Revenge of the spurned wife

WHEN Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce appear before Westminster Magistrates’ Court later this month, every divorced person who has considered chopping the sleeves from a suit or trashing the Porsche with a nine-iron will have food for thought. This is where an act of revenge can lead.

Both have been charged with perverting the course of justice – maximum sentence life imprisonment – over a 2003 speeding penalty. Huhne allegedly asked Pryce, then his wife, to say she was behind the wheel when the offence took place. Almost a decade later, after the couple’s toxic split in 2010, it has started a chain of events that could put them both in jail. It will almost certainly end Huhne’s political career and kill Pryce’s political ambitions, as well as tarnishing her reputation as a high-powered economist (never mind the damage that seeing their parents in court will do to the couple’s three children).

Huhne has already jumped out of the Cabinet before he was pushed. The Energy Secretary handed the Prime Minister his resignation on Friday, claiming to be innocent but wanting to “avoid distraction”. But it is the personal rather than the political that fascinates in this story of love, lies and various shades of deceit. Sexual and relationship therapist Sue Maxwell, who has counselled many warring couples, says that such extreme revenge is unusual, “unless the woman has been very, very victimised by her partner. Most walk away”.

The difference here is that, when a Cabinet minister and a well-connected civil servant divorce, the stakes are so much higher, the possibilities so much more enticing. Why have a moan to your pals on Facebook when you can discredit your ex on the front page of a Sunday broadsheet?

We are told that, on 12 March, 2003, Huhne, an MEP at the time, flew home from Strasbourg to Stansted airport in Essex. His flight landed at 10.23pm. As an MEP, he was entitled to a free car-park pass. Pryce, who was then chief economic adviser at the Department of Trade and Industry, had been speaking on a panel at the London School of Economics, in central London, around 40 miles from Stansted. Afterwards she went to a dinner with LSE staff, which finished around 10pm.

Huhne’s car was caught speeding in a temporary 30mph zone on the M11. With three more points on his licence, the MEP, who was campaigning for a seat in Westminster, would have been banned. He allegedly asked Pryce to say she was driving. His wife, who had been tirelessly supportive throughout her husband’s political career, posted off her driving licence and that, those involved presumably thought, was that.

He duly became the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh and, aged 50, set about a mid-life assault on the corridors of power. Had the ambitious, impatient Huhne stayed faithful to the woman who funded his transformation from a financial journalist to city millionaire and, eventually, successful politician, the rumours of a female aide allegedly taking his speeding rap would have remained one of the great unfounded yarns of the House of Commons tearoom.

Instead Huhne began an affair with media consultant Carina Trimingham, one of his campaign team when he ran for the party leadership in 2007. Pryce, who had not suspected any funny business, was watching the World Cup at home in 2010 when she heard a phone ring in another room. It was the News of the World, telling Huhne it was about to run the story. He waited until half time to tell his wife of 26 years that he had “30 minutes to kill the story”. Their marriage was over and he would be drafting a statement to that effect, releasing it to the media and then going to the gym. And that’s what he did.

The speeding points rumour surfaced as part of the prurient coverage of a Cabinet minister’s affair with a bisexual member of his staff, but came to nothing. Pryce, understandably devastated both at the end of her marriage and the way she heard about it, kept her head down and comforted her five children (three with Huhne and two from her first marriage). She had already decided to quit her prestigious job, as joint head of the Government Economic Service, when Huhne became a Cabinet minister, fearing a conflict of interest. (After the split, civil servants from Vince Cable’s office would warn her when Huhne was visiting the department so she could leave the building.) Even though, with the end of her marriage, any potential conflict disappeared, she left anyway. She is now senior managing director of a financial consultancy.

Huhne continued his political career, noisily campaigning for a Yes vote in the Alternative Vote (AV) referendum, positioning himself for another shot at the party leadership (he also stood against Charles Kennedy in 2005) should the coalition disintegrate. Then, last year, Pryce told the Sunday Times that her ex-husband had asked someone “close to him” to take the penalty points, so he could keep his licence. Later on, it was alleged that she was the person he asked.

Labour MP Simon Danczuk made a complaint to Essex Police, who questioned both Huhne and Pryce twice and spent eight months gathering evidence including Pryce’s sworn affidavit to the Sunday Times, a tape recording of Pryce and Huhne allegedly discussing the claims, text messages between Huhne and his son Peter, in which they are believed to have referred to the case, and emails from Pryce to a Sunday Times journalist. This amounts to what Keir Starmer, the director of Public Prosecutions, describes as “sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against both Mr Huhne and Miss Pryce for perverting the course of justice”.

