Pryce achieved her goal to bring cheating husband down, but private family matters were brutally exposed during two trials
Vicky Pryce maintained she was pressured by Chris Huhne into taking his speeding points because she felt, by refusing, the consequences for her and her family were too great to contemplate. Ten years on those consequences have proved to be immeasurably worse.
During the two trials she was forced to stand, excruciating details of two planned abortions, one proceeded with and one resisted, were exposed under the harsh strip lights of Southwark crown court.
A painfully damaged father-and-son relationship, narrated through private texts, was ripped open for public scrutiny.
A stepdaughter, brought up by the former energy secretary as his own, was forced to testify to his bullying of her mother.
And both Huhne and Pryce's prized reputations and his glittering political career were comprehensively annihilated – by their own hands.
As this drama unfolded over five weeks, the fact it was all sacrificed over three speeding points a decade ago almost defied belief.
Factor in human flaws of naked ambition, hubris, infidelity and vengeance, however, and this most bitter of marital breakdowns had components of a Greek tragedy bar one: there is no hero or heroine here. Today, both must be reflecting on how it had come to this.
It was, Huhne's barrister John Kelsey-Fry told the judge as he unsuccessfully fought to get the case against Huhne dismissed before the trial, a simple case of "scorned woman syndrome".
The trial heard that the true kernel of this sorry saga lay not late at night on 12 March 2003, on the M11 at Chigwell, when the then MEP was clocked speeding on his way home from Stansted airport to Clapham, south London, after a European parliamentary session at Strasbourg.
Rather, its emotional nub lay in the events of Saturday 19 June 2010 when Huhne, 58, midway through the Netherlands v Japan World Cup game Pryce was watching on TV, arrived home to declare a newspaper had discovered his affair with his PR adviser, Carina Trimingham, 46.
He had 20 minutes to write a statement: "I am in a serious relationship with Carina Trimingham and I am separating from my wife."
Pryce was shocked, not least because she believed Trimingham to be a lesbian in a civil partnership.
It had been going on for "a year and a half", said Huhne, according to Pryce, but he had not planned to tell her "for another year and a half" when their youngest son went to university. After delivering this news, he went to the gym.
He ran out of the house with Pryce and their son following and Huhne's warning "don't talk to the newspapers" ringing in their ears, she told the court. And that was that.
If Huhne ever dared to think that was, indeed, that, he had fatally underestimated his wife of 26 years. Hitherto, they were an affluent, aspiring power couple with five children, three of them together, and would seem to have it all, matching each other in sharp intellect as well as ambition.
He was the privately educated Oxford PPE starred first, who from being a financial journalist, on the Guardian among other newspapers, had risen through the City to embark on a political career that would see him become cabinet minister with the Liberal Democrat leadership within his grasp.
Pryce, born Vasiliki Courmouzis in Athens, had built a formidable professional reputation as an economist, holding senior positions at KPMG, Exxon Europe and the Royal Bank of Scotland. She would become the first female chief economist and director general at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, on a salary considerably in excess of £100,000, she said, and a CB, a companion of the order of Bath, "a very high honour", she said, for services to economics.
As an economist and business consultant, she said she earned more than Huhne for most of their marriage. Yet, she told the jury, he regarded her as intellectually inferior. He was "very driven, very ambitious", and "tended to be a bit arrogant". He regarded few people as his superior, and certainly not his wife, she said. "We would be at home and a Newsnight car would be waiting for me and he would be asking, 'Why are they asking you? You do not know anything'," said Pryce in evidence, describing herself as "possibly an intelligent woman".
Pryce felt her career was placed on the "backburner" to allow him to pursue his. She resigned from her cherished Whitehall post when Huhne entered the cabinet to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, taking up the position of senior managing director of FTI, the global business advisory group. Her choice would be to still be a senior civil servant, she has said in interviews. Some even tipped her to become permanent secretary.
But she supported her husband throughout the pursuit of his dream until his bombshell announcement that their marriage was over. During the 2010 election campaign in May his campaign leaflets had proclaimed: "Family matters to me so much – where would we be without them?", alongside photographs of his smiling children and wife. His youngest son, Peter, whose texts laid brutally bare the chasm between the two now – even helped deliver them.
It was Huhne's decision one month later to walk out. It was Pryce's vengeful response thereafter that would lay waste everything they had worked together for.
Three months later, in September 2010, Pryce attended the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool. But she was hurt and furious over newspaper reports at the time, instigated, she believed, by Trimingham, that she was merely a "scorned woman" there to "ruin her husband's conference and his career". "I didn't feel scorned. I was abandoned, badly treated, that's different," she said. People seemed to be "rewriting history" about the marriage breakup, blaming her, she thought.
A month later, Huhne took Trimingham to a state banquet with the Queen at Windsor Castle. Pryce's response was to throw his clothes out of the front door – then tell a newspaper diary what she had done.
Her decision to unleash her full wrath was almost immediate. By November, she was talking to the Mail on Sunday, "peddling a false story" that Huhne, when MEP, had forced one of his constituency aides to take his points. It was untrue and the paper did not publish it.
By March 2011, she was talking to the Sunday Times, confiding to its political editor, Isabel Oakeshott, that it was she, in fact, who had taken Huhne's points.
The problem was Pryce did not want to get prosecuted herself and go on the record. A plan was hatched whereby she would secretly tape record phone conversations with Huhne in the hope he would make an admission.
In those calls, Pryce, pretending to be hounded by the press and with Oakeshott's help, attempted to trap him.
English, she told the jury, was her fourth language – after Greek, French and German. But she had certainly learned to swear proficiently in it, as jurors would discover when listening to the tapes.
In the first three she was aggressive, accusatory, confrontational and provocative. It was not enough. Huhne, a former journalist, was conscious of the profession's darker arts, and too wary to make any admissions on the phone.
In the fourth, and final, call Pryce changed tack. She was less hostile, more conciliatory, seemingly canvassing him for advice on how to deal with the being hounded by a rapacious media. And, in so doing, elicited enough ambiguous responses that would later appear in the media, though it was still not enough to "nail" him.
On 7 May 2011, Pryce signed a confidentiality agreement with the Sunday Times. The following day the newspaper reported her as confirming "rumours" that Huhne had asked "somebody close to him" to take his points. The story was now out there.
There followed an official complaint to Essex police by the Labour MP Simon Danczuk, which triggered Operation Nigella, a full-blown police investigation into not just Huhne, but into his former wife as well.
Huhne fought to prevent his case going before a jury in a series of intense pre-trial hearings, which could only be reported after his dramatic change of plea to guilty on the morning of this trial on 4 February.
The denouement to this long drawn-out drama was finally played out with Pryce standing alone in the dock as the jury delivered its damning verdict on her.
Vengeance had cost Huhne. His career was over, his character trashed. Pryce had, ultimately, achieved her ambition to bring her cheating husband down.
But, with details of her and her children's most private matters brutally exposed in public, and as she now faces the prospect of jail herself, this was truly a pyrrhic victory and one she could never have envisaged she would pay so dearly for.
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