering profile of Becky a few years earlier, she was absolutely livid and emailed me to tell me what she thought of me in a tantalizingly personal way. conditions.

We had a back and forth conversation and then spoke again a few times whenever Becky was in the headlines, such as when she made her own journey into the jungle from I’m A Celebrity. Caroline believed that Becky was the victim of difficult family circumstances and married to some rotten men, and that it was unfair to characterize her as greedy, ambitious or fashionable.

After the Wagatha tweet I asked Caroline if Becky would agree to an interview and she said Becky had decided she would only talk to me because people would know I wasn’t a fan of hers so it would be an honest article .

As I waited for the call, I wondered what on earth she would have to say for herself. Coleen’s tweet described a carefully executed mission to find a mole among her group of friends. How could Becky get out of this?

Becky was clearly upset and spent a lot of time crying about being seven months pregnant and being cheated on. She desperately wanted the public flogging to stop – most of the conversation was about how terrible this was for her.

Becky told me: ‘I thought she was my friend, but she completely destroyed me. Coleen said, ‘You know, I’ve always really liked you, which makes it harder.'”

Becky was confident that she could prove that she was not to blame through a forensic cyber expert.

I asked her if anyone on her team, like Caroline, or a family member, could be to blame and she said no, absolutely not. She did say that many people had access to her Instagram account.

She said she was particularly baffled by Coleen’s motivation, saying: ‘I wonder if there is more to this than meets the eye. If someone wants to make something like this public, there must be something bigger behind it.

“I keep thinking about it and trying to figure it out. It’s like trying to figure out how someone does a magic trick. I don’t know what the reason is; If I had the answer, I would be over the moon.”

She added, “I don’t have any hatred or bitterness. She did what she thought was necessary. That was her decision and she will have to live with it.’

I asked if she wanted an apology. “I guess this goes beyond an apology, right?” She said with absolute guts in her voice. I knew at that moment that there would be some sort of legal consequence. Becky disastrously dug herself in and brought a defamation case that turned out to be a huge tactical blunder. She still insists that she wasn’t the traitor and that Coleen – the shit pigeon of her metaphor – is the real bad guy who ruined her life.