And now two highly intelligent public figures in their 50s, with five children between them, are facing possible imprisonment. Huhne’s political career is rubble, not over a point of principle or ideological fault-line but the fallout of an ugly, painful divorce. In revealing her husband as, allegedly, the kind of person who not only breaks the speed limit but expects someone else to clean up the mess, Pryce has also damaged her own career prospects, status and family life.

The desire for revenge is, says Maxwell, “a powerful emotion. It’s a reaction people have that is beyond awareness, they just do something and don’t know why. They feel better about themselves for a brief moment but it’s a perfunctory process. They then realise what the backlash will be.”

So the adrenaline surge that would have come from trashing her husband’s political dreams would be short-lived. Pryce has not commented on the criminal charges. Her plans for a tell-all book entitled Thirty Minutes To Kill The Story, announced at the same time as the penalty points revelation, seem to have been quietly forgotten.

Many wronged women favour one cathartic grand gesture. The man who compared his lady friend’s bottom, unfavourably, to Pippa Middleton’s soon discovered IS PIPPAS [sic] BUM STILL BETTER THAN MINE??? sprayed in paint on his car. “Cheating bastard”, “expert liar” “hope she was worth it” and “this man can gamble but he can’t pay child support” are just some of the home truths painted by angry wives on straying husbands’ vehicles.

Lady Sarah Graham-Moon didn’t stop at trashing the BMW. She famously cut the sleeves off 32 of her unfaithful husband’s Savile Row suits, then redistributed 70 bottles of his vintage claret around the village. Pamella Bordes marked her split with newspaper editor Andrew Neil by shredding the crotch of all his trousers.

The internet has opened whole new avenues for revenge. Anyone with access to embarrassing snaps and their ex’s password can do significant damage from the comfort of their own laptop. Changing his Facebook relationship status to “serial adulterer”, posting a cringe-inducing photo-montage on YouTube, with a suitable soundtrack, then emailing the link to everyone on his contacts list are the 21st-century options. The wronged party can then go to one of the many post-divorce chat rooms and tell everyone else about it. Like the American woman who reported her husband’s illegal cable box to HBO, informed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives about his unlicensed weapons, closed their joint bank account after he paid in his wages, bombarded his new girlfriend with religious tracts about the wrongs of adultery and fornication, and forwarded her the results of her ex’s HIV test. He was positive.

Some dumped political wives do stretch out the process of revenge. Margaret Cook, emptied by Labour foreign secretary Robin in Heathrow’s VIP lounge, wrote a newspaper column and two toe-curling memoirs detailing her ex’s sexual inadequacies, weight problems and fondness for the bottle. His affair, divorce and these revelations were not, however, what ended his political career; he resigned from the Blair Cabinet over the Iraq war. When Edwina Currie divulged her affair with John Major in her memoirs, it was not because he broke her heart by choosing to stay with Norma. Any pain was long forgotten by the time she banked her advance. It was because he did not acknowledge her, giving her barely a paragraph in his own biography. That was what hurt.

For Pryce, Maxwell thinks that subsuming her own ambitions to help her husband’s career may have been festering since before 2003. “Agreeing to take those penalty points implies that this woman has been submissive and subservient. She appears to be a modern woman, she is probably quite a feminist, but there was something there that didn’t allow her equal responsibility and recognition.

“His rights became more important than hers.”

And while Huhne is not exactly a slacker – he has a first in PPE from Oxford – on paper it is his wife who is Cabinet material. When they met he was a financial journalist; they used her private income to transform him into a city player. Together they became a formidable unit, holding an annual party for 200 of the capital’s most important and influential people. He was elected to Strasbourg in 1999 while she continued to work as an economist at the highest level, moving between the private sector, civil service and academia, taking just six weeks off after the birth of each of her children. There has never been, she has noted pointedly on several occasions, a female Chancellor of the Exchequer. There can be few women – or men – with a better CV for the job.

“Their relationship has,” says Maxwell, “a lack of equality. She has had to let go of some of her personal power, things that matter to her. To maintain his public profile she has had to give up things that she wanted to do, to fill in the gaps left by his career, to look after everything.”

These are the compromises and decisions a couple makes behind the closed door of a marriage. Huhne’s mistake was to think that, after the vicious end of that marriage, the same deal would apply. And while Maxwell is sure that Pryce now regrets her actions, it’s too late. The damage is done. It is up to the courts to decide how high a price everyone involved might have to pay.