Who could have guessed that it would be him? That Brooklyn Beckham, the smiling lad who’s never had a real job in his life, once derided for being so simple that he published a photography book including an elephant in which you couldn’t even see the elephant, could turn out to be our nation’s voice of sanity?
I am talking about celebrity culture itself, still a huge force gripping the nation, and this week’s unexpected online post in which Brooklyn tears down his parents, David and Victoria Beckham. He says the family brand which they have spent almost 30 years building is false and damaging; he says he wants no part of it ever again. His message to his parents’ millions of followers is that they have all been deceived.
For several years now, ever since he got married to American heiress Nicola Peltz at the tender age of 23, there have been rumours of a feud between him and the family he left behind. Something to do with his bride, his fashion designer mother, and a wedding dress, the gossipmongers said. Now, in a sensational move, Brooklyn has confirmed all of this and more.
Via a post on his Instagram account, the 26-year-old said his parents had left him with “no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about some of the lies”. He complained that they have “controlled narratives in the press” for his entire life, with “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships” being “a fixture of the life I was born into”. He has seen them “place countless lies in the media”, he alleged, “mostly at the expense of innocent people, to preserve their own facade”. His wedding day was one of anxiety and embarrassment, he said, with his mother allegedly hogging what should have been his first dance with his bride to dance “very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.” Yes, that would be “on” me, rather than “with” me — does he mean a lap dance? Ouch. Oedipus Becks, indeed.
David and Victoria have not responded to Brooklyn’s allegations. But, as someone who has spent 20 years interviewing celebrities, with their consent but not always with their enthusiasm, I see this development as a significant one. Not so much for what it might reveal about Brand Beckham from behind the scenes — I mean, come on, how did we really think they managed to stay in favour for such a long time? — but for what it means. A younger generation of stars, Brooklyn’s generation, no longer wants to play the old game. They would rather go scorched-earth on their own families than pose for one more group photo with one more fake smile.
To my mind, having watched up close how such people operate, Brooklyn’s words have the ring of truth to them. But it still feels rather incredible that we should have heard it from his lips. This is partly because — and let’s be honest here — compared to his canny parents, Brooklyn always seemed like a simpler kind of guy. If you’ve watched either of his parents’ recent documentary series on Netflix, you’ll know how hard they have worked to get where they are. Their eldest child Brooklyn, however, has always seemed the clown prince of nepo-babies, announcing that he’s a photographer one week and a chef the next, in much the same way that I might fix a dripping tap and declare myself a plumber. So for him to take control of the narrative like this, revealing his anxiety, his pain but also his happiness, is quite startling.
You see, after the News of the World shut down in 2011, with the Leveson Inquiry subsequently exposing the underhand methods by which the tabloids had harvested gossip, it felt like the end of an era. We had known so much about the lives of the rich and famous, but now reporters were on edge, celebrities felt betrayed, and the creative industries of film, fashion and music were unsure how to rebuild their relationship with the media. Who in their right mind would want their private life splashed across the press anyway?
What followed was an era in which celebrities communicated on their own terms, with families like the Beckhams taking advantage of what had become a weakened press. Reporters no longer rifled through voicemail inboxes. Social media permitted one-way, polished communication. Today, long lens paparazzi shots from photographers hiding in bushes are almost a thing of the past, for Instagram is full of celebs acting as their own paparazzi and posting their own bikini photos from the beach — though more flatteringly staged, of course. All this means that celebrities have far more control over their public image than they ever used to.
“A brief check online shows all sorts of commenters saying that Brooklyn is a brat who will soon be running back to Mummy and Daddy for cash.”
The Beckhams are among the best practitioners of this new style of celebrity, notably via the medium of the self-produced TV documentary. Here, more than any other medium except perhaps Instagram, stars can secure their reputations on their own terms. And this is where Brand Beckham has played a blinder — perhaps because David and Victoria knew that Brooklyn was a bomb waiting to go off, and therefore wanted an early victory in the court of public opinion.
