The strange comfort of watching the Beckhams fall apart
Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Anne Peltz at their wedding. Picture: Brooklyn Beckham/Instagram/Vogue
I was planning an early night when the news broke. No, nothing about Greenland tensions or Enoch Burke or even the Northern Lights visible over Ireland. I mean the big news.
Brooklyn Beckham had posted an Instagram story.
Not just any Instagram story — this wasn't another dull cooking video or a poorly shot photograph of an elephant. This was the latest shocking development in what is probably Brooklyn's most successful incarnation to date — that of Estranged Son.
In his statement, Brooklyn declared unequivocally, that he does not want to reconcile with his family. This family, for those who have been living under a rock for the past 40 years, is the Beckhams — footballer David, ex-Spice Girl turned fashion designer Victoria and their brood of children.
Rumours have abounded of a feud ever since Brooklyn married American actress — and billionaire heiress — Nicola Peltz in 2022. Initial indications that there was some truth to the gossip came last year, when Brooklyn unfollowed his family on Instagram.
He was also conspicuously absent from a family photo to mark David's 50th birthday. However, the Beckhams appeared to offer an olive branch on New Year's Eve when David posted a picture of himself with Brooklyn as a child, alongside the caption "I love you all so much".
If David and Victoria hoped to mend their relationship with their eldest son in 2026, they were in for a rude awakening this week. Taking to Instagram, Brooklyn accused his parents of being controlling, trying "endlessly" to ruin his relationship with his wife and valuing "public promotion and endorsements above all else".
Specifically, Brooklyn says his parents have tried to bribe him into giving away the rights to his name (a concept that I'm honestly too poor to understand but which I'm sure is a big deal in celebrity circles) and “rejected” him and his wife when they travelled to London for David's birthday.
Interestingly, the worst accusations are saved for Victoria, who Brooklyn says called his wife "evil" over seating arrangements at the wedding, cancelled making Nicola's wedding dress "at the eleventh hour”, and — most sensationally — hijacked the couple's first dance where she "danced inappropriately on" Brooklyn, much to his embarrassment.
It's official. The boy has gone nuclear. Look, weddings are fraught. We've all been there. Who hasn't had a disagreement over a seating plan or a dress hem in the lead-up to the big day?
Another famous example of tensions surrounding an epic wedding ceremony is that of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, where somebody made somebody else cry over a bridesmaid's dress — it's still unclear who was actually crying. Probably me, as I think of all the hours I've wasted reading about it.
The parallels between Prince Harry and Brooklyn don't end there. Before the Beckham scandal, the most famous celebrity family estrangement in recent times was "Megxit" — Harry and Meghan's scorched earth approach to extricating themselves from royal duties.
Harry and Meghan are even rumoured to have taken Brooklyn and Nicola under their wing in recent months, no doubt talking them through the logistics of high-profile family feuding. Step 1: Burn all bridges in an extremely public way. And so on.
Light entertainment this all may be for the masses, but there are actually real people behind the headlines and the Instagram stories. And honestly, Brooklyn's statement does read like he is a young man carrying a lot of hurt.
His accusation that his parents prioritise self-promotion and controlling the media narrative probably has more than a grain of truth to it. Nobody would know this better than Brooklyn himself.
Anyone with a pulse and a Tamagotchi in the 90s will remember his birth — again, comparable in anticipation to that of royalty. His name was supposedly in recognition of the New York borough in which he was conceived.
We all knew a lot about the Beckhams, long before the advent of social media and knowing far too much about everyone.
Brooklyn and his siblings have grown up in the limelight, and this has certainly been predominantly orchestrated by their parents. The recent Netflix “documentaries” about David and Victoria can barely be described as such, so cherry picked was their content by Pa and Ma Beckham.
Their social media accounts — until all the recent unpleasantness — presented the family in glossy-haired, shiny-toothed perfection. The Beckhams show us what they want us to see, but no family is perfect.
I believe that Brooklyn is speaking what he perceives to be the truth about his family situation. He is a grown man now in his 20s, married and possibly planning a family of his own — a bit long in tooth to be under the thumbs of mum and dad.
A cynic may suggest that the timing of this estrangement is fortunate — the extreme wealth of his new family negates Brooklyn’s need for the Beckhams to continue bankrolling his various passion projects.
Even so, that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t experienced strife as a member of Brand Beckham.
We will likely never know the full story of what is going on behind the scenes. Whatever the truth, what we do know is that — like all family drama — it’s complicated, it’s messy, and it probably shouldn’t be aired in public.
But for as long as it is, I know that I and millions of others will continue to lap it up.
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