What was it that made the Vicky Pryce trial so compelling?

Just about the only respectable moral that can be drawn from the grisly extended farce that was the Vicky Pryce trial is that the defence of marital coercion is a choice absurdity; one look at the feisty, tightlipped Ms Pryce should have been enough to persuade any jury that this one wasn’t a runner. Everything else about the trial was just horrible. And, obviously, utterly compelling. It’s a toss up between whether the calculated revelation about Pryce’s abortion – at her husband’s behest, she says – was worse than the publication of emails from her embittered son Peter to his father (for good measure she let it be known that her husband wanted that pregnancy aborted too), but the scary thing was that every bit of her home life and her children’s life amounted in the end to so much ammunition for her bid for self-preservation plus the destruction of Chris Huhne, and, if possible, his girlfriend.