Is there more to Brooklyn Beckham’s bombshell than the whinging of a nepo-baby?

Regarding the War of the Poses – between Brooklyn Beckham and his wife, Nicola Peltz, and his parents, Sir David and Lady Victoria – it made me think back to the Iran-Iraq war, though on the surface the conflicts appear to have little in common. The link is that it’s a luxury not to instinctively back a side for once. I didn’t want to see the mad mullahs being strengthened by an Iranian victory, but I wasn’t keen on Saddam Hussein being further secured in power by romping into Tehran, either.

I’m aware that the Beckham bundle is a trivial situation, on which the deaths of multitudes of innocent drafted soldiers and civilians do not depend. But still, both sides seem equally ghastly. In the blue corner, very visible in their performative sorrow, are the elder Beckhams. According to their sources and their social-media posts, all they ever did was offer boundless love to their eldest offspring and endless hospitality to his new bride. In the red corner, far more in anger than sorrow, are the young Peltz-Beckhams, who accuse the boy’s parents of all kinds of fascinating misbehaviour.

There have been celebrity spats spilling out on to social media before – one thinks of the ‘Wagatha Christie’ case of Coleen Rooney vs Rebekah Vardy. But surely never one like this one, ignited this week by a series of Instagram posts by young Brooklyn. For these sought not to highlight one isolated example of bad behaviour, such as the alleged snitching by Mrs Vardy, but the whole edifice of what his family have sought since their inception – since Brooklyn was a twinkle in his dear old dad’s eye, in fact. Namely, to build the Beckhams (plural) into a brand – a brand built on the solid foundations of wholesome family love behind the glittering prizes.

The tension between what was marriage and what was merger has been queried before. In Tom Bower’s 2024 book, The House of Beckham, he claimed that the famous union was more a marriage of conveyance than the product of true love. But all the previous digs at the couple, including over the extramarital-affair claims from the likes of Rebecca Loos, pale in significance compared with the Brooklyn bombshell.

It’s probably quicker to say what the irate young person involved left out than what he put it. Suffice to say, he claimed to have been:

‘Controlled by a family that values public promotion and endorsements above all else… Brand Beckham comes first… Family love is decided by how much you post on social media… I have been controlled by my parents for most of my life. I grew up with overwhelming anxiety. For the first time in my life, since stepping away from my family, that anxiety has disappeared.’

He credited his wife, Nicola, and her family, the Peltzes, for this new light-heartedness.

I think the image that will stick in my mind, ineffably vulgar in the midst of all the little-boy-lost psychobabble, is that of Lady Beckham ‘twerking’ on her eldest son at his wedding. Dancing with someone can be quite respectable, from the foxtrot to the frug. But if you dance on someone, you basically ‘grind’ on them, as the young people would say. As Brooklyn put it: ‘She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.’

Not only did she allegedly use her son like a lap-dancing mark at his own nuptials, she apparently ‘hijacked’ the first dance of the wedding, which had been planned ‘weeks in advance’ to a suitably slushy romantic love song. ‘In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage, where in the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife’, wrote Brooklyn, ‘but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead’. You can understand the kid being somewhat taken aback by expecting to take his radiant young bride into his arms to the strains of ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’, only to find a hopped-up matriarch dragging him by the tie to the vulgar strains of, say, ‘WAP’ by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. It’s not really the video you really want to show the future grandkids, is it?

If you wanted to be cynical, you might dismiss this as a case of a boy raised in the lap of luxury by two multi-millionaires who has now glimpsed life among a family of billionaires, and has decided that you might as well fly private instead of first class.

But if I think deeper about it, I’m on junior’s side. He does seem enamoured by his bride. He’s interested in adopting the Jewish observances of his in-laws (Brooklyn is also a little bit Jewish on his dad’s side). And there’s one incident in particular that made me feel that the boy is telling more of the truth than the try-hard twosome of would-be national treasures (I think we can safely say they’ll be forgoing that dream now).

Boys, especially those of working-class extraction, are notoriously sentimental about their old nans. Here’s Brooklyn on a senior-moment contretemps: ‘During the wedding planning, my mum went so far as to call me “evil” because Nicola and I chose to include my Nanny Sandra and Nicola’s Naunni at our table, because they both didn’t have their husbands. Both of our parents had their own tables equally adjacent to ours.’ The stick insect is such a bred-in-the-bone status-hound, I can see her thinking that two old ladies might spoil the look of the Vogue photos, as if her son’s wedding were a runway front-row, rather than a family knees-up.

Things get a bit Deliverance when Brooklyn says: ‘The night before our wedding, members of my family told me that Nicola was “not blood” and “not family”.’ Reading this gave me the creeps – what do they want the kid to do, marry his sister, Harper Seven, when she comes of age? Given such weirdness, the turning of the boy to his bride seems even more natural, relegating his mother quite obviously into second place in his life. ‘A daughter’s a daughter all her life – but a son’s a son till he takes a wife’ goes the old saw, and Lady Vic might do well to dwell on it.

You might see Brooklyn’s rebellion as the revolt of perhaps the first nepo-baby, who now sees that his parents did him no favours by using their famous names to get him his own cookery show at 22, which apparently required 62 professionals to film him and help him fashion a sandwich. Perhaps by trademarking all of their offspring, the Beckhams really thought they were helping protect them in some obscure way. Now it just looks tremendously grasping on the part of the parents.

It’s hard to see how the Beckhams Senior can come back from this. Hubris has overtaken them. And just when they thought they had it all sewn up, too – with those indecently sworn over and yearned for titles theirs at last. And not to mention that recent Netflix docu-series, showing them as ‘real’ people, a proper battle-weary couple come through it all, still teasing each other with easy charm. All that banter now seems as phoney as the matching purple thrones they got married on, and I feel that it is for this they won’t be forgiven – the lie posing as the truth, as is so recurrent right now, right to the seat of government.

Of all the Spice Girls, Victoria was always seen to be the one to have made it; the decades-long marriage weathered with dignity and discretion. And now she’s an actual Lady, compared with Geri’s bother with her husband’s sexting scandal, Mel B’s victimisation at the hands of an allegedly coercive and violent partner, Mel C’s mental health and Emma Bunton’s rather banal billet on Heart Radio. But some of these trajectories look rather more enviable now, compared with the public shaming Victoria is now suffering.

Lady Beckham has queened it over the other Spices in recent years, stymieing tours, seeing herself as an upmarket fashion designer rather than a tawdry performer. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t find the situation somewhat funny. I can imagine a lot of ‘You okay, hun?’ on the group chat while, behind her back, they’re tearing her a new one worthy of Wes Streeting locked in a Sabatier store with Keir Starmer.

What will the players do? The parents will have to keep mum, though it will drive them seven shades of puce with frustration, because if they retaliate, they risk being seen as every bit as status conscious and power mad as their son accuses them of being. Getting the other kids involved looks shady, too – and is only likely to draw the young lovers closer together. There’s no sign at all that the boy Brooklyn wants to reconcile anyway:

‘I do not want to reconcile with my family. I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life. Recently, I have seen with my own eyes the lengths that they’ll go through to place countless lies in the media, mostly at the expense of innocent people, to preserve their own façade. But I believe the truth always comes out.’

In fact, I’d bet shorter odds on Harry and Megsy setting up Archewell Inc and Lilibet Ltd on a playdate with the Wales kiddies than this supremely silly bit of scandal sorting itself out any time soon. Let the popping of the corn commence!

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.