Top 20 Times Arrogant People Learnt the Hard Way

#20: Rebekah Vardy

Was she selling stories to the papers? The courts certainly seemed to think so, since they ruled against her in her infamous “Wagatha Christie” trial. Following public accusations from fellow WAG Coleen Rooney that she was selling stories Rooney had planted on her Instagram account, Vardy sued her. But it was Rooney who came out smelling of roses thanks to various mistakes made by Team Vardy, including the claim that Vardy’s agent Caroline Watt had “accidentally” dropped her phone – likely full of incriminating messages – into the sea, with Vardy also conveniently not having the messages because she forgot the backup password. Vardy was ordered to pay millions of pounds after losing.

#19: Bernie Ecclestone

After years of courting controversy, F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone got into water so hot even HE couldn’t worm his way out of it in 2022. Over a decade after he’d already been found out for tax avoidance to the tune of £1.2 billion, he was then charged with the far more serious offence of tax fraud. The CPS said he’d been trying to hide £400 million in undeclared assets. Rather than go through a lengthy trial, Ecclestone ate humble pie – for once – and pleaded guilty to fraud, also agreeing to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in the back taxes he owed. The sums were so high that he was even handed a prison sentence – albeit one that was suspended for two years.

#18: John Gummer

There was absolutely nothing the matter with British beef in the 80s and 90s, that’s what John Gummer, a Tory minister who was environment secretary when the full scale of the mad cow disease outbreak became known, would have you believe. In chilling and now-infamous scenes, Gummer tried to downplay the risk to humans, insisting that the disease couldn’t jump species. He said on the news that beef was fine, giving his young daughter Cordelia a beef burger to eat on camera. We now know that it absolutely COULD jump between species, and many humans died as a result of BSE’s spread. Luckily, Cordelia was fine, but the footage remains shocking.

#17: Joey Barton

Third-rate footballer Joey Barton is never out of the tabloids these days, regularly finding himself at the wrong end of numerous libel lawsuits. Presenter Jeremy Vine and football pundit and ex-player Eni Aluko have both taken him to court, the former after Barton called him a “bike nonce”, and the latter after he compared her and fellow pundit Lucy Ward to Fred and Rose West. He’s since been found guilty of sending offensive messages, and charged with malicious communication. More recently, he’s been charged with wounding with intent after a violent altercation at a golf course in Merseyside. He’s also been done for placing dodgy bets on football matches, and was found guilty of attacking his own wife.

#16: Naomi Campbell

Supermodel Naomi Campbell remains one of the most famous women in the world, but in 2010 found herself forced to testify in the trial of dictator Charles Taylor. Court proceedings dragged on for years after Taylor had been removed from power, but part of the allegations involved Taylor trading weapons for blood diamonds. And some of those diamonds allegedly found their way to Naomi Campbell, who was made to testify via a subpoena and made no secret of the fact she didn’t want to be there. She was frustrated, irritable, and denied any knowledge of where the diamonds had come from, barely answering any of the questions put to her.

#15: Jeffrey Archer

After being in and out of government for years, Archer’s political career ended just about for good in 2001, when he was put on trial for perjury. The perjury charges pertained to his previous trial in 1987 for libel, when he took the Daily Star to court when it ran a story alleging he’d paid for sex. Years later, someone came out publicly to say that they’d provided Archer with a false alibi. He was found guilty and sentenced to prison, during which time he also had to pay back the Daily Star all the money – plus legal fees – he’d won during the libel suit that turned out to not be libellous at all.

#14: James Corden

Is there any arrogant comeuppance as memorable as James Corden’s explosive restaurant rant? He says that he lost his temper with wait staff in New York restaurant Balthazar over some allergies. While it’s always important to take allergies seriously, shouting at the overworked restaurant staff probably isn’t going to help, and the allergens were spotted before they caused any trouble. He was publicly banned by the restaurant owner, generating masses of headlines, and was eventually forced to apologise on “The Late Late Show”. He’s since left America completely and, other than the big “Gavin & Stacey” finale, has finally started to fade into obscurity.

#13: Chris Evans

He thought that he could give “Top Gear” a new lease on life when he was drafted in to replace Clarkson, Hammond, and May, but he got a very rude awakening when everybody hated this new iteration of the programme. Evans has long been known for being arrogant and difficult to work with, once quitting Radio 1 because they didn’t want to give him Friday mornings off. We thought he’d mellowed out in subsequent years, but he still couldn’t take the heat on “Top Gear”, leaving after only a year despite signing a three-year contract to front it. Allegedly, this was because fellow presenter Matt LeBlanc – who also didn’t last long – said he would quit if Evans didn’t leave.

#12: Simon Cowell

2013 saw Simon Cowell get at least a little bit of pushback against his authoritarian control of the music industry. During that year’s “Britain’s Got Talent” finale, one of the classical musicians on stage to support the finalists got up from her chair, stormed across the stage, and hurled eggs directly at Cowell, with a handful hitting their mark. The woman, Natalie Holt, is a professional viola player who apologised, then specified that her apology was only for Richard and Adam, the contestants, and she stood by her anti-Cowell views. Cowell’s vicelike grip on music has somewhat lessened since the end of “The X Factor”, and we doubt anybody is complaining about that.

#11: Sir Philip Green

Business magnate Philip Green ruled Arcadia Group and, through it, controlled many of the high street’s best known retailers. One of those retailers was British Home Stores, which he bought in 2000 and then sold for £1 fifteen years later, having run up debts of over a billion pounds while he collected hundreds of millions in dividends. The following year, BHS went bankrupt, leaving its employees without their pensions. After a lengthy dispute, Green eventually agreed to pay into the scheme to restore those pensions. MPs even voted to strip Green of his knighthood, though the government didn’t bother. This, and his other scandals, have made him one of the most maligned names in business.

