On 20 January, the day after his son Brooklyn posted an explosive statement on social media accusing his parents of controlling him and prioritising “public promotion” over all else, David Beckham was at Davos, of all places. In an interview with CNBC, Beckham senior said that while social media “can be dangerous”, he has learned to “use it for the right reasons”, and he tries to teach his children to do the same. The “right reasons” he cited in this particular instance were not the building of multimillion-pound Brand Beckham – so cynical, you! – but his work with Unicef. Despite his best efforts to educate his children about wise social media use, however, “they make mistakes. Children are allowed to make mistakes. That’s how they learn.” This was widely interpreted as a tacit comment on his eldest son’s statement. But it was also a deeply ironic position to take. After all, Brooklyn would probably say that his parents have used social media in everything but the right way.
Brooklyn let daylight in on a feud that has been a feature of gossip columns since April 2022, when he married the American heiress Nicola Peltz (the tell that signalled trouble: as bride, she wore a Valentino dress, rather than one by Victoria’s fashion label). In the years since, there has been David’s 50th birthday party, which Brooklyn and Nicola conspicuously did not attend; the Beckham-Peltzes’ vow renewal, which David and Victoria conspicuously did not attend; Victoria Beckham’s self-produced 2025 advertorial Netflix “documentary”, in which Brooklyn barely featured; and various complex spats over who unfollowed who on social media.
Along with several, absurdly specific grievances including that disappearing wedding dress and a first dance ruined by a mother “dancing very inappropriately on” her son (a funny choice of word that rather brings to mind a lap dance), Brooklyn’s central allegation is that his parents have controlled him and his image for his entire life, to the extent that they wanted him to sign away the rights to his name. “The performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have been a fixture of the life I was born into,” he wrote.
Brooklyn probably has a point. His whole childhood was commercialised. The news of his existence was sold to OK! magazine before he was born, as were his first baby photos and his parents’ wedding photos, featuring baby Brooklyn in a purple cowboy hat. Our tell-all social media culture is just the latest iteration of that tabloid era and its (in this case mutually consensual) exploitation of privacy for profit, and David and Victoria played a key part in establishing the idea that a person could be a brand.
Today, Brand Beckham is built upon a far more sophisticated and controlled exploitation of their privacy: they are the ruling social media dynasty of a world in which content creators curate impossibly idealised versions of their lives for public consumption – and money. The family show up to support each other, invite professional photographers to special occasions and post all of it on Instagram, pronouncing how much they love each other. I suspect that, somewhere on the way, the Beckhams lost the ability to see how very far from normal family life all this is.
Crucially, Brooklyn also accused his parents of trying to ruin his relationship with his wife, and denied “the narrative” he alleges they have fostered that “my wife controls me”. The night before their wedding, Brooklyn writes, “members of my family told me that Nicola was ‘not blood’ and ‘not family’” (a highly commendable characteristic in a wife, you might say, in terms of gene-pool diversity).
For all this, comparisons have been drawn with Britain’s other royal family and its wayward son, Prince Harry. Here is another son born into unimaginable wealth, forced to lead a life more public and more rigidly dictated than he might have chosen for himself; another beautiful, slightly older American woman who resists the strictures and the self-sacrifice his family demands, and shows him another way to live. She doesn’t need his fame or his money, but hers give him a way out. Both these royal families rule by public consent, maintained by a sort of Faustian bargain with the press (though the Beckhams already have more money than anyone could reasonably spend in several lifetimes, and could have put a stop to all this years ago).
If the British dislike wayward sons who bring shame on the family, we like their wives even less – particularly American ones. Nicola is, like Meghan Markle, and Wallis Simpson before her, portrayed as the archetypal toxic wife: a grasping interloper getting her claws into a good British lad and dragging him back to her lair. These Americans don’t understand that, in the UK, unquestioning family loyalty – no matter how punishing – is sacrosanct; that the Beckhams and the Windsors are not people, they are institutions. They persuade their prey, using therapy-speak like “boundaries” and “trauma response”, that, in the Land of the Free, everyone gets to be the main character in their own lives.
After six years away, Harry is beginning to signal a desire to reconcile with his ill father and return home. Brooklyn has been clear that he has no intention of making up with his; he is, he says, “standing up for myself for the first time in my life”. Is this where their stories diverge? Or will, with time, Brooklyn too come to learn that a man famous by birthright is nothing without the family that made him.
[Further reading: Millionaires of the world, unite!]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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