There have been many moments from the Wagatha Christie trial, which has dominated the news this past week, that will remain bound in the public’s consciousness forevermore. 

There’s Rebekah’s observation that arguing with Coleen was like “arguing with a pigeon” being read out in the High Court. “You can tell it that you are right and it is wrong, but it’s still going to shit in your hair,” the quote concluded. There was Coleen’s response when asked why she wasn’t bothered about crashing her Honda 4x4: “I’m not a snob,” she said. “It wasn’t because it wasn’t a nice car.” There’s been tears, melodrama and public hysteria. 

Instead of attending court on the final day of the trial last Thursday, Coleen and Wayne boarded a plane to take their children on holiday, leaving Vardy to appear alone. An apparent sign they felt they had done all they could in the courtroom. Or simply, that they didn’t care.

We, the public, have watched the daily reporting, the paparazzi pictures and the court sketches spill out of this trial with astonishment, glee and horror – hooked and hungry for more. “Rebekah Vardy calling Coleen Rooney a c*nt for unfollowing her on Instagram, I honestly have no idea why this trial isn’t being broadcast on big screens outside pubs like the Wimbledon final,” read one viral tweet, while the BBC’s documental It’s… Wagatha Christie podcast has remained one of the country’s most popular. 

If, however, you need a recap, then let me oblige: the case dates back three years to when Coleen Rooney logged onto Twitter to reveal she was the mastermind of a sting operation. She had narrowed down the person selling stories about her to the press through her Instagram stories, revealing the alleged culprit to her followers with the dramatic line: ‘… it’s Rebekah Vardy’s account’. This led writer and comedian Dan Atkinson to term Rooney ‘WAGatha Christie’, a phrase now cemented in all our minds and news cycles. He has since called this phenomenon a “WAGalanche’.

Still, could anyone have predicted that these two women would actually go to court? That they would willingly air their grievances, WhatsApp messages and snarky comments so publicly? “I certainly didn’t anticipate this trial would reach the level of public interest it has,” says media lawyer Antonia Foster, whose firm Carter-Ruck deals with defamation cases. “If, like me, you hadn’t followed the initial reveal by Coleen, you wouldn’t know about what happened at all. But the fact of the proceedings culminating in a High Court trial, means now, there’s no chance of that. It’s more widely reported than ever before.”