Chris Huhne's estranged wife is writing a memoir about their breakup – but is it so clear that she's only motivated by revenge?
The late Gianni Versace apparently believed revenge was best served after seven years. But he is not around to show us his working for this calculation, and a British parliamentary term is a mere five years – the lifespan of a coalition possibly shorter. And so it is that the senior economist Vicky Pryce has this week been painted as a minor Medea because of her views not on the latest threat to the eurozone but about her estranged husband Chris Huhne's driving licence. Over the weekend, claims emerged – confirmed by Pryce but denied by Huhne – that the energy secretary had asked an aide to accept penalty points for a speeding offence on his behalf. It remains moot whether Pryce's intervention was inadvertent, or an acutely timed broadside to coincide with speculation about Huhne's leadership intentions following his party's disastrous local election and referendum results.
For those who employ their own internal gagging order when confronted with headlines relating to the private failings of folk you don't know, the bowdlerised backstory relates to the fact that the Lib Dem minister left his wife last year when a tabloid threatened to expose his long-term affair with a former press officer. Pryce broke her silence in a newspaper interview to publicise the memoir she's writing about their 26-year union, in which she will detail her shock at his betrayal and his "ruthless" behaviour towards his family. It is reported that the book is provisionally entitled 30 Minutes to Kill the Story – which is, allegedly, what her husband told her when media speculation about his infidelity first surfaced.
For many voters Huhne's personal conduct will be less troublesome than his public support for a Conservative minority government. After all, those who behave badly in relationships are not necessarily bad people, or bad politicians, and it is only when it suits a particular agenda that the fourth estate suggests otherwise. But if Huhne's behaviour has been shoe-horned to fit one set of cliches (needy egoist trades in trusted helpmate for younger, racier model once stellar status has been secured), so his wife's moulds to another: the woman scorned. Publicly rinsing one's ex is not, of course, an exclusively female activity, though it is considered a female vice. John Cleese only ever attracts the most ardent of publicity for his current Alimony Tour, allegedly undertaken to fund his divorce settlement.
Linda McDougall, the magic porridge pot of Political Wifely commentary, has congratulated Pryce on her "delicious revenge", while Cristina Odone, at present self-describing as author of The Good Divorce Guide, concluded that she must be happy to be shot of both her husband and her dignity. But the rush to portray her as pseudo-feminist heroine or bitter harridan is a reminder of just how narrow the templates remain, particularly for political wives.
Sally Bercow is just one who has felt the pinch of nonconformity for her giddy candour and refusal to pretend that she and her husband need be political as well as personal bedfellows. But as a generation of homely backroom facilitators has been superseded by partners whose interests extend beyond the constituency fete, the public definition of seemly behaviour has not likewise expanded.
Thus Cherie Blair was placed on a par with Machiavelli and Lady Macbeth in her vaunting ambition. During the last election campaign, both Samantha Cameron and Sarah Brown fostered personas that were independent but unashamedly family-centric, and not above photogenically baking the cookies that Hillary Clinton was once so derided for deriding. Meanwhile, those unwilling or unable to compose the martyr's smile for the cameras next to an adulterous spouse must be measured against the acme of table-turning vengeance, Margaret Cook.
I interviewed Cook a decade ago, at the time of publication of her own memoir. Like Pryce's putative title, it highlighted how cruelly instrumental the exigencies of spin can be. Cook was dumped at Heathrow by her late husband, Robin, as they were about to embark on a holiday. The News of the World was planning to expose the cabinet minister's affair with his secretary, Gaynor Regan, whom he subsequently married, and Alastair Campbell had given him minutes to decide his future.
The book was a catalogue of minor humiliations that dogged Cook until his untimely death in 2005. The index was exemplary: "Cook, Robin: heavy drinking; weight problems; sexual difficulties." But she insisted revenge was not her motive. She had an expansive vision of her universal appeal. "Women were very pleased that I was showing myself as a strong woman and not being shuffled off into the background," she told me.
Pryce also insists she has no desire to wreck Huhne's career but simply wants to warn others of the unique pressures of being a political spouse. That she should wish to write her own role in the public narrative of her relationship's unravelling is understandable. Her private motivations for doing so remain unknowable, perhaps even to herself.
Whether the index of Pryce's memoir is as subtly devastating remains to be seen. It's certainly arguable that to air one's private pain in public is no more demeaning than to foreground one's family for political gain in the first place. And it is a reminder that the templates have yet to catch up with the times when a partner with a corrective opinion about her relationship only ever has room to be raging or redundant. All marriages, and especially their conclusions, are frayed around the edges. As for the best serving of revenge, if at all, that is another question entirely.