Coddled rich boy Brooklyn Beckham torches the family brand his parents spent 30 years building

What did Brooklyn Beckham hope to gain by aiming a flamethrower at his parents’ carefully curated brand Beckham?

Public sympathy? Attention? Revenge? All three.

The Beckhams’ long simmering family feud broke out into the open after the oldest scion posted to his Instagram an extraordinary statement accusing his parents of orchestrating a stealth press campaign against him, and of having tried to control him his entire life.

The details were lurid — allegations of his family’s love being contingent on how often each kid posts on social media, of Victoria “inappropriately” dancing at his wedding, and of attempts to sabotage his marriage to Nicola Peltz.

It seems like every news outlet in the world, even serious ones, ran the story high on their homepages and in their bulletins. It’s a celebrity story that also goes to the heart of privilege, family and power. It’s royals-adjacent and Saltburn-themed.

What was an item largely relegated to tabloids, gossip and TikTok videos of body language analysis — someone unfollowed someone else on social media, Brooklyn was absent from his father’s 50th birthday celebrations — was now the business of everyone.

Even the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, when pushed, obliquely commented on the feud, “diplomacy is very important”.

This moment feels inevitable. When your livelihood depends almost entirely on what you share with the public — and the Beckhams share a lot — with an image cultivated around not just the individuals but the family unit, every thread could unravel the whole tapestry.

Brooklyn seems intent on pulling at that thread. For him, he’s 26 years old and hurt, and now married into another family (father-in-law Nelson Peltz is a politically connected billionaire investor) with more money than the Beckhams.

If this whole thing blows up, he will not starve, and without much value to his personal brand, having dabbled in some cooking videos and a photography book which sold a few thousand copies, he’s not exactly tangibly torching himself. He’ll probably even get a lucrative book deal out of this.

Brooklyn may come to regret this decision, but right now, he probably feels in control, as illusory as that is.

The Beckhams could be considered the UK’s second royal family, now even closer to the seat of old-school institutional power after David Beckham was knighted in November (fun aside, in a lot of the UK press, David and Victoria are now referred to as Sir David and Lady Beckham).

Everyone can acknowledge that a fractured family is a terribly sad and relatable thing (as Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”), but for the Beckhams, the stakes are super high.

Victoria and David have spent three decades engaged in brand management, the endgame of their careers in sport, music and fashion.

They have changed the nature of celebrity. They are to the UK what the Kardashians are to the US, except with more credibility because David and Victoria became famous for actually doing something.

They started off as a couple of kids taking advantage of their fame, selling the details of their lives to the press, predominantly OK! magazine. As Marina Hyde pointed to in The Guardian, OK!’s proprietor, Richard Desmond, recounted in his autobiography that he was plotting with the Beckhams weekly when the couple was young, and cutting the cheques for the honour.

As much as the Beckhams, especially in the earlier years, had a tempestuous relationship with the UK press, they also weaponised it to their own advantage. They, and their team, knew how to be friendly with the “correct” media outlets, eventually earning the respect of Vogue doyenne Anna Wintour.

It’s also remarkable how they have managed to morph their reputations from football lad and pop star to elegant tastemakers.

The pair of Netflix documentaries they produced, and had approval over, supercharged their international profiles. David’s docuseries was watched by almost 50 million accounts in the year after release, with even more exposure on social media. Victoria’s show clocked 13.2 million views, according to stats released today by Netflix.

Those shows were very instructive because you could see from them, exactly how the Beckhams wanted to be seen by the public — they played hard when they were young, but they also worked hard, and now, they’re just a family who’s playful, supportive and warm.

Brooklyn’s very public dispute of that narrative is a direct refutation of the latter point, while his specific charges also fit into a puzzle. You may think he’s being an ungrateful prat, but there’s that niggle, that, yeah, it kind of tracks with what you already know.

To Brooklyn’s point, his whole life has been used by his parents to boost the clan’s profile and coffers. From the sale of the story of Victoria’s pregnancy with Brooklyn to his birth photos and a tour of his nursery, he has never known a life outside the public eye, and that was never a choice he got to make.

Three more kids followed — Romeo, Cruz and Harper — and as a six-person unit, the Beckhams forged forward. Coming from traditional English families who have great affinity for the British royals, the Beckhams clearly took a few cues from the monarchy.

The Hertfordshire estate they initially bought in 1999 and then sold in 2014 is nicknamed Beckingham Palace. Just like the British royals, the Beckham brand is commoditised on products bearing their names.

According to media reports, Victoria does actually own the trademark to Brooklyn’s name in documents lodged in 2016, which are set to expire this year. She also holds the trademarks for the names of their three other children.

More than anything else, the family is everything, and as the two adults who created the empire, one which is worth, according to The Times, £500 million, every decision will be made by David and Victoria.

What Brooklyn is chaffing against is the obligation that he too must be in service of maintaining the Beckham brand.

No one wants to be under the thumb of their parents into adulthood, but anyone over the age of 30 will struggle to sympathise with Brooklyn’s complaints because everything he has is courtesy of his parents, including his marriage because he was only ever in the position to have made that match due to the status afforded to him by his family association.

He also doesn’t have even a 10th of the hustle or entrepreneurial gumption of David and Victoria. If he’s known for doing anything on his “own”, it’s photography and chef-ing, and he succeeded at neither. When he complained that he was expected to sacrifice his own professional obligations to show up for his parents’ photo ops, you have to kind of laugh.

That’s the conflict at the heart of this scandal, and partly why the story has become so big. If it was clear-cut one-sided, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

Brooklyn may be a spoiled brat having a whinge, but there’s truth in what he’s saying. Some of it is so specific (the arguments over the nannies being included on their wedding table) and petty, that there’s obviously something to his statement.

There are clear parallels to Prince Harry’s equally public discord with his father, brother and the whole institution of the royals. Harry too felt strait-jacketed by a family brand that he no longer wanted to be in service of, and one which he felt had actively worked against him and his interests.

What’s clear is that growing up rich and privileged, and as part of a powerful family legacy is not something most people would actually want, push comes to shove.

There’s a scene out of Emerald Fennell’s 2023 film, Saltburn, that feels very relevant to the Beckham controversy. Saltburn may have attracted more attention for some of its more incendiary scenes involving jizz water and grave copulation, but Fennell’s critique was of the English class system.

The Catton family are old-money, and for generations, they’ve had all their whims catered to. They don’t know struggle and they haven’t even had to work. It’s made them soft and vulnerable.

So, when the ambitious and sociopathic upstart Oliver Quick targets them, they’re prey. As he said in voiceover in the film, “I hated all of you, and you made it so easy. Spoiled dogs sleeping belly up. No natural predators. Well… almost none.”

There’s no Oliver in the Beckham situation, nor was there one in the Prince Harry case, unless you want to buy into misogyny-laced narratives about their “manipulative” wives.

But there are a lot of Cattons — coddled boys who’ve grown up in a Saltburn zoo, knowing nothing of their natural environment, unprepared for the world outside.

Even Harry, who has known real loss and also served military tours in Afghanistan, lives in a world not like ours. He just doesn’t have the same reference points.

It’s no wonder then, when they get a taste of it, they don’t know what to do with themselves.

Brand Beckham won’t be cratered by this. Victoria and David have built up plenty of goodwill over the years, they are genuinely loved, and there will be people who sympathise with either party, perhaps both at the same time.

Brooklyn too will eventually move on. But if he actually learnt anything from his parents, he’ll seize the moment and make some money out of it. If he wants to write that tell-all, he can be assured everyone will buy it.