Brooklyn v the Beckhams, Harry v The Royals, Adam Ramsay-Peaty v the Peatys… What's *really* going on, with all these toxic family feuds?

Extracts from Alison Boshoff ‘s new book on the Beckhams, Brand Beckham, could not be more mesmerising. The details, the sourcing, the colour! I am obsessed by her reading on eldest son Brooklyn’s estrangement from the rest of ‘em.

His Palm Beach wedding to actress and billionaire’s daughter Nicola Peltz (the woman who would, apparently, help draft Brooklyn’s earth scorching, family-rejecting, wedding-dance exposing Instagram statement of Jan 2026) sounds particularly intense.

According to the book, Victoria and David had stopped speaking to Brooklyn and Nicola months before the wedding, which may or may not explain why Nicola’s mother, model Claudia, had the Valentino Atelier sew an evil eye into the inside of her daughter’s couture wedding dress (the one Nicola wore instead of a VB design, more on this shortly) “for protection”.

Ahem.

Multiple wedding planners were hired and fired, for crimes as varied as, flowers not being “white enough”, and inadequate management of the RSVPs. One of the fired teams would describe it as, “less a wedding plan, more a crime scene.” The night before the wedding, “‘members of my family told me that Nicola was ‘not blood’ and ‘not family’,” Brooklyn would say (so mafia!). The Day Of: David’s speech was just weird, according to a guest, too long, quite obsessive about his eldest son. “It was as if David was getting married to Brooklyn,” the guest said; peculiar in itself - though, even more so, if you consider this was apparently the first time David had spoken to his eldest son at all, in yonks.

THEN came the mother- groom dance which has been characterised as anything from full on lap dance grade twerking, to, absolutely fine, depending on who you ask, and to which camp they subscribe. Brooklyn himself would describe it, in that Instagram statement, as a all-out “hijacking” of the wedding, saying it made him feel “humiliated” and that his mother danced “inappropriately on me.”

On me.

The atmos at the morning-after brunch was described by another guest as: “Honestly? It was like someone had died.”

Congrats, guys!

I met Nicola P-B, six-ish months later, for an interview. I really liked her - she was not at all the spoiled minx I’d anticipated, but rather a dog-loving courteous sweetheart who spilled way more beans on the Beckhams-in-law than expected. EG, on the wedding dress situation:

“I didn’t end up wearing Victoria’s wedding dress,” she told me. “But the real truth is, I really, really wanted to wear it and I thought it was so beautiful that Brooklyn’s mom got to make that for me! And I was really excited to wear it! And I didn’t end up wearing it.”
Why not?

“I was so excited to start the design process. Um, and then, Victoria, um, was like… And then she, Victoria, uh, was very busy, and then we started this text chain, and a few days went by, and I didn’t hear anything, then I think Victoria… called my mom and said that she couldn’t make the dress. She said that her, um, atelier couldn’t make the dress in time. So, um, then my mom told me, and then we regrouped and came up with something else. But I, truthfully was really excited to wear her dress.”

Yet as F**KING AWFUL as all this sounds, it has all, somehow, got much, more worse over the intervening years, so now? We’re living through the public undoing of the Beckhams (emotionally, if not financially, apparently they doubled their wealth in the course of the last year) and, the thing is:

We’ve been waiting for it. Haven’t we?

A bit? For years?

For SOMETHING to go wrong?

Not terribly nice of us, but also… I dunno: True?

I know that, for decades, every time I told a mate I had some hot celeb divorce gossip, they’d always go: “IS IT THE BECKHAMS?” - then get disappointed, when it wasn’t.

Maybe it's schadenfreude? Up to this point, they have just seemed better than us- in every respect. More glamours, richer, more stylish; but more of a pack, too. A chummier, happier, shinier sort of a family. Like The Kardashians, but less vapid; The Waltons, but richer.

So to see it - them - unravel rather, from the inside out (because it was always going to be that, if the Rebecca Loos allegations proved anything, it was that)… Of course we’re fixated.

And anyway, celebrity family estrangements are the scandal of our times. We’re living through a golden age of them.

The unraveling of the Beckhams came hard on the heels, of course, of that other great family unravelling - Harry V the Royals - and has been followed up, by that of Adam Ramsay-Peaty, the Olympic swimmer who seems to have forsaken his own family, for that of his new bride, Holly, daughter of Gordon, Ramsay…

It’s a bold new conceit on famous person undoings, for sure! Very modern, in its blurring of the private and the public spheres, in its shattering of ostensibly gilded lives, before our eyes! In how it weaponises social media, delivers us neatly coded mysteries of suddenly scrubbed posts, and of Likes, pointedly withheld - equipped with which, we may play armchair detective, with our phones as an incident room.

I mean, if we think about it too much, it is also terribly sad. Sundy Gilchrist , who is estranged from three of her children, described it as a “living grief”. The estranged… they’re alive, but as lost to you, as if they were dead.

Plus there’s stigma and shame mixed in - for everyone. The kids are thankless ungrateful arseholes, and the parents definitely did something wrong.

Everyone looks like awful in an estrangement. Everyone loses.

It is sad.

But also AMAZING.

But sad.

But why? What’s happened to families, to ancient ideas like loyalty and familial duty, to the old old principle of not washing your dirty laundry in public, that’s brought these three - along with so many non famous families - to this point? The point of LC (Low Contact) and, NC (No Contact) and shots fired on the ‘Gram?

Actually - I think I might know.

So much of what’s happening is, I think, a consequence of just one thing. One idea, one convention, one narrative which has become increasingly current. I think Harry is a whiny brat and Brooklyn is young and sad and lost and Ramsay-Peaty beguiled by a sparkling new world of middle classiness but I also think they’re all subject to the same, singular, new, dubious phenomenon. The same instruction, the same vibe, the same flex, the same oppressive, all-encompassing urge, this brand new