Leila Trabelsi, the politically ambitious wife of Tunisia’s Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, was easily the most detested, a monstrous symbol of nepotism and corruption, whose embezzlement of state wealth made Imelda Marcos’s nearly 3,000 pair of shoes seem trifling. Trabelsi sparked the sense of injustice that flamed the revolution, keeping a mafia-style hold of the nation’s economy, siphoning off riches to her and her husband’s family, who were thought to control 30-40% of the economy, running everything from customs to car-dealers, supermarket chains and banana importations. She and her relatives are accused of ordering people from their homes if they wanted their land, confiscating their businesses if they thought they could profit from them. Trabelsi took archaeological artefacts to decorate her palace rooms while her daughter and son in law flew in ice-cream from St-Tropez for dinner parties.

Described as the woman who sparked the Arab spring, Trabelsi, who liked to be called “Madame La Présidente”, inspires dread in the public imagination. A book by her butler recently described how she would ritually sacrifice chameleons to supposedly cast spells over her husband and how she punished one cook by plunging their hands into boiling oil. From exile in Saudi Arabia with her husband Ben Ali, the couple are seeking to appeal their sentencing in absentia last year to 35 years in jail accused of theft and unlawful possession of large sums of foreign currency, jewellery, archaeological artefacts, drugs and weapons – the first of several cases against them. After they fled, $27m (£17m) in cash and jewels, guns and 2kg of drugs were found at one of their lavish palaces outside Tunis…

In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi was perhaps more famous for his Ukrainian nurse and female bodyguards than his wife. But Safia Farkash, his second wife, a nurse when she met him, was still vastly wealthy, a symbol of public money siphoned off into the family’s pockets. His daughter Aisha, once described as the Claudia Schiffer of the region, a lawyer and part of Saddam Hussein’s defence team, was held up by her father as a model of modern women’s rights. Safia and Aisha fled over the Algerian border during the uprising. Mostly low-profile, Safia Gaddafi nonetheless occasionally attempted, particularly to the western media, to play the role of a simple wife and mother, humanising her husband. In the 1980s, she told the US press she was someone who was afraid of even a “dead chicken”, saying of Gaddafi: “If I thought he was a terrorist, I would not stay with him and have children with him. He is a human being.”