When Brooklyn Beckham took to Instagram in January this year, no one expected him to unleash a six-page tirade of abuse against his parents. Confirming four years of reported feuding, his most cutting line in the scathing post read: “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”
David, 51, and Victoria, 52, have never said anything publicly about their estrangement from their oldest son. However, in her first book, Brand Beckham: The Fame. The Feuds. The Fallout, seasoned British journalist Alison Boshoff details the moment Victoria privately fell apart as the world found out their private business.
“Victoria, at home in Holland Park, West London, with Romeo, Cruz and Harper, was inconsolable,” Alison writes. “Victoria was in such a bad way that her mother, Jackie, started to worry she might harm herself. Jackie was apparently insistent that Victoria should be watched by staff and not left alone at all.”
The buzzed-about book delves deep into the famous family’s inner workings and unpacks exactly how their rift with Brooklyn became so wide and seemingly irreparable.
“There was quite a lot that surprised me,” Alison tells Woman’s Day of speaking with Beckham insiders for the book. “I was surprised when I found out that the Beckham attitude is they don’t think they’ve done anything to apologise for. I thought they would understand that they’d made a misstep.
“One other surprise to me was, I think I had fallen into the notion that Victoria wears the trousers in the relationship, largely because of their demeanour and how they present. But the more I researched, the more it was evident that actually, David is very much in charge. And that he is very fully the more dominant partner.”
At the heart of the family feud? David and Victoria’s ongoing disapproval of Brooklyn’s actress wife, Nicola, which proved to be the last straw after a lifetime of feeling like he was being “controlled” and exploited by his parents for the sake of their empire.
“Fundamentally, this is a beef because your parents don’t like the person who you’ve chosen to be your wife,” the Daily Mail editor-at-large says. “I think it was a very long time coming, similar with Prince Harry and Meghan actually – meeting the right person was the catalyst for him deciding that he wanted to live in a different way and to be independent and come out from under this family structure.”
In his social media outburst, Brooklyn referred to his parents’ “performative” nature, insisting, “My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else. Brand Beckham comes first.”
Alison explains that one need only look at the business model of the Beckham empire to see it from Brooklyn’s point of view.
“Remember that the way the family structure is set up, they all have the same management and the same legal team – what that does is there’s an assumption that the interests of the children are identical to the interests of the parents and that isn’t the case, he decided,” the author says.
Alison has been writing about the Beckhams for around three decades, the footballer and the pop star quickly becoming “very much part of my early working life” on the British showbiz rounds.
“I would have written about Victoria first as a Spice Girl,” Alison recalls of the mid ’90s. “At the time I was writing for the Daily Telegraph, a terribly proper newspaper for the English upper class.
“Certainly with David and Victoria in terms of their public perception, in the early days, people thought they were kind of vulgar, people mocked them, they were figures of fun. You know, she’s a pop star who can’t sing, he’s a twittish footballer with stupid hairstyles and ridiculous clothes, so people didn’t think that much of them. But I think as time has gone by, you kind of get to see them more as people.”
ON DAVID’S ‘AFFAIRS’
Long before Brooklyn’s very public battle with his parents, David and Victoria had weathered their own storms, starting with the footballer’s scandal-plagued stint with Real Madrid in 2003. It wouldn’t be a Beckham book without mentioning David’s infamous “affair” with his former personal assistant Rebecca Loos – claims he called “ludicrous” at the time.
It remains a chapter in his life that he has never directly addressed, apart from describing the tabloid storm as the first time he and Victoria had been “put under that kind of pressure in our marriage”, in his Netflix documentary.
“I think if you look at what happened with Rebecca Loos, there was a denial that wasn’t a denial, there was legal action that never went any further and the Beckhams ended up paying the News of the World’s legal costs, and that tells you where that sits,” Alison says.
“I don’t think there’s a world in which David Beckham wants to end up facing Rebecca Loos across a courtroom and having her under court privilege, [retell] a deeply embarrassing, very old story which she has always stuck to her version of events which was that there was a fully sexual affair.
“I think people are fascinated by it still. I was hoping she might speak to me, she decided not to, although she seems to ebb and flow. After the Netflix Beckham documentary, she did want to speak.”
THE ‘INAPPROPRIATE’ WEDDING DANCE
The first inklings of tension between Brooklyn, Nicola, David and Victoria began before the young couple’s lavish wedding in April 2022. Brooklyn later claimed his parents tried to pressure him to sign away the rights to his name before he joined the billionaire Peltz family, and the issues snowballed from there.
