The Beckhams: the feud dividing Britain

“Forget Ukraine, Greenland and the collapse of the old world order,” said Ed Cumming in The Daily Telegraph. The conflict that has preoccupied the nation over the past fortnight is the “civil war” tearing the Beckham family apart.

We all know the details, by now, of how Brooklyn posted an 840-word diatribe on Instagram, in which he described the “complete breakdown” of relations with his family: his complaints about how his mother had sabotaged his relationship with the heiress Nicola Peltz, and “hijacked” their first dance at his wedding, dancing “very inappropriately on me in front of everyone”; how his parents had tried to control him, and to maintain the perfect “facade” of Brand Beckham at all costs. The nation is now divided between #TeamBeckham and #TeamBrooklyn.

‘Deeply ungrateful’

This feud “resonates”, said Emma Jacobs in the FT, because while few of us have been a footballer or a pop star, “everyone is a son or daughter and many are parents”. There is rivalry for attention and love in most families.

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I know which side I’m on, said Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. “Why would any child humiliate their mother like that?” There is often tension between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, but to make this kind of public accusation – that his mother behaved in a narcissistic, controlling and disturbingly sexualised way – is unforgivable. It also, by the way, doesn’t accord with reports of the wedding, which state that the happy couple had had an untroubled first dance earlier on. “It’s such a horrible, twisted and – when you think of all the many advantages Brooklyn has enjoyed in his life because of his parents – deeply ungrateful thing to do.”

‘Tabloid fodder’

I find it disturbing, this growing fashion for excommunicating one’s parents, said Jemima Lewis in The Daily Telegraph. Of course mothers and fathers often let us down. But we seem to have forgotten the Christian virtue of forgiveness. “Much simpler just to hate and excise the enemy.”

Personally, I sympathise with Brooklyn, said Sarah Manavis in The Observer. Like other “nepo babies”, he is seen as a figure of talentless privilege. But he has never been able to find his own way in life: he has been “tabloid fodder” ever since, at four months old, he featured in photos of his parents’ wedding sold to OK! magazine.

The Beckhams and Peltzes, the Ramsays and Peatys, “and even the Sussexes and the Windsors” – all these feuding families prove one thing, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. “If you commercialise your life and your heritage, if you cash in on your name by spreading the thin jam of who you are – rather than what you do – onto the flaky pastry of public opinion, then there is always, always, a price to be paid.”