Hearing about Coleen Rooney signing up for the new series of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! (launching tonight) was a surprise. It’s such a classic “footballer’s wife” move. One former IACGMOOH campmate is Rebekah Vardy (wife of Jamie, striker for Leicester City), who took part in 2017 – the very woman Rooney defeated in the infamous 2022 Wagatha Christie libel trial.
However Rooney, wife of former England and Manchester United player Wayne, is not a typical footballer’s wife. Self-contained, reserved, something of a working-class queen, the mother of four is the antithesis of the red-carpet “plus one”. She barely did the Wag thing, except at big tournaments, and even then without the designer gusto of others with their Brazilian blow-dries and Gucci heels, rather smiling serenely in the spectator box like a Premier League Eva Perón.
It seems strange to think of Rooney in Australia hunkering down with campmates (including Love Island’s Maura Higgins, Coronation Street’s Alan Halsall and McFly’s Danny Jones), chewing through witchetty grubs, emptying the nightmarish camp dunny. This is a woman who’s been warding off media intrusion for most of her adult life. How is it going to feel to invite it all in?
Of course there’s the incentive of the plump paycheque. Rooney is being paid a record fee, reportedly more than £1.5m. More than for either former pandemic health secretary Matt Hancock (who appeared in 2022) or now-MP and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, the divisive political figure whose signings prompted much criticism for ITV. Farage, in particular, provoked a backlash, with two million fewer viewers tuning in to watch last year’s launch show.
Now here’s Rooney, 38, who’s at an interesting pivotal point in her life and career – one that, arguably for the first time, is wholly and indisputably about her. How will the hyper-private and rigidly controlled Coleen Rooney deal with that?
That said, Rooney is no fame rookie. Since becoming engaged as a Merseyside A-level student to Wayne at a petrol station in 2003, she’s built her own multimillion-pound fortune in branding deals with the likes of Asda and Littlewoods. Her “luxury item” for the I’m a Celebrity camp is reported to comprise collagen sachets from Applied Nutrition, for which she just happens to be brand ambassador.
However, it was in 2019 that Rooney’s quasi-forensic Wagatha sleuthing (erupting with her Instagram post accusing Vardy of selling stories about her to the media) propelled her into a whole new cultural orbit. What could be termed Wagatha Inc has since sparked a book, a play, a 2022 Channel 4 drama (Vardy V Rooney: A Courtroom Drama) starring Michael Sheen, and a 2023 Disney+ docuseries, Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story (now to be shown on on ITVX and ITV2).
If Wagatha is now sucked as dry as a half-time orange, one senses it isn’t over for Vardy (as the Sun’s guest columnist on Friday she said that she hopes Rooney eats “bull’s penis, ostrich bum and humble pie” in the jungle). Wagatha also ushered in a New Age of Coleen, in which she became recalibrated in the public eye as composed, clever, determined. Yet, for all that, still curiously unknowable. Even in the docuseries, Rooney’s most intimate venture yet, she comes across as a shyly smiling sphinx: sweet but guarded, consummately self-protective, as if poised waiting for the media to take a bite out of her again.
If so, she could hardly be blamed. Beyond Wagatha, Rooney’s core brand is the quintessential girl next door, the glossy end of ordinary, but at times it’s turned dark. If there’s any doubt that the British class system is still going strong in the 21st century, one only has to recall the snobbery meted out to the Rooneys’ 2008 multimillion-pound wedding (aided by a reputed £2.5m deal from OK! magazine); to the choice of band (Westlife), the food (pizza), Coleen’s three dresses and white stilettos; to the ceremony n Portofino, Italy. There were barely any famous guests, the couple asked for no gifts – just donations to a Liverpool children’s hospice. Still, the wedding was portrayed by some as a full-on “chav” circus.
Fast-forward through the years, and some of the same attitudes trickled through during the Wagatha trial. While certain details were irresistible (handily misplaced smartphones; poor Peter Andre’s “chipolata”), it didn’t take long for a retro whiff of Battle of the Chavs to start weaving its way in.
It is, after all, how certain sectors of the British press and public like to think of women of working-class origin – that, when push comes to shove, they’re as common as muck, and you can goad them into a cat fight.
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Never mind that Rooney has publicly stated she didn’t like how Vardy was trolled. Nor that, for her, Wagatha hinged on the fundamental matter of protecting her family’s privacy. Nor even that Coleen Mary McLoughlin, as she was, came from a loving close-knit family, and before leaving school to be with Wayne, she was a bright schoolgirl who got 10 GCSEs. But who needs such trifling details when there’s a fight going down between two Wags, and all that popcorn and schadenfreude to enjoy?
Rooney’s ordinary-girl appeal may be where things get sticky for her on I’m a Celebrity. In this specific stratum of fame, it’s all about monetising your relatability, the dark art of “opening up”, which doesn’t seem to be her strength at all. How could it be when she is a walking mass of scar tissue? Chiefly from the various media frenzies surrounding her husband’s various past infidelities, including drunken trips to brothels.
For Rooney, this resulted in a dual media profile: on the one hand, our long-suffering lady of the football premiership; on the other, the calculating gold digger who couldn’t bear to give up her “glamorous lifestyle” … of what? Full-time motherhood and flexitime tabloid abuse? Years on, was any of the mockery, castigation and judgment warranted? Was it motherhood, or, more precisely her powerful sense of family, that kept Rooney in the marriage at that point?
Even as Rooney went into the jungle, there were reports of her attempting to micromanage her sons’ lives while she was away, to the point of leaving detailed instructions on a whiteboard. How many mothers arched a weary knowing brow hearing of such dogged remote mum-ing and near-militaristic future-proofing? It is in such details you sense you’re getting the clearest view yet of Rooney’s true core values and non-negotiables.
For his part, is Wayne – now managing Plymouth Argyle – still the dark blot of Coleen’s story? Arguably he underwent his own reputational New Man-rehab during the Wagatha trial: supporting his wife, even carrying her tote bag into court as she struggled with an injured foot. Against considerable odds, something strong and sweet is emerging from their couple dynamic that isn’t always a given with high-profile football couples. Is it just me, or does David Beckham sometimes give off the air that he thinks he’s better than his wife? If this once also seemed true of Wayne, it doesn’t any more. You get the impression the Rooneys respect and support each other, that they have a marriage of equals.
As for Rooney’s reality TV adventure, shows like I’m a Celebrity run on Big Personalities. Despite her eye-watering fee, it is quite feasible she is considered too quiet and stiff (and, worse, discreet) and gets booted off early. Though arguably she earned her fee before she even set foot into camp – in that her involvement, and the attention it’s attracted, has amounted to a reality television laundering of the show’s increasingly dubious flirtation with controversial politicos.
Still, you can’t help wondering whether, if Strictly Come Dancing hadn’t been mired in sundry difficulties, it might have been a better (less personally exposing) fit for the desperately private Mrs Rooney.
Or is this tough, resourceful canny Coleen being underestimated yet again? And there’s nothing to stop her turning her flavour of glowed-up ultra-ordinary into an even bigger brand. Wagatha Christie showed another side of Rooney – that she isn’t so neutral or vanilla, that this most atypical of footballers’ wives had bite. The jungle may reveal yet another.