I can remember exactly where I was at 19.32 on Monday when the news exploded over Britain like a thunderclap. I was sitting in my office having a row with someone about Greenland.
It was all baloney, I was saying. The US isn’t going to invade Greenland. The Europeans have got to stop whimpering and do more to support Ukraine, I was saying. That’s all that matters – Ukraine, Ukraine; and then pow.
My phone went wild. It was my wife, with text after text. She had to talk to me. Had I seen the news? Had I seen the appalling Brooklyn attack? My heart lurched. Brooklyn? No, I thought: not another terror attack on New York.
Frantically I googled ‘Brooklyn attack’ – and it was only then I understood the full gravity of the moment.
I am told that in the newsrooms of Britain a silence fell as hard-bitten reporters tried to cope with the sheer scale of the story. After 26 years of agonised silence it seemed that Brooklyn Beckham had launched a bombshell attack on his parents, the globally idolised couple known as Posh and Becks.
They were controlling. They were self-promoting. They somehow owned the copyright to his name. Above all, said Brooklyn, they had wrecked his own wedding.
In words that have now been quoted in every household in the land, Brooklyn told us how his mother Victoria – aka Posh Spice – had muscled her way into that critical romantic moment, the opening dance of the disco. For months this had been planned as a conventional smoochathon between Brooklyn and his bride, billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz; and yet just as the DJ was about to call her to the floor a satin-clad Posh had shot sinuously across the room and grabbed the groom.
As Brooklyn lamented in a phrase that has caused global consternation: ‘She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone.’
It seems the bride fled weeping from the room, while the groom tells us: ‘I have never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.’
On Monday Brooklyn Beckham launched a bombshell attack on his parents – in which he said they had ruined his wedding
Brooklyn accused his mother Victoria of ‘hijacking’ his first dance with wife Nicola and dancing ‘very inappropriately on me in front of everyone’
Well! I am sure that by now millions of readers will already have made up their mind about this epic toe-curler. Some will blame the controlling mother, some the controlling wife. Some will blame poor Brooklyn, helplessly danced on by his own mother, in the most prostrate act of physical subjection since the emperor Valerian was forced to serve as a footstool to Shapur of Persia.
Some will even be tempted to blame the god-gifted Becks himself. Perhaps he should have stuck out a leg and stealthily tripped her, as he once tripped the likes of Ronaldo; or perhaps his reflexes are not what they were. Perhaps she was too quick.
I hesitate to say who was really to blame in the whole affair, but let me put on record now that in any future wedding involving any of my children I reserve the absolute right as a probable funder of the event to dance inappropriately on anyone I darn well please, and my instinct, as a parent, would be completely to exonerate Sir David and Lady Beckham.
Poor Brooklyn, helplessly danced on by his own mother, in the most prostrate act of physical subjection since the emperor Valerian was forced to serve as a footstool to Shapur of Persia
I don’t know either of them at all well. The nearest I came to Posh was many years ago when I followed her up some ski lift stairs in Courchevel, and she seemed gracious and beautiful with an interesting runic tattoo on what you might call her lower back.
As for David Beckham, anyone who has worked with him will confirm that he is a complete gent: always kind, polite, well-briefed, on time. Both of them have worked phenomenally hard. Both of them have achieved truly colossal export revenues for their country.
They are both now so famous – she for music and fashion, he for football and wearing a sarong – that they are providing a hugely important and unpaid function in the life of the nation. They are staging a great long-running dynastic drama with which we can all identify.
We may not have their money. We may not have their designer clothes. We may not be able to fly people around in private jets, just to attend our birthday parties. But all of us, every person in this country, is able to offer a valid opinion about the events of that wedding, and in that sense the Beckhams are helping to glue this disparate desperate nation together.
In these dark days of Starmer’s Lefty terror, the Beckham family drama is the joyous little campfire about which we can all warm our hands. It is the best thing since that other recent celebrity wedding – I think the Beckhams were also invited – where a fellow called Adam Peaty managed to get married without inviting his own mother.
My instinct, as a parent, would be completely to exonerate Sir David and Lady Beckham, writes Boris Johnson
In so far as the Beckhams are providing consolation and amusement for everyone else, they are actually helping to give the Windsors a bit of a break
As Caroline Peaty told readers of this paper, it was like having her own heart cut out. What is it, you may ask, with these young men and their mothers?
Why can’t a mum go to her son’s wedding, and do more or less what she wants? Or should the son put the wishes of his wife first?
It’s a great question, and above all it’s a universal question, an eternal question. Every man has a mother, and more or less every wife has a mother-in-law. Every family has a stake in this debate – and that is why the population is currently devouring these stories.
We need the Beckham family dramas, not just for the huge vicarious pleasure, the schadenfreude, but also to help us manage and understand our own problems and disappointments in life.
These stories are therapeutic, and they are now so popular that they raise the obvious question: why are we so transfixed by this type of celebrity gossip when as a nation we were once obsessed with the Royal Family?
All those royal divorces and scandals – they held up a mirror to the whole of society. They were brilliant glittering royal version of every family in the land, and they were fascinating because they had exactly the same pains, the same embarrassments, as the rest of us.
And now? Well, we shake our heads sorrowfully over ex-Prince Andrew, but somehow it is as if young people are more apathetic – or at least less engrossed by the royals – than we once were, and the polls seem to bear this out.
Some surveys even suggest that the 18 to 34-year-olds may even be drifting towards republicanism. What is going on? Have Posh and Becks begun to displace the royals as objects of public fascination? Is the crown slipping?
Perhaps, but I very much doubt it. That royal soap opera has been running for a thousand years, and will last for at least another thousand.
In so far as the Beckhams are providing consolation and amusement for everyone else, they are actually helping to shoulder some of that royal burden, and give the Windsors a bit of a break.
We should raise a glass to all these celebrities, and their hilarious family weddings. Ladies and gents, I give you the bride and groom – and above all, whether he or his bride likes it or not, I give you the mother of the groom!
Who will now proceed, by ancient English custom, to dance inappropriately on her loving son.
