I am talking about celebrity culