David Beckham’s 50th-birthday celebrations were as meticulously engineered as any royal engagement. There was a black-tie event in Florida with some of the world’s top athletes, a lavish party in the Cotswolds, a trip to Bordeaux on a rented $44.7 million private jet, and then dinner with Tom Cruise and Gordon Ramsay at a swanky Notting Hill restaurant.
This rolling cluster of soirées was designed to send an undeniable message to the world: he might be getting on a bit, but David Beckham still has a royally perfect life.
However, as the actual royals understand all too well, the harder you try to stage-manage something, the more likely it is that a family member will screw everything up. And so it is with the Beckhams. After all that effort, the only part of the festivities that anyone will remember is the complete absence of David’s son Brooklyn. In short, we might be witnessing the Beckham version of Megxit.
In order to understand the supposed feud, some context might be useful. Arguably more than any other nepo baby, Brooklyn Beckham has struggled to escape the shadow of his father. For all of his adult life, he has half-heartedly toyed with one career after another.
For a while, he was a photographer, publishing a book containing a blurry shot of an elephant with the caption “So difficult to photograph.” Then he was a chef, which involved making $100,000-per-episode Facebook videos where he essentially watched other people make him a sandwich.
Now he reportedly wants to become a race-car driver, despite apparently failing the basic driving test seven times.
However, it isn’t as if Brooklyn desperately needs a job. Not only is his father richer than the King but his father-in-law is literally a billionaire. Brooklyn’s wife, Nicola, is an American who is four years older than he is—as is Meghan Markle four years older than Prince Harry. She’s the daughter of Nelson Peltz, the former director of Heinz and a man so wealthy that he once effectively attempted to buy a portion of Disney. When Brooklyn and Nicola got married, in 2022, it meant that Brooklyn could stop relying on handouts from his dad. Finally, he could stand up for himself like a man and rely on handouts from his wife.
This sudden change in dynamic is likely to have put a strain on the relationship between David and Brooklyn. To make matters worse, Brooklyn’s brother Romeo is currently dating a model and D.J. named Kim Turnbull, who, in true soap-opera style, was once reportedly involved with Brooklyn.
What we are left with is something approaching all-out war. Last week, some of Nicola’s close friends went public, claiming that the feud was down to Nicola helping Brooklyn to “see the emotional abuse and toxic behavior within his family.” Sound familiar?
This week, Beckham sources retaliated, telling Hello! magazine that “from the minute Nicola came into the family, she hasn’t shown what Victoria would say is respect towards them.”
As Marina Hyde astutely pointed out in her The Rest is Entertainment podcast, news of this estrangement broke in an extremely modern way, with online sleuths noting that Brooklyn hadn’t attended any of his father’s parties. They even spotted that, when Brooklyn’s brother Cruz wrote, ‘So beautiful Romeo’ with a pink star and a sparkle emoji under one of Romeo’s Instagram posts last month, he was mocking the time when Nicola commented, ‘So beautiful Mia’ with a pink star and sparkle emoji underneath an Instagram post by Romeo’s ex-girlfriend. Clearly, we owe these detectives a debt of gratitude for their invaluable work.
Needless to say, the media has reacted to the feud with typical exuberance. Every public comment, appearance, and outfit has been pored over for clues to the current state of turmoil among all involved. Us Weekly hired a therapist to unpack all the knotted psychodrama. The Sun reported that Brooklyn has already found a “second mum” in Nicola’s mother.
The Daily Mail even lists the nepo friends he’s allegedly abandoned, such as Jack Ramsay (the son of Gordon Ramsay) and Rocco Ritchie (the son of Madonna and Guy Ritchie), at Nicola’s behest. Short of someone hiring a clairvoyant to discover how disappointed Brooklyn Beckham’s ancestors are with him, it seems as if the story is already saturated.
But we’ve been here before. Megxit set a blueprint for how a feud instigated by an ambitious, ever so slightly more experienced American wife can tear apart even the most tightly knit British family. Indeed, on Thursday, The Sun noted that Brooklyn and Nicola visited Montecito to dine with Harry and Meghan last week (an event apparently planned before Beckham Sr.’s birthday extravaganza) so they could all “share trauma of toxic family feuds.” As such we should understand that this is just the beginning.
The good news for Brooklyn is that, if he wants to exploit this situation as well as Prince Harry has, then there’s bound to be big money in a Spare-style tell-all memoir. That’s assuming he knows how to write.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