“They’d fallen out before the wedding and weren’t on speaking terms because of an issue with names and rights, then the wedding happened and that was a very low point,” Alison explains.
Shortly after the wedding, there were rumours Nicola, 31, had snubbed her future mother-in-law’s offer to design her wedding dress, but it wasn’t until years later that the extent of the wedding day disaster was revealed. Brooklyn claimed his parents had been “trying endlessly to ruin my relationship” and their big day in Miami was no different.
He accused his mother of hijacking his planned first dance with Nicola and dancing “very inappropriately” on him – a revelation that opened up the former Spice Girl to ridicule from many.
However, recollections may vary when it comes to what really happened on that dance floor.
“One of the few who have seen the footage that was captured on the night by a cameraman describes the “close” dance as “honestly, very weird”, and adds: “It is uncomfortable to watch,’’’ writes Alison in Brand Beckham.
“However, two other wedding guests, both friends of the Beckhams, insist that they saw nothing untoward. And Gordon Ramsay – no stranger to an awkward wedding – said that he saw nothing “salacious” or “inappropriate” either.”
Despite the simmering tension, Alison says Brooklyn and Nicola tried to “play nice” with his parents, but essentially there was “a relationship of mistrust” that was hard for both parties to move past.
“It was said to me that Nicola tried to be a good soldier, she showed up, she wore the Victoria Beckham dresses, they went on family holidays in Miami, they saw each other at Christmas, they came to her fashion shows, the Beckhams supported his hot sauce launch,” the author says.
“But the undercurrent there was that Brooklyn and Nicola felt that nothing they did was ever enough, and the Beckhams felt there were still bitchy sideswipes being taken behind the scenes.”
A FAMILY DIVIDED
Eight months after he took their feud nuclear, Brooklyn – and his wife – have stood firm in their face-off with the Beckhams, and David and Victoria have shown no signs of budging.
“Each side is waiting for an apology, somebody has to ultimately be the bigger person and what will drive that, I don’t know because at the moment, nobody seems to want to be the bigger person,” Alison explains.
There’s been talk that family friend, Sir Elton John, has been tasked with playing peacemaker to the warring family members. The iconic singer hosted godson Brooklyn and Nicola in the South of France recently, at the same time his estranged parents and siblings were holidaying in the area.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying because he is very much a family person and I think the other thing you have to remember with Elton is he had an absolutely mirror fallout with his own mother, who called David Furnish ‘that thing you married’ and as a result, Elton did not speak to his own mother until she was on her deathbed,” Alison explains.
“That was a 15-year estrangement so I’m sure if he was asked by either side, his advice would be ‘make up’.
“He’s trying to play a straight bat and be a good godfather to his godson and maintaining that relationship, but I’m sure if he’s able to speak warmly about David and Victoria to Brooklyn, he will do so. He will be among those friends of the Beckhams who will be saying, ‘Come on guys’.”
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
Even after the Rebecca Loos chapter, the Beckhams’ marriage has remained under the microscope as some question whether they’re truly in it for love or money, or status. However, 27 years on from their over-the-top wedding in an Irish castle (paid for partly by OK! Magazine and their £1 million payday for the wedding rights!), Posh and Becks seem determined to stick it out through thick and thin.
Speaking with their inner circle for her book, Alison discovered it had long been a similar pattern of resilience for the couple, who are said to have had a “difficult” dozen or so years of marriage.
“One family source says, ‘They have had some really difficult times and have both behaved badly. But it’s a real relationship’,” she writes.
That loyalty to each other has become even more evident as they both continue to come to terms with being disowned by their first-born.
“From everything that I hear, the Brooklyn issue and problem and sadness has really brought them strongly together,” Alison tells Woman’s Day.
“They really support each other because there’s one other person in the world who truly understands what you’re going through because they’re the other person who is going through it. And that’s each other. That’s a very, very strong bond for them at this point.”
Going back to Victoria’s initial devastation at being cut off by Brooklyn, it seems time has partly healed the wounds.
“I think everyone is learning to live with the new reality which is that they are only on speaking terms with three of their four children,” Alison says. “So it is still a matter of deep upset and sorrow for them, but that very early reaction has faded out.
“They are just really busy – they’re busy launching things with Cruz, and with Romeo and with Harper. They haven’t rethought the way they go about Brand Beckham and the promotion of it and the promotion of their children as commercial entities. You might think, if that was me, it would make me rethink. But it has not made them rethink.” [credit]
Brand Beckham: The Fame. The Feuds. The Fallout, by Alison Boshoff, Penguin, $36.99
