Hell hath no fury...

As speculation emerges that Osama Bin Laden may have been betrayed by his first wife, that old saying seems to be re-validated

In 1697, the English author William Congreve wrote a poem called The Mourning Bride which ended with the following lines: “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d. Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.” More than 400 years later, these words still carry a angry resonance as speculation rages that Osama Bin Laden was tracked down not by brilliant spy work by the CIA but because his first wife Khairiah Saber betrayed his location.

Apparently Saber, Bin Laden’s first wife, a Saudi woman now in her 60s, fetched up at the Abbotabad complex sometime in February or March 2011. When challenged by one of Osama’s sons as to why she had come back after such a long time, she replied enigmatically, “I have one more duty to discharge for my husband.”

The extended Bin Laden clan now believes that it was Saber who betrayed him by leading the CIA forces to his door. And all because she was jealous of Osama’s latest wife, the Yemeni-born, much younger Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada with whom Bin Laden shared a bed (while Saber slept alone in a bedroom on another floor).

So, there’s a lesson for you. While the entire might of the US army and the all-seeing eye of the CIA could not bring about Osama Bin Laden’s downfall for well on a decade, his scorned wife managed to do so in a matter of months.

For readers of a certain age, this will bring back memories of that 1996 Hollywood hit, The First Wives Club, starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton. The three women are dumped by their husbands for younger models and decide on revenge: by taking their husbands for everything they have. As yet another infamous first wife, Ivana Trump (married to ‘The Donald’), putting it in a cameo appearance in the movie, said, “Don’t get mad; get everything.”

But, of course, that is easier said than done. First wives do tend to get mad – and sometimes very mad indeed. As one man found out the hard way when he left his wife and moved out of the family home. When he came back to collect his things, he discovered that she had cut off the right sleeve of each one of his Savile Row suits. Yet another ex-wife crept into her ex-husband’s house and sewed up prawns in his curtain hems (yes, you really can’t get more bonkers than that).

Others take an even more direct approach. Remember Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ ex-wife? When she found out about his posse of mistresses, she chased his car down, golf club in hand and bashed the windscreen in. (Tiger later gallantly insisted that his wife had been unfairly maligned – to widespread scepticism in the media.)

And then, there are the women who wait for years, even decades, on end, before trying to extract a horrible revenge for the humiliation heaped on them. In the UK, Chris Huhne had to resign from David Cameron’s Cabinet when his ex-wife, Vicky Pryce, recently revealed that in 2003 he had prevailed upon her to take some penalty points he had incurred while speeding on her own driving licence. But in an ironic twist, Vicky found herself charged alongside her husband for trying to ‘pervert the course of justice’.

Across the Atlantic, Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich found himself in the ex-wife trap on the eve of an important primary when his second wife, Marianne, crawled out of the woodwork to announce that he had asked her for an ‘open marriage’ in the last years of their relationship. Not exactly the kind of thing that a candidate hoping to make headway in the puritanical heartland of America wants to hear, right? And sure enough, since then Newt’s appeal among women voters has gone down sharply.

Heather Mills tried a similar smear campaign when Paul McCartney asked her for a divorce, suggesting that the former Beatles had been physically abusive towards her in the course of their marriage. But such was the goodwill towards McCartney that nobody paid the slightest attention to these allegations. No wonder then that when Mills scored a paltry 25 million pounds (yes, you read that right: 25 million pounds) in her divorce settlement, she showed her displeasure by pouring a jug of water over McCartney’s attorney, Fiona Shackleton, in a classic case of misdirected anger.

That’s not to say that men don’t behave badly in the aftermath of a marriage, but their acting out mostly takes the form of retaining a tight control over joint resources while women fall back on restricting access to the children – in other words, each party plays to their strengths. And yet, sadly, both sides lose as a consequence.

So, perhaps the best revenge for a scorned woman is not to get mad or even get everything – but to just get on with it. Move on with your life, rebuild the torn corners of your world and wrestle some happiness out of it. Because more often than not, living well is the best revenge of all.

The First Wives Club

It doesn’t really exist in Indian politics – and long may it stay that way

Who would have thought that being in London as the British chose their new government would make me nostalgic for politics, Indian style? And yet, strangely enough, that’s exactly how I feel.

