Back in October 2019, the whole of Britain temporarily dropped everything in order to obsess over a single tweet, sent without warning by the wife of former England soccer captain Wayne Rooney.
In the tweet, Coleen Rooney calmly explained that one of her Instagram followers had been selling stories about her to The Sun. And to smoke out the rat, Coleen had blocked all but one account from viewing her Instagram stories. She then created an elaborate litany of fictitious woes about flooded basements and car crashes and attempts to gender-select her next baby—to see whether this single viewer would leak them to the press. They did. The tweet ended with an explosive, and now legendary, accusation: “It’s ……….Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
