Vicky Pryce is guilty

[UnexpectedItemInShaggingArea]

The person I feel the most sympathy for is the son.Family life destroyed for him forever by two selfish , calculating,vengeful & devious so called 'parents' who wanted him aborted.I hope the pair of them both go down because they both lied, committed crimes of varying degrees & are a disgrace. All the more reason divorce laws should be amended.

I'm gobsmacked at how many posters seem to think "tough independent intelligent woman" can't be a victim of domestic abuse. Isn't marital coercion simply emotional abuse under another name? Isnt pressurising a woman into an abortion she doesn't want EA?

I totally believe her - but she was an idiot for going down the revenge route.

debs8 Yes I do feel sympathy for the son, indeed all their children. I don't think you can say it was the case that both parents wanted an abortion when Pryce ultimately refused to go ahead with it.

sympathy for her?

she took the points.

she then flogged the story of her lawbreaking to the press in an act of vengence

she has been found guilty of doing so, despite a dubious attempt to avoid this.

she will have to pay the penalty

how about her repaying the taxpayer for the cost of her lawbreaking, court time etc.

i do feel sorry for her kids for what has been dragged out through the court case- but again that was her choice to do so.

I don't even believe that his job depended on passing on his points. He wouldn't have been the first MP or person in the public eye to be banned from driving for a while and had to use a driver and/or taxis. He just couldn't be bothered to deal with the fallout from his crime, and having no regard for his wife apparently, thought nothing of sticking them on her licence instead.

I am also very about the prosecution team suddenly bringing VP's friend Constance Briscoe into the mix, again at the last minute. Why wait that late? Unless it was a last stab in the dark and attempt to hurt her even more.

Now the trial is over they have released documents and emails that Pryce sent to the Times journalist. She shows herself to be incredibly calculating and she did everything possible to try and get other people into trouble while avoiding it herself. To try and implicate the OW is understandable (if not right) but she even tried to involve another totally innocent aide to ensure he got sent down and she (Pryce) got away scot free.

It is quite clear why the jury found her guilty based on the series of emails alone and quite rightly. How the first jury didn't is beyond me.

By taking the course she has, Pryce has brought a lot of dirty linen out into the public that should have remained private. I feel enormous sympathy for the son who has had to endure what he has and seen and heard what has been said in court and I actually find it despicable that a mother would do that to her own family.

duchesse he didn't have an MPs job when this happened. He was a MEP.

If he'd lost his licence, it could have affected his selection as the Eastleigh Lib Dem candidate.

They were complicit in sharing the points, it's true. How galling for her that having done that for him, and after securing the nomination, he then went on to lose his licence for not bothering to put his seatbelt on, meaning she had to act as his chauffeur during the Eastleigh by election campaign.

I suppose sympathy is not the right word, exactly. However I do understand that she wasn't in her right mind at the time she tried to seek revenge.

Husband had left her for OW, OW then proceeded to brief against her as a "scorned wife" in the press.

It must have been awful.

Her actions were ill-thought-out, blatantly encouraged by a self-serving journalist, and disastrous for the whole family.

People do incredibly misguided things when they are under extreme emotional pressure. It's easy in hindsight to see the whole sequence of events spiralling out of control.

I got flashed for speeding last year. My husband is the registered keeper of the car I was in.

HE received the Notice of Intended Prosecution.

HE had to fill in the details of the person driving at the time.
HE had to sign it as a true statement of who was driving
HE sent it back- he was responsible for that.

The form quite clearly states that it is a criminal offence not to name the actual driver at the time.

I'm not sure I even had to sign the NIP at that stage-does anyone know about this? When the papers came back in my name, it was up to me to deal with.

Yes, Huhne and Carina are both odious.

Who said upthread that when you plot revenge you should dig 2 graves? Good quote.

Last night, I hypothetically asked my DH if he would take points for me. He said no way. His reasoning is that quite apart from the fact it is a breach of the law, and the jeopardy that it would put on his career, that if you manage to rack up 9 points already, you clearly need to lose your licence before the message gets through.

I wonder if Huhne currently has any points. I wonder if Carina does?

My sympathy is with her - and not him.

On the last thread we had about this, there was quite a long discussion about the burden of proof, and why the judge had insisted that the burden of proof lay with the prosecution when normally in a marital coercion case it lies with the defence. It turns out that there were pre-trial discussions in which the defence persuaded the judge the burden of proof should be with the prosecution. Apparently the judge agreed because the Human Rights Act enshrines a presumption of innocence.

