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If the biggest feud of the week belongs to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then the longest running is arguably “Beckxit”.
The name given to the fallout between one of the most famous couples in the world – David and Victoria Beckham – and their less famous eldest son, Brooklyn and his wife, Nicola Anne Peltz, was coined by the Daily Mail this year. But it covers a broader conflict that began in 2022, when Peltz wore Valentino instead of Victoria Beckham to her wedding, and brings us to this week’s lavish cover-shoot for German Glamour magazine in which the junior Beckhams discuss their “occasionally messy, very real love” and whether they might open a restaurant – without a word about her in-laws.
Such are the vagaries of celebrity beef, no one really knows what happened in between. But things had clearly ratcheted up when photos of David’s 50th birthday party last month appeared online – with no sign of Brooklyn. Further details involving Romeo Beckham’s now-ex-girlfriend, various tattoos and a failure to attend one of Victoria’s fashion shows began bubbling up, and soon Beckxit had become a reality.
Since then every appearance and Instagram post has been picked over by media outlets and armchair journalists alike. Within hours of the Glamour shoot appearing online, the Daily Mail was speculating in one of its 52 stories (and counting) whether the interview was proof that the feud was far from over.
The timing of the Glamour piece was terrible or brilliant, “depending on whose publicist you were”, said the PR agent Mark Borkowski, who helped revive Noel Edmonds’ career. But however you look at it, it is “absolutely a war of spin”, he said of the shoot. “It’s what I call a visual soundbite. These images often don’t always have the meaning we imbue them with. But we still feed off of it because we are all culprits driven by twitching.”
Dr Kadian Pow, a lecturer in sociology at Birmingham City University, agreed. “The PR moves have to be connected,” she said. “It’s another power play between the two parties.”
From the Times of India to Jordanian paper Amman, coverage of this three-year family “feud” has been extraordinary – especially considering we will probably never know the truth, nor really care. So why are people compelled to read on?
“It’s about titillation, and it’s about power [and] the Beckhams,” said Pow. “But more widely, these tales are an escape from the doom and political reality [of the news cycle]. We are fascinated because they are supposed to be richer and better than us – so when we see a flaw that mirrors us ordinary folk and our everyday fallouts, it makes us feel better about ourselves.”
In The Stars in our Eyes, Julie Klam’s 2017 book exploring our fascination with celebrities, celebrity-watching is compared to a fun-house mirror, as if celebrities are constructed to keep us in check. “If we can get a handle on our relationship to celebrity,” Klam writes, “we can better understand ourselves.” Celebrities are perfect, she says, until they aren’t.
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Gossip was not victimless, however, said Mark Stephens, a media lawyer at Howard Kennedy, citing the media’s part in the divorce of Paula Yates and Bob Geldof. Just as newspapers have dedicated Beckham correspondents, there is an entire Tiktok cottage industry of amateur sleuthing that capitalises on other people’s difficulties for clicks and profit. Most of this is unregulated. “And there are libel laws that bring to bear [legal action], but the harm is usually done by that point,” said Stephens.
Still, fights and breakups are life’s great equaliser and occasionally, said Pow, when the stars are as big as the Beckhams, these feuds can be “a shared experience, which is particularly salient in what has become an increasingly siloed society. There isn’t a lot of monoculture left, but these big juicy stories allow us to whisper together.”
Celebrity feuds have been entertaining us for centuries. In medieval Italy, the satirist Pietro Aretino was supposedly employed by the French king to write propaganda about the Spanish king, while being paid by the Spanish king to write propaganda about the French king. It was a weaponising of gossip on a par with 2019’s Wagatha Christie, in which the machinations of back-stabbing footballers’ wives turned Instagram into a global whodunnit.
Sometimes the fights feel curated – and often are. Some gossip sites are suggesting the feud has been confected to drum up publicity for Victoria’s Netflix documentary this October.
One reason for the intense Beckxit media interest is that it involves two nepo babies (Peltz, an actor, is the child of a billionaire businessman and a former model). “These children are looking to monetise their lives, yet are in economic competition not just with their peer-group, but also their parents,” said Stephens. This is particularly uncomfortable for the Beckham brand, which is built on family. Victoria and David came of age “in full tabloid glare”, said Stephens. “[But with the offspring] it’s harder – what you have is a case of children growing and boundary finding, except [they are doing it] in the public eye.”
Klam said: “I do think people believe that the kids of celebrities are fair game. But I do not. Nepo babies have it worse than normal people because everyone thinks they’ve had everything handed to them.”
Still, she said: “Now that Brooklyn is choosing to be in the spotlight, well, he is fair game. It’s not like he decided to be a shepherd or something.”
