In the months leading up to Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz’s much-dissected nuptials, the mother of the bride contacted Valentino’s Roman atelier with an unconventional request. Claudia Peltz wanted the inside of her daughter’s gown to feature a secret “evil eye” talisman, sewn in blue thread, “for protection”.
It was a superstitious take on the classic wedding tradition for “something blue” – but perhaps the first person to marry into the Beckham clan “needed all the luck she could get”, the Daily Mail’s editor-at-large Alison Boshoff suggests in her new book, Brand Beckham.
The talisman didn’t exactly do its job. The wedding only served to entrench the bad feeling brewing between Brooklyn and the rest of his family, an enmity that erupted in dramatic fashion in January this year, when the eldest boy took aim at David and Victoria in a bombshell Instagram statement. In it, he claimed that “my family values public promotion and endorsements above all else”, and that “family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media”.
Boshoff’s account of David and Victoria’s rise and rise draws upon the decades she has spent covering Britain’s premier celebrity clan from close range, and paints a distinctly unvarnished portrait of what it might take for a family to maintain their spot at the top of the pop culture pecking order.
Brand Beckham is littered with fun gossipy titbits. Did you know that Princess Margaret’s half-brother-in-law was the Beckhams’ wedding planner? Thought not. And did Nicola really want “to give away dogs as parting gifts to all the guests” at her ceremony, as Boshoff reports? God only knows.
But there is also one question that crops up again and again: despite all the fancy clothes and far-flung holidays, who’d want to take on the burden of dating a Beckham scion? That’s no shade to the kids, who all seem rather sweet in their way, but rather a reflection of just how difficult it must be to be part of what Victoria has called the family’s “travelling circus”.
This is a book that will make most in-law drama look pedestrian. Sure, your boyfriend’s mum and dad might be posting pass-agg comments in the family WhatsApp group, but at least they’re not icing you out with the pointed withdrawal of Instagram likes, and the intricacies of your own cold war aren’t being painstakingly reported in the press like this one is.
The second generation of Beckhams has played a crucial role in burnishing the family’s image, Boshoff points out. Without them, the writer reckons, David and Victoria would be “just a retired footballer and a middling fashion designer who was in a pop band three decades ago”.
It seems as if the Beckham kids’ partners are expected to toe the party line and manage their image just as carefully as an actual family member
Instead, she suggests, Brooklyn, his younger brothers Romeo and Cruz, as well as their sister Harper, have “humanised” David and Victoria over the years, allowing them to position themselves as “a relatable mum and dad”. But the kids have also helped to make one celebrity couple into a “dynasty” and “shored up their importance as a quasi-First Family”, whose influence and appeal spans generations.
Anyone interested in dating the Beckham boys, then, must seemingly opt in to becoming an extension of the brand, showcasing an image that aligns with the family’s priorities.
For the women to whom Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz have been romantically linked, that doesn’t just mean smiling on the red carpet for launch events and fashion shows; it means wearing Victoria’s designs for big occasions, turning up for endless family obligations and cheerfully documenting it all on social media, complete with vaguely adoring captions professing their thanks to the matriarch and patriarch.
I’ve sometimes idly wondered how I’d deal with, say, marrying into a family that likes to do parkruns on Christmas Day, or to all dress in matching pyjamas for high days and holidays – but this particular instance would require another level of careful navigation, not least because it all plays out in public.
Essentially, it seems as if the Beckham kids’ partners are expected to toe the party line and manage their image just as carefully as an actual family member – and although they might enjoy some kind of boost to their profile, it appears to come at a cost. By Boshoff’s reckoning, being a supporting character in Brand Beckham is a full-time job.
It’s hard not to think of Prince Harry, another estranged son given to public pronouncements; in the past, many of his ex-girlfriends have spoken about the difficulties of being suddenly expected to follow the royal playbook, without much of the protection that comes with being a proper part of the family. As a “girlfriend of Beckham” – a GoB, if you enjoy unfortunate acronyms – you’ll receive media scrutiny during the relationship, but if that relationship ends, you’ll no longer enjoy the protection of the inner circle.
