It’s… Coleen Rooney’s account (again). Just a few weeks after her three-part documentary The Real Wagatha Story served up behind-the-scenes tales from her High Court battle with fellow Wag Rebekah Vardy – and detailed the social media sleuthing that prompted her to go after Vardy in the first place – Coleen is returning to the Wagatha Christie scandal in her second autobiography. Her first effort, Welcome to My World, came out when she was about to turn 21 in 2007, the year before she married the then Manchester United footballer Wayne.
But even if you hoovered up every bizarre, gossipy titbit related to the Wagatha saga – and from a crucial piece of evidence falling into the North Sea to a spectacularly unforgiving courtroom sketch of Wayne, they came thick and fast – you’d still be forgiven for wondering: is there really anything left to say? According to Coleen, though, My Account isn’t meant to dish further dirt. Instead, it is more of an exploration of what motivated her to post that initial “J’accuse” in the first place. “I’d like to express my feelings about it and tell my side of the story from beginning to end, then draw a line under it and get on with the rest of my life,” she says in her introduction.
Naysayers might argue that it might be easier to “get on with the rest of [her] life” without the press interest that inevitably accompanies big releases like her documentary and this book. I think that’s an uncharitable reading, though. Throughout My Account, Coleen, a matter-of-fact and often self-effacing narrator, comes across as scrupulously fair and thoughtful, at pains to tell you that she knows the attention around her row with Vardy was “inflated” and “ridiculous”. You get the feeling that she was mortified by accusations that she’d stirred up the Wagatha row for publicity, and wanted to set the record straight at length, without being reduced to a soundbite. “I’m happy tackling more complex subjects if I have time to say my piece,” she writes.
Rooney in her Disney+ documentary ‘The Real Wagatha Story’— (Ben Blackall/Disney+)
From the start, she doubles down on the “honesty, fairness, kindness” inculcated by her bricklayer dad and nurse mum as she grew up in Croxteth, Liverpool; her parents are loving but strict, telling her that she and Wayne will have to sit on opposite sides of the cinema on their first date as teenagers – to see Austin Powers. (The book inadvertently gives some fascinating insights into the young Wayne’s taste in cinema; at one point he asks to borrow Coleen’s VHS copy of Grease, though she concedes this might have been a ploy to get her attention).
Coleen revisits the early days of their relationship, and her first encounters with the media, from a more mature standpoint. Once the tabloids realise that Everton wunderkind Wayne has a girlfriend, photographers snap the 16-year-old on her way to school, dressed in a puffa coat. This attention must have been disorientating, even frightening; later, she recalls learning that one paparazzo had attached a tracker to her car. There isn’t much space afforded to introspection on the subject of the press, although she does voice her frustrations at being reduced to two dimensions: “the shopaholic, the chav made good, the ultimate Wag.” It’s only in an aside that we learn Coleen now has “a phone hacking claim in process” after her barrister David Sherborne tells her he has seen her name “on a list” in connection with hacking (she “can’t say much for legal reasons at the time of writing”, she notes).
Much has been made of the misogyny of Noughties media culture, and My Account does briefly allude to those big red circles that used to ring women’s body parts in magazines, pointing out anything perceived to be a flaw. But the book also gestures towards its class bias. Wayne, his wife writes, received no media training before going on camera as a teen; because he was “a boy from a rough council estate who never finished school”, she says, journalists snidely assumed that “he couldn’t read or write”. She believes that “whatever scrutiny [she] was under, Wayne had tenfold”, and writes candidly about his alcohol issues. “Wayne drinks to be invisible,” she notes while detailing one of his well-publicised indiscretions under the influence. “If there’s too much going on in his head, he’ll drink to blot it all out and disappear from the world.” It’s a subject that Wayne has addressed himself recently, admitting that alcohol became a “release” for him at the start of his career, when he “wouldn’t move out of the house and [would] drink until [he] almost passed out”.
Once we finally arrive at the events preceding the Wagatha affair, when Coleen and her four children are in the United States as her husband plays for DC United, thousands of miles from her tight-knit family, it is easy to why the leaked stories would have so unsettled her. She is so homesick that she hides in the pantry among the jars and tins whenever her young sons video chat with their relatives, because she knows that seeing their pixellated faces on screen will make her cry.
The passages detailing her painstaking social media investigation don’t always come alive on the page – the TV show definitely has the advantage here. And although the trial was covered at length in the Disney doc, there is still a smattering of fresh anecdotes: the moment when the couple had to nip into a pub to get changed before court, after their return flight from Berlin, where son Kai had been playing football, was delayed, for example. Or the light skewering of Wayne’s intense interest in the case, courtesy of her legal team. “Our Wayne’s going to be up there one day,” says one lawyer, while “pointing at the gallery of men in white wigs” in the courtroom restaurant.
Is My Account essential reading for Wagatha scholars? Probably not: the overlap with The Real Wagatha Story is extensive. But it does paint a likeable, if earnest, portrait of the clear-headed woman who’s been at the heart of the media storm (and is ready to move on now, ta very much).
‘My Account’ by Coleen Rooney (Michael Joseph, £22)