David’s three-episode life story, released in 2023, outlined how hard he had worked at football from boyhood, pushed unrelentingly by a father who never praised his talent or said well done. We heard about the hard yards and sheer joy of his early success with England, only to be followed by years of rejection: the young midfielder was blamed for the team’s failure and had a bad time in Spain. There was a brief allusion to Rebecca Loos and tabloid stories about alleged infidelity, somehow told as if David was once again the victim of a story in which he might just, you know, not be. The series was a hit.
So was Victoria’s, which came out in 2025. It showed her to have a sense of humour that had previously been missed by many. The series emphasised how doggedly Victoria had worked to be taken seriously in the fashion industry after her pop career in the Spice Girls came to an end. Having watched the show, former doubters came away saying how much they liked her now.
Yet celebrity culture is changing. In some cases, the glossiness has been torn away. Little more than a decade after the end of the Leveson Inquiry, Prince Harry, one of the people most aggrieved by Leveson’s subject matter, was giving us more of his private life than any journalist had ever dredged up. In a move that surely inspired Brooklyn, Harry had married a glamorous American, turned his back on a dynastic British family, and then written a memoir so long that after 12 hours of the audiobook I couldn’t take any more revelations and gave up listening.
The painful authenticity, so unlike the staged photos, is evident in music, too. Lily Allen ended last year with an incredibly revealing album about the breakdown of her celebrity marriage, while other pop stars, such as Charli XCX and Lizzo, have unexpectedly taken to Substack to write long essays about their lives. Sometimes that authenticity is being foisted on the rich and powerful rather than chosen by them: this week, Donald Trump has been posting Emmanuel Macron’s private appeals for diplomacy straight onto the internet for the world to see.
As for the Beckhams, their near-pristine public image has been damaged, but they are unlikely to lose the affection of the public. The thing is, Victoria and David are both clearly hard workers: nobody can deny the lifetime of effort they have put in. So I’m sure their son won’t turn everyone against them. A brief check online shows all sorts of commenters saying that Brooklyn is a brat who will soon be running back to Mummy and Daddy for cash, apparently not having noticed that he’s left a family of multi-millionaires to live with one of actual billionaires. (His father-in-law, Nelson Peltz, is a well-known investor and businessman.) Perhaps it feels safe to publicly denounce your parents as liars once you have access to even more expensive lawyers than they do.
Of course, one can’t guarantee that the person saying “It was all lies!” is any closer to the truth than those they accuse. But in an age of younger celebrities seeking to claim their “truth”, Brand Family is going to be harder to maintain. The Royals can’t do it, the Beckhams can’t do it — but does their survival actually depend on it? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes, in that they won’t be able to carry on in quite the same way. Victoria’s already been through this with the Spice Girls, who tried and failed to carry on after Geri Halliwell walked out. David Beckham, an experienced captain, knows a winning football team creates a magic that is greater than the sum of its parts. With videos showing the apparent frostiness of Victoria towards her son and her daughter-in-law, the PR campaign that so recently revealed her warmth and sense of humour might all be in vain. Plus, Brooklyn may have further bombshells yet to come. Then there are the rumours about David and Victoria’s marriage that have swirled around the media for years. None of our business you might say, and you’d be absolutely right — if Brand Beckham weren’t trading on their nuclear family image for quite so many business deals.
So might this be the thread that, after so many other dramas have been successfully stitched over, finally starts to pull Brand Beckham apart? And, in an even more unlikely twist, could it be that the formerly-derided Brooklyn, only recently presumed too young to know his own mind, turns out to be the wise old sage who wakes us all up to the truth of celebrity, once and for all? He was the first nepo-baby that my generation, young in the Nineties, paid much attention to, making him all too easy to mock. Now that he’s revealed how it feels to grow up in one’s very own Truman Show, perhaps we’ll be less quick to believe any other celebrities who still play the glossy reality card. And perhaps we’ll also be less surprised when their children try to leave.