Thought I'd share that in case anyone from the previous thread was around and interested!

duchesse: "I'm not sure I even had to sign the NIP at that stage-does anyone know about this? When the papers came back in my name, it was up to me to deal with."

Yes, apparently this was what Huhne did: he sent the form off naming her as the driver (even though according to her, she'd refused at that point), and when she received the papers back she felt she had to sign them.

The main thing is that he got exposed for being the self-serving unethical twit that he is.

So by the time the SECOND set of papers came back, if she'd refused sign, she'd have been sending him straight into prison, definitely losing him his job and upsetting their entire lives. Ten years ago their children were quite a bit younger as well. He utterly dumped her in it, making it her decision whether to enforce his responsibility.

I can entirely see why she wouldn't have wanted to do that back then. I can also entirely understand why it would have rankled for all these years to be basically made into a criminal by someone who got off scot-free (although of course he lost his licence anyway a fortnight later). I don't think any sane person could view her "complicity" at the time as fully willing.

I think that was the point duchess he had already lied and she had to decide whether or not to go along with it. What a horrible position to be put in. It wasn't her saying she'd done it - but once he said it (and sent off the forms) she felt she had no choice but to go along with it. Having been with my ex for 25 yrs (and Huhne seems to be a similar personality type) I can see how coercion happened perhaps more easily than some others can. She was probably, ironically, thinking very much of the children and the impact on them should she not go along with his scheme.

I would hope I would not have knowingly broken the law - but there were certainly times when I signed documents without fully understanding what the implications were . Looking back I barely recognise myself - but it's a long slow process of becoming someone who doesn't rock the boat at home but is more than feisty outside it.

duchesse, same here with my son (went into an area which apparently was one way (not well signed to be fair to him)), car in my name s I returned it saying who was the correct driver as most of us would do although not apparently the 300,000 people over 10 years who have lied about the driver.

cats, yes, it's true. You can be competent, clever, successful and still bullied in a marriage.

As for the son comment above VP did not want to abort her son. It was apparently the husband's suggestion and I am sure the son know where all blame lies in this matter - fairly and squarely at the door of his father who chose to sleep with the lesbian in the civil partnership and hide and lie rather than ending a marriage and then seeking someone else and completing the form and lying on it and presenting it to his wife as sign or I lose my career. Had he acted properly none of this would have happened.

oops cross post - but yes!

I agree, duchesse. Assuming her story is true, then it would have been very hard for her at that point to refuse to take the points. The consequences would have been terrible.

So if she had really wanted to land him in it years later, the thing to do would have been to go to the police, confess everything, and she'd have probably ended up with a light sentence. Instead she went to the papers, and set in train a sequence of events that has ended in disaster for both of them.

I know of someone who ended up saddled with millions of ££ of debt because she felt she just had to sign whatever her husband put in front of her. She was in a fairly traditional marriage although she has a good job. I believe that in her case marital coercion should have been a valid defence but it was deemed to be by the courts.

She probably felt (quite rightly) that the police wouldn't have taken it anywhere after ten years and that he was close enough to the centres of power to make it all go away anyway. So she chose the fourth estate instead.

*it was NOT deemed to be... She was utterly landed in it.

Agree that neither of them comes out of this well, and the whole story is truly depressing. I feel so, so sorry for the children.

One thing that really struck me (and apologies if someone has said this - haven't managed to read whole thread) is that Huhne is a very, very wealthy man.....a multi-millionaire apparently. How hard would it have been for him to just hire someone to drive him, FFS? Then all this could have been avoided, or at least they could have washed their dirty linen in private. But no, he appears to be tightfisted in addition to all his other deeply unattractive characteristics.

It sickens me the way these arrogant twunts think they can get away with anything they like and just keep denying, denying, denying until the very last second. Masters of the Universe indeed.

This whole thing comes off as something that wouldn't look out of place on Jeremy Kyle. "You claim you were coerced into taking the points, after the break we find out the results of the lie detector test"
Turns out that rich and powerful people can be just as vile to each other as the families on that show.

"You claim you were coerced into taking the points, after the break we find out the results of the lie detector test"

All a bit daft I know. But can't help but think she needed to take him on somehow, and a prison sentence might be a small price to pay for getting her power back and him out of her hair. The son already knew the state of his dad's integrity - and she exposed it to the world. We don't need men like that in powerful positions running our country.