But it escalated, through the tangled, explosive passions of a failed marriage and one partner’s new love affair, into one of the most tawdry political scandals Britain has seen in years.
And it has claimed the political career of an ambitious cabinet minister, Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat who resigned his position as energy and climate change secretary in Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government and his parliamentary seat. He now finds himself facing what the judge in the case has described as the strong likelihood of a prison sentence.
Mr. Huhne’s former wife, Vicky Pryce, a prominent Greek-born economist who was joint head of the Government Economic Service until 2010, may go to prison, too, if a verdict expected this week finds her guilty of perverting the course of justice by falsely certifying that she, and not her husband, was the driver who had been speeding.
That was the offense to which Mr. Huhne (pronounced HEWN) pleaded guilty when the trial began two weeks ago, though he had maintained for years — up to the moment the court sat — that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.
Along the way, the trial veered far from the speeding offense, into painfully intimate details of the couple’s family life, in what some British commentators have described as an egregious invasion of their privacy.
The court has heard that Ms. Pryce, 60, a mother of five, twice faced demands from her husband that she have an abortion, and that she acceded the first time, to her bitter regret. It has been told of her fury and humiliation when Mr. Huhne, who is 58, left her for a female political aide, Carina Trimingham, who was previously in a relationship with another woman.
It heard, too, of her subsequent decision to reveal the speeding ticket switch to one of Britain’s most widely read newspapers, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, in order to “nail” her former husband and “bring Huhne down,” as she expressed it in e-mails shown to the court.
Evidence at the trial showed The Sunday Times aggressively encouraging Ms. Pryce to join in an effort to end Mr. Huhne’s career.
In the e-mails introduced by the prosecution, the paper’s political editor, Isabel Oakeshott, assured Ms. Pryce that going public with the story of the subterfuge over the speeding ticket in front-page articles without naming her as the person who falsely signed as the driver would inflict “maximum, perhaps fatal damage” to Mr. Huhne, by then a minister in the government and in the process of divorcing Ms. Pryce. This, Ms. Oakeshott said, would achieve “the dual purpose of bringing Huhne down, if we can, without seriously damaging your own reputation.”
The evidence also included a string of text messages between Mr. Huhne and the couple’s youngest child, Peter, now a 20-year-old college student. Distressed by what Mr. Huhne had done to his mother, the youth responded to overtures for understanding with expletive-littered repudiations in which he said, “You are the most ghastly man I have ever known,” “I hate you” and “You make me sick.”
The justification given in court for venturing so deeply into the couple’s family life was that Ms. Pryce had employed the rarely used “marital coercion” defense, adopted into English law in 1925. Using this as a plea, a woman can be found not guilty of any crime other than treason or murder if she can show she committed it under coercion from her husband while he was physically present.
Ms. Pryce asserts that her husband pressured her insistently to take the blame for the speeding violation, while the prosecution has argued that she was a willing partner in the subterfuge and constructed her account of the episode out of a desire for revenge for her husband’s affair and his abrupt ending of their 25-year marriage, shortly after he became a minister.
That has made the entire sweep of the couple’s troubled marriage and divorce an open book in court, in a way that has made allies of powerful groups that have not always seen eye to eye. Among those are women’s rights advocates deeply sympathetic to Ms. Pryce and people critical of the judiciary for leaping to the defense of individuals’ privacy rights in some cases and for adopting a seeming indifference to the same rights in others.
One commentator, David Aaronovitch of The Times of London, compared the court revelations about the Huhne-Pryce marriage with the outrage stirred in Britain last week by the publication in Europe of photographs of the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge walking in a bikini along a Caribbean beach with her husband, Prince William. Everything revealed in the court about Mr. Huhne’s and Ms. Pryce’s private lives, he said, has been “published, republished, reported and analyzed and — frankly — gloated over by sections of society who sneer at beach shots.”
The case before the London court began late one night in March 2003 when a police camera captured a black BMW 7 Series traveling south to London from Stansted Airport at 69 miles per hour on a stretch of highway with a 50 m.p.h. limit.
Mr. Huhne, a former journalist for The Financial Times who later made millions of dollars in his own investment consultancy, would have been fined $100 if he had acknowledged being the driver. But with three other speeding offenses in the previous 14 months, he faced the loss of his license for a year and told his wife there would be serious consequences for his hopes, ultimately successful, to win a parliamentary seat in a general election in 2005.
Ms. Pryce said she had rejected Mr. Huhne’s demands to name herself as the BMW’s driver, only to discover, from a summons in her name that arrived at their London home, that he had gone ahead and named her in response to the initial police notice.
She told the court that he had confronted her in the hallway of their home, holding the summons, waving a pen and saying, “You’ve absolutely got to sign this now.” She said she had done so, “feeling that I absolutely had no choice.” Mr. Huhne has denied that, or that he applied unfair pressure on his wife.
It is on that moment that the case now hinges. The prosecution counsel, Andrew Edis, said in closing arguments that Ms. Pryce was one of Britain’s “most powerful, talented, intelligent women,” not “the quivering jelly kind,” and that she had made a free choice in accepting responsibility for the speeding offense.
But Ms. Pryce’s defense lawyer, Julian Knowles, told the court that Ms. Pryce, “a woman of integrity,” had the same frailties as any other woman. “She is not a superwoman,” he said. “They exist only in comic books. Everyone has a breaking point, everyone makes mistakes, has moments of weakness and can be worn down.”
NYT
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