I could have made my peace with the cheesy, stage-set like ambience of the electoral debates, which created a lot of sound and fury while signifying very little. Even Bigot-gate – when Prime Minister Gordon Brown was overheard calling a life-long Labour supporter a bigot on a live microphone after she quizzed him about immigration policies – seemed like par for the course in an era when non-stories are spun into pivotal media events. But in the end, it’s the wives who really got to me.

No matter which newspaper you opened – broadsheet or tabloid – or which news channel you watched, there was no escaping the First Wives Club. Here was Samantha, dutifully trotting behind David Cameron, all peachy skin, luminous smile and baby bump. There was Sarah Brown, trying hard to hide a tense look behind a rictus grin as husband Gordon did his own awkward take on man of the people. And bringing up the rear was the redoubtable Spanish spouse of Nick Clegg, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, who bravely built a dry stone wall with her bare hands before falling over in a supermarket and breaking her elbow.

It wasn’t all photo-opportunities, though. The First Wives had speaking parts as well on the campaign trail. Sarah Brown held forth on how her husband was “her hero” and how only he could save Britain from economic meltdown (barn doors, bolting horses anyone?) when she wasn’t tweeting every inconsequential detail of her day. Samantha Cameron was all about the Bump – how happy she and David were, when the baby was due, how she was feeling these days (tired but great, if you really want to know). And Miriam was all bolshy and defensive about how she wasn’t as prominent a presence on her husband’s election campaign (“I don’t have a job that I can just abandon for five weeks, and I imagine that is the case with most people in this country,” she snapped at one point, though she insisted this was not a dig at Samantha Cameron, whose job at Smythson appears to have rather flexible hours.)

And then there were the obligatory public displays of affection. Samantha and David were pictured on the tour bus, with her head nestled in his lap while he cradled the Bump (by now a supporting member of the Cameron cast). Gordon and Sarah fetched up on the GMTV sofa, sitting far too close together as Gordon held forth on how much he loved her. (“Thank you,” gushed Sarah, looking deep into his eyes even as the rest of us groped around for a sick bag.) And Clegg clung on to his wife’s arm and made inappropriate cooing noises whenever he could coax her away from her high-powered lawyer’s digs.

No detail of any of these men’s private lives was too trivial to share with the voting public. We heard about their love stories, how they met their wives, how they fell in love, how they got married, how much they loved their children; where they liked to holiday; what breakfast cereal they started the day with. And then, there were the personal tragedies: the death of the Browns’ first-born daughter, Jennifer, who had been born prematurely; the recent demise of the Camerons’ first-born son, Ivan, who was born with cerebral palsy and died at six; the fact that Browns’ younger son, Fraser, was born with cystic fibrosis.

While all of this was compelling viewing – and fascinating reading – what possible connection could any of this have with the General Election? You could argue at a pinch that such stuff goes towards building up character – which it does – but does it make a man a better or worse Prime Minister? Surely to suggest that you can only understand the problems of people in tragic circumstances if you have experienced tragedy yourself is to demean the human capacity for empathy and to diminish us all as social beings.

But while I can understand the impulse to humanise our politicians, what I simply cannot fathom is this relentless focus on their spouses – on what they are wearing; what they feed their kids; where they shop; the list of mindless tripe goes on and on.

Of course, it is all dressed up as political commentary. Why was Sarah Brown wearing a silk Erdem dress worth 600 pounds and Jimmy Choo shoes at 400 pounds a pop? Didn’t she understand that she is a Labour wife not a posh Tory bird? Did you know that Samantha Cameron’s M&S dress was actually made to measure for her because the store had run out of her size? What was she trying to prove by wearing M&S? We all knew that she was a fully-paid up member of the designer set. And why was Miriam Clegg shopping for lingerie at Rigby and Peller during her lunch hour anyway?

But however you dress it up, all this focus on the wives is just trivia. And it makes me grateful that we don’t have to endure it in Indian politics. We don’t really know or care what the wives of Manmohan Singh or L.K. Advani wear. And long may it stay that way.