To the untrained eye, the Beckham children would seem to want for nothing. But according to their eldest son, Brooklyn, it’s all just a hollow, empty sham.
‘My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,’ he wrote on Instagram this week, in a six-page diatribe.
‘Brand Beckham comes first. Family “love” is decided by how much you post on social media, or how quickly you drop everything to show up and pose for a family photo op. I have been controlled by my parents for most of my life,’ he added. ‘I grew up with overwhelming anxiety.’
Ouch. But that’s not even the worst of it. The most damning – and wounding – criticism was reserved for Brooklyn’s mother, Victoria.
He claims that at his 2022 wedding to Nicola Peltz, Victoria ‘hijacked my first dance with my wife, which had been planned weeks in advance’.
‘In front of our 500 wedding guests,’ he wrote, ‘Marc Anthony [the pop star] called me to the stage, where in the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead.
‘She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.’
Those words – ‘she danced very inappropriately on me’ are brutal and calculated to cause maximum damage. The implication from the use of the word ‘on’ is clear. ‘On’, not ‘with’.
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Brooklyn’s parents, David and Victoria Beckham, at his wedding to the billionaire’s daughter
David Beckham says ‘you have to let your children make mistakes’
In other words, this wasn’t just some embarrassing mum dancing (always a risk at any wedding, especially if I’m involved), this was something more troubling, something unwanted and intrusive, maybe even rather sinister.
Essentially, he is accusing Victoria of dancing with him in a sexualised way at his wedding, of placing herself between him and his new wife in a highly questionable manner.
The implication is that Victoria is a shameless narcissist and control freak who will stop at nothing to make herself the centre of attention, and that she is wildly jealous of her son’s wife, who is a saint in human form.
I don’t know whether to reference Freud or the Brothers Grimm. Both, probably.
As the mother of a 21-year-old son myself, I cannot imagine how devastating that accusation must be for Victoria. I would be utterly beside myself with guilt and mortification if I thought my son felt about me that way, even more so if he decided to share that accusation with the entire world.
Why would any child humiliate their mother like that? I totally get the fact, as is clear from Brooklyn’s statement, that he feels resentful towards Victoria for what he sees as her rejection of his choice of bride.
But why would you say something so horrible and so guaranteed to wound? What manner of cruelties could she and David possibly have inflicted on him to warrant such vindictiveness?
Brooklyn talks about finding true love, but I’m afraid what we’ve seen from him is the language of someone consumed by hatred. Not since the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused the royals of racism has a public family feud taken such a drastic turn.
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Victoria is joined at the wedding by her parents Anthony and Jackie Adams
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Nicola wore a couture Valentino dress after Victoria apparently pulled out of designing a gown for her ‘at the 11th hour’
It’s such a horrible, twisted and – when you think of all the many advantages Brooklyn has enjoyed in his life because of his parents – deeply ungrateful thing to do.
And talk about burning your bridges.
This kind of thing may be cathartic in the short term, but in the long run who knows what might happen. There may come a day when he needs his old mum and dad (or their cash, at least).
But how can there possibly be any way back for him now? Especially since, like the great royal fallout, this too appears to be a case of ‘recollections may vary’.
According to Vogue magazine, which covered the nuptials, it’s not true that Victoria hogged his big moment with his new wife.
The newlyweds had their first dance to South African singer Lloyiso’s rendition of Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love.
Brooklyn did dance with his mother, but only later at around 11pm, when David took to the floor with Brooklyn’s little sister, Harper – and ‘Brooklyn invited his mother on stage for a dance’.
Maybe by then Victoria was a little overwhelmed by the spirit of the occasion; maybe her moves were a bit outré. But ‘inappropriate’? That is a real slap in the face.
They say that as a parent you are only as happy as your most unhappy child, and Victoria must be utterly miserable now. David, normally so unflappable, looked strained and tired yesterday at an event in Davos, Switzerland. And who can blame them?
Because although in his statement Brooklyn claims to ‘wake up every morning grateful for the life I chose, and have found peace and relief’, it’s clear he is far from happy. Happy people don’t lash out. Happy people don’t inflict pain on others like that.
And that, even more than the accusations, must be what is really troubling for his family: how come their boy has ended up so bitter and twisted?
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Brooklyn and his new wife attend a brunch at her home in Palm Beach after the ceremony
I don’t know the Beckhams well. But our boys – their third child, Cruz, and my youngest, Will – played in the same football team together. They were worlds apart in terms of ability, of course, but nonetheless, for a brief period they shared a pitch.
Apart from the fact that he was gigantically famous and stupidly good-looking, David was a perfectly ordinary touchline dad. He would stand there in the pouring rain with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his hat clamped over his ears, yelling the usual words of encouragement.
Every now and again a member of the public would approach for a selfie and an autograph, and he would oblige, keeping one eye on the pitch.
Occasionally Victoria and baby Harper would join him, mostly sheltering in the Range Rover out of the weather (one gets the impression football is not really Victoria’s thing).
Whether all this was merely ‘performative’, as Brooklyn describes it, I really cannot say. It seemed perfectly genuine to me at the time.
Certainly, David’s relationship with his son Cruz seemed very far from ‘inauthentic’. He was, if anything, extremely present. And he was also very kind to the other kids, too.
I’m sure there are elements of truth in Brooklyn’s diatribe. The Beckhams, like so many famous celebrity couples, promote a carefully curated image which feeds into their commercial ventures, from David’s lucrative sponsorship deals to Victoria’s fashion label.
That ‘brand’, so derided by their son, is what affords them much of their wealth, and what allows their children to have the life they lead.
Brooklyn may not care about any of this – after all, his wife Nicola comes from a family even richer than the Beckhams.
It’s all right for him: he’s never going to be short of a Learjet. But it’s not very fair on his siblings, who may not get so lucky. And to the rest of the world, it smacks of entitlement.
As for the notion that, after a lifetime’s enslavement to ‘performative social media posts’, he is finally free, that’s just nonsense.
He’s swapped one image-obsessed family for another, as evidenced by his wife’s own selfie-snapping and Instagramming, both of which are pretty unrelenting.
Whatever you think of David and Victoria Beckham, at least they earned their fame and fortune, at least they’ve lived in the real world, at least they deserve their success.
Brooklyn and Nicola are just two spoilt nepo babies with nothing better to do than complain about how awful their lives are.
Neither of them has the first idea what real suffering or hard work looks like.
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