Everything is content. Boshoff draws attention to David’s 2015 interview with James Corden’s Late Late Show, in which he shared details of chaperoning Brooklyn on his first ever date as a teenager. “He’s going to hate me for this, but yeah, it’s happening, I’m fine with it,” he told Corden, before launching into the anecdote.
Boshoff claims that there was ‘consternation’ when Brooklyn missed a family party for his grandma in order to jet off on holiday with Hana
A few years later, Brooklyn’s romance with one of his first serious girlfriends, the model Hana Cross, would provide something of a cautionary tale. Boshoff writes of how, soon after the young couple started dating towards the end of 2018, Cross started “wearing Victoria Beckham clothes and going to family parties”, setting out a girlfriend-of blueprint that later would be “applied to both Nicola herself and to the girlfriends of Brooklyn’s brothers, Romeo and Cruz”.
But the honeymoon period – for the couple and for his family – was short-lived. Boshoff claims that there was “consternation” when Brooklyn missed a family party for his grandma in order to jet off on holiday with Hana. “There were mutterings in the press about ‘three-line whips’ for important family celebrations and an apparent lack of respect,” Boshoff writes, making David and Victoria sound a bit like the Cotswolds equivalent of Tony and Carmela Soprano.
And in 2019, Boshoff mentions, there was media speculation that the family had asked Cross to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It should be noted, though, that she has denied that they’ve tried to prevent her from talking about her time with Brooklyn. “I’ve never been pressured or received any warning from them not to speak out about it or say anything about the relationship,” she told Hello! earlier this year.
That’s not to say that she looks back fondly upon her stint as a Beckham plus-one. “My time with the family caused me a lot of anxiety, in all honesty,” she admitted in the Hello! interview. “There were a lot of warning signs and things that happened during the relationship that, in hindsight, should have made me think and maybe end the relationship or walk away from it a lot sooner than I did.”
And as a billionaire’s daughter, Nicola, who has also been painted in headlines as a bridezilla par excellence, is perhaps not an automatic figure of sympathy. But marrying into the Beckham family can’t have been easy, even though as an actor, she was arguably better placed than most for dealing with the press scrutiny.
Towards the start of Nicola and Brooklyn’s relationship in 2020, one Heat magazine article, referenced in Boshoff’s book, claimed that Mia Regan, Romeo’s then-girlfriend, had “supplanted Nicola in Victoria’s affections”. Whether or not there was any truth to such claims, being pitted against each other in such a public manner must have been tricky.
Take into account that Mia was then only 17 years old and this media framing seems especially cruel. And again, intra-family favouritism is hard enough to traverse without millions of people checking to see whether your in-laws have liked and commented “Kisses! VB x” or some other friendly banality on your latest Instagram post.
Mia, who Boshoff describes as a “nice, humble, home counties girl”, seems to emerge relatively unscathed from her relationship with Romeo, which ended in 2024 with a flowery statement about their “five years of love” and ongoing “love and respect for each other”. Might that be because she was, as Boshoff puts it, “malleable” and willing to go by the family playbook? Who can say.
Romeo and Cruz are currently dating DJ Kim Turnbull – who has had to deny speculation that she was previously involved with Brooklyn, just to make things even messier – and music producer Jackie Apostel, respectively.
Both women appear to have subscribed wholeheartedly to the classic “GoB” playbook. They’ve turned out for the World Cup. They’ve worn their Victoria Beckham outfits. They’ve sent Harper very public birthday messages on Instagram. The parents seem to approve – but it’s a little exhausting to watch. So next time you’re dealing with family drama, count your blessings – at least you don’t have to impress David and Victoria to boot.
‘Brand Beckham’ by Alison Boshoff is out now (Century, £22)
