Emmerdale’s scheming Ruby Fox-Milligan does a complete one-eighty – and finds an unexpected friend

Since Ruby Fox-Milligan (Beth Cordingly) arrived in Emmerdale, she hasn’t made a great effort to integrate with the locals – and that’s putting it mildly.

‘When you get the scripts you just think, “Oh my God, she’s just rude to everybody.”’ Beth Cordingly told us. ‘It’s definitely not how to make friends and influence people. That is not a life skill she’s learned!’

She’s made it clear that she’s only in the Dales because of Caleb (William Ash) and Nicky Milligan (Lewis Cope) but has no interest at all in anyone else.

She’s been positively antagonistic to Caleb’s family the Dingles, ruining BelleDingle’s (Eden Taylor-Draper) wedding, deliberately kneeing Cain Dingle (Jeff Hordley) in the groin when he wound her up and accidentally elbowing Chas Dingle (Lucy Pargeter) in the chest.

Ruby was left impressed with one villager’s take on a situation – and found herself admiring her

Her verbal attacks are just as bad. In a village where community is everything, she manages to get up everyone’s nose.

Often this is because of her bond with Caleb. She sees his relationship with the Dingles as a threat to that and attacks them.

Recently Caleb has been in hospital having emergency surgery for appendicitis. Prior to that he’d gone to see GP Manpreet Sharma (Rebecca Sarker) as he was in agony. Because he didn’t have an appointment she told him to come back later, or if the pain was very bad he should go to A&E.

So when Caleb collapsed in pain later and it proved to be serious, Ruby was looking for someone to blame and the obvious person was Manpreet.

She put in a formal complaint against the GP and also vented her feelings about Manpreet in the Woolpack.

At the start of Monday’s (April 15) episode, Manpreet was fuming about Ruby bad-mouthing her and decided to go and confront her. She insisted she hadn’t been negligent and Ruby needed to stop telling people she had been.

Ruby told her she was ‘unhinged’ but Manpreet wasn’t backing down. ‘Your nonsense stops now,’ she insisted. Ruby replied that she would decide when she’d stop and how far she’d go.

It seemed that Manpreet had just made things a lot worse for herself, and she didn’t help her tarnished reputation when she was at the surgery later and got cross because Bear Wolf (Joshua Richards) wanted to switch his appointment from her to Dr Liam Cavanagh (Jonny McPherson).

She thought it was because of what Ruby had said, rather than the actual reason, which was that Bear had an embarrassing issue and felt more comfortable with a male doctor.

Manpreet was relating this to Billy Fletcher (Jay Kontzle) in the Woolpack later (with names changed to protect confidentiality, otherwise she’d be opening up a whole new can of worms).

Then Ruby came in and headed straight for their table and it looked like another argument was on the cards.

As Manpreet braced herself for what was to come, she was thrown when Ruby was all smiles and said she’d been impressed when Manpreet came around to confront her.

‘You standing up to me like that, you’re my kind of woman, Manpreet,’ she said. ‘We should go for a drink or something. I reckon we could be friends.’ She said she’d withdrawn her complaint and would tell everyone she’d overreacted.

Manpreet was gobsmacked at the turn of events. But can we really envisage her and Ruby sipping cocktails together at the Hide?

Well, it’s Emmerdale – and stranger things have happened.