I have seen behind the scenes of Brand Beckham – it wasn’t always pretty

Just as Brooklyn Beckham turned himself into a human hand grenade for brand Beckham, his father David found himself surrounded by the snow-capped mountains of Davos. Ironically, he had gone to pick up an award for his work with children and young people, and he may have paused to reflect on the last time an explosion this big threatened to blow up his family. The last big crisis had also played out to a snowy backdrop, when in 2004 the family decamped en masse to the ski slopes of Courchevel to put on a united front after claims of an affair with his then-assistant Rebecca Loos.As the News of the World cast a shadow on the perfect family narrative, Victoria even sported a rare smile in the famous photographs of snowball fights captured by paparazzo Jason Fraser, known as their “court photographer”. The pair dismissed the allegations as “ludicrous”, and gave short shrift to the rumour mill they started. It wasn’t brought up again until the 2023 four-part Netflix series Beckham, when it was retold as a story about the evil tabloids and the impact they had on their family. I was The Daily Mail’s showbusiness editor at the time and saw up close how the carefully curated image of Brand Beckham was. Their apparent “perfect family shtick” became further cemented when they moved to America and signed with Simon Fuller, who had first managed the Spice Girls, in 2007. And yet the idea that all was not well was never far away. Family members and friends would give me stories – some of them didn’t even want money – and hinted at anger, envy and frustration behind the scenes. It has always been interesting to see which families sell stories to the press and which remain loyal. The picture that emerged was a miserable one. Victoria – the girl bullied for her acne and even now obsessively skinny – desperately hanging onto her “goldenballs” Beckham, whose business acumen seems to be every bit as successful as his footballing career and bankrolled her fashion business for years. While there is no doubt that they love their children, the childhood of the Beckham clan was often uprooted as David’s career often took them from country to country.Following son Brooklyn’s explosive claims, the Beckhams will struggle to “play” the happy family card this time. His father did not answer when asked direct questions about his son during a public appearance in Davos, Switzerland. However, while recording a podcast with US popular science author Adam Grant at the World Economic Forum about social media, he said that parents must allow their children to “make mistakes”. For once, the Beckhams’ PR team is keeping silent. But don’t be fooled: I have little doubt that a war room will be busy behind the scenes as the couple plot their next move.The row between Brooklyn and his parents has been simmering since his £3m wedding to Nicola Peltz, the daughter of a billionaire businessman, in April 2022. Victoria’s decision to like an Instagram video a few weeks ago showing him cooking a beer-brined chicken is believed to have been one of the final straws. Astonishingly, it prompted his lawyers to send his family a cease-and-desist letter to try to stop them engaging with him online. The erratic nature of what came next might be explained by the fact that a few days ago, it was reported that Brooklyn and Nicola made the decision to part ways with Matthew Hiltzik, a much respected crisis PR whose past clients include Miramax and Johnny Depp. Hiltzik had been hired seven months ago by Nicola’s father, who wanted to help shift public sympathy away from the Beckhams and protect the Peltz family’s reputation. While sources said that the couple had let him go because they were unhappy with the continuing negative stories about Nicola, it has also been claimed that Hiltzik walked away, having grown tired of Nicola using social media to antagonise her in-laws.If Hiltzik is no longer working with them, it might explain the timing of Brooklyn’s six Instagram posts that showed his “truth”; toxic stories about his family that can never be unsaid: “I do not want to reconcile with my family,” he wrote of his parents. “I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life.”Stories about where this all started – the wedding dress, which was originally to be designed by Victoria, and the first dance, which the former Spice Girl did with her son, apparently leaving Nicola in tears – had already been rumoured, but Brooklyn laid them bare.Victoria had “cancelled making Nicola’s dress in the eleventh hour”, he insisted. More shockingly, he added: “My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife, which had been planned weeks in advance to a romantic love song. In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage, where in the schedule it was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead. She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.”Mum-shaming Victoria – a professional pop star and dancer – in this way feels particularly brutal and in many ways, it’s hard to feel sorry for a pair of “nepo babies” whose first house was worth £7m. This isn't a couple who started at the bottom like Victoria and David, who have earned what they have made through hard work, nor is Brooklyn someone who knows what it is to wonder whether you can pay your rent or mortgage this month. But as privileged as he is, as a celebrity-watcher, I have long been fascinated by the children of famous people. Too many of them become drug addicts and die by suicide for this to look like a comfortable life. As Brooklyn wrote: “I grew up with overwhelming anxiety. For the first time in my life, since stepping away from my family, that anxiety has disappeared.” Sacha Bailey, whose father David was a scion of the Swinging Sixties, once told me that, even as a young child, you never know whether friends want to be with you because of you or because of who your dad is. He ended up leaving the country and considering changing gender because he felt unhappy in his own skin, not really knowing what his own skin was, other than “son of David Bailey”. “Being the child of a celebrity is not privilege – it’s pre-ownership,” says PR guru Mark Borkowski. “From birth, your name is metadata. Your adolescence is content. Your mistakes are monetised by strangers and quietly risk-managed by family advisers. You grow up fluent in exposure but illiterate in autonomy. By the time you’re old enough to choose, the brand has already been chosen for you.”For the Beckham children in particular, there seemed to be no choice in the matter. They are the children of two celebrities, but they were also part of the brand from an extremely young age. Even on Victoria’s latest Instagram posts, Harper, 14, is filmed trying on her mum’s latest makeup lines.While most of us get a chance to make false starts and mistakes as we begin our careers, Brooklyn’s could not have been more public. A short-lived modelling career. A book of photographs which was publicly derided. A career as a YouTube chef, who was mocked for his simple recipes. Now, under the tutelage of Nicola’s father, he has started a business making food sauces. Once again, he is being bankrolled by wealthy family members, given opportunities that some have worked for all their lives, but if it fails, it’s another very public failure. There is a lot to compare in this situation with Prince Harry and how he blew up his relationship with his family after marrying someone from a different world. Certainly, both men, blue-blood royal and the celebrity version, had little choice about the direction their lives would go in until their wives showed a different way was possible. Those who fall into “Team Beckham” in what has become, overnight, a salacious scandal and source of mirth, shock and sadness, blame Nicola for taking him away from his family. But I think it’s much more complicated than that. As Rebecca Loos, now a yoga teacher, wrote on Instagram: “So happy he is standing up for himself and speaking publicly finally. I have felt so bad for his poor wife, knowing too well what they can be like.”Brooklyn writes: “For my entire life, my parents have controlled narratives in the press about our family. The performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have been a fixture of the life I was born into.” This is a morality tale showing us the other side of the Instagram-perfect world created by the brand. Brooklyn’s posts have since broken the internet, sparking a thousand memes, mainly on his claims about Victoria’s dancing “on” her son at the wedding. This will impact Brand Beckham, even if it is too big to be completely broken. One of the most interesting elements of Brooklyn’s post was about the importance of the brand element – “Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media,” he wrote, suggesting there had even been a family legal tussle over his use of the Beckham name. “Weeks before our big day, my parents repeatedly pressured and attempted to bribe me into signing away the rights to my name, which would have affected me, my wife and our future children,” he wrote. “They were adamant on my signing before my wedding date because the terms of the deal would be initiated.”Most of us don’t get pre-wedding paydays or have to fight over the use of our name, but in some ways this is a modern Shakespearean-style story of love and family dynamics, heightened by fame, wealth and power. The immense pain of falling out with family members, however, is a tragedy many of us can sadly relate to, and whatever “team” you’re on, there are rarely any winners.