#10: Phillip Schofield

He was one of the biggest names in telly, fronting “This Morning”, “Dancing on Ice”, and even having a theatrical career. But rumours began to circulate years ago that Schofield was unpleasant to work with, with former co-hosts Fearne Britton and Amanda Holden allegedly feuding with him off-camera. There were even whispers of a rift with Holly Willoughby. Then, when the news of his affair broke, he was exiled from mainstream television, fading into obscurity. That was, until he appeared in a one-off series on Channel 5 where he got stranded on a desert island for ten days, complaining about all the toxic people in his life that he never wanted to speak to again.

#9: Jamie Oliver

Many times, TV chef Jamie Oliver has suffered for his own hubris. There was, of course, the infamous chicken nuggets fiasco, where the children remained unperturbed by chicken nuggets containing ground-up bone and gristle. But we’re going to go with a scandal that affected far more people: the failure of Jamie’s Italian. The midrange restaurant chain opened dozens of outlets worldwide, but by 2018, the shine had come off. It turned out that the chain had run up tens of millions of pounds in debt, some of it in unpaid wages, and was also behind paying vendors and HMRC. The chain collapsed and was deemed to have acted unlawfully in how it handled redundancies.

#8: Noel Edmonds

While he’s certainly become a more annoying public figure in the UK, there’s one country in particular that absolutely despises Noel Edmonds: New Zealand. He and his wife emigrated there back in 2019, buying an 800 acre estate that they wanted to operate as a wellness retreat, much to the chagrin of the locals. He bought up a dozen buildings in a rural village with fewer than 3000 inhabitants, and they’re not happy, especially not with his pub, “The Bugger Inn”, and its X-rated draught names. Nature seems not to like him, either, as he’s talked about how he and his wife had to temporarily abandon their vast estate following an earthquake.

#7: Liz Truss

If any politician has lost their mind in the last few years, it’s Liz Truss. Her spectacular fall from grace happened after she tanked the economy during her brief, fifty-day tenure in government. But in the years since, the out-of-control ego that led to the demise of her premiership has only got worse. She’s recently claimed that it wasn’t her mini-budget that crashed the economy, but that she was prevented from enacting successful economic policies by bad actors within the Tory party. She even attempted to launch a podcast about how the west is dying, describing her own page as the “Home of the Counter-Revolution”.

#6: Boris Johnson

Another British government brought down by arrogance directly preceded Liz Truss’s: Boris Johnson’s. While the Chris Pincher scandal was the final nail in the coffin, Boris’s downfall was the culmination of the long aftermath of Partygate. Senior politicians and civil servants denied it for months, but eventually, the truth came out, and we got definitive proof that Boris DID attend at least three of the illegal gatherings. He and Rishi Sunak apologised and paid the fixed penalty notices they were handed by the police. Eventually, Boris was forced to step down after a mass resignation of Tory ministers, triggering six months of political chaos.

#5: Jeremy Clarkson

There was arrogance on all sides during the 2015 debacle that saw “Top Gear’s” second iteration end. From Clarkson, in getting so angry over a lack of hot dinner that he punched a producer in the face, and then from the BBC, which inexplicably thought that it could refuse to renew Clarkson’s contract and keep Hammond and May. Well, they called the BBC’s bluff and all three left, signing on to make “The Grand Tour” with Amazon. As we’ve already seen, “Top Gear” in the interim floundered, though “The Grand Tour” has now also ended. In its place, we have “Clarkson’s Farm”, offering a more realistic perspective on Clarkson after his many controversies.

#4: Piers Morgan

Anybody can tell you that of all the people who hate Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson is at the very top of the list. Their feud goes back decades, with Clarkson punching Morgan in the face in 2004, and later rubbing it in his face while hosting a charity edition of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” that Morgan was competing on. But there was another memorable incident where Piers Morgan got what-for, when Harry Hill smacked him with a custard pie as revenge for Morgan’s posts about how it was emasculating for Daniel Craig to carry his baby in a papoose. He still hasn’t lived down his “GMB” temper tantrum, either.

#3: Hannah Ingram-Moore

Just what happened to all that money raised by Captain Sir Tom Moore during lockdown? Well, rather a lot of it ended up in The Captain Tom Foundation, a charity that got the attention of the Charity Commission in 2022 for all the wrong reasons – namely, the construction of Britain’s most controversial spa. The spa emerged on the property of Moore’s daughter Hannah, a spa that was later demolished by the council because it didn’t have planning permission. The Foundation stopped accepting donations and later, Ingram-Moore and her husband ended up barred from ever working in senior management of a charity again.

#2: Katie Hopkins

It’s very rare that Katie Hopkins does bother to learn a lesson, but there’s one rare case, during her weight gain project. She aimed to put on a large amount of weight and then lose it, to prove that actually losing weight is easy and the people who struggle to do it just aren’t trying hard enough. Well, ironically, she ate her words, saying that she’d – for once – seen the error of her ways, and knew just how hard losing weight actually is. She acknowledged that, quote, “nobody wants to be fat by choice”, end quote. Perhaps Chris Ramsey got through to her when he attacked her over this on “Celebrity Juice”.

#1: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

It takes someone with an extraordinary ego to go into that “Newsnight” interview willingly, and then bizarrely believe afterwards that it had all gone well. As everybody else in the world knew, though, it did NOT go well; Andrew’s royal career – if it can be called a career – was in tatters, though it didn’t truly end for him until 2025. The full truth of his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came out, leading to Mountbatten-Windsor having all of his titles stripped, including “prince”, and becoming the first royal to be arrested since King Charles I was deposed. He’s now been investigated on suspicion of misconduct in public office, pertaining to his work as trade envoy.

Let us know who you want to see on the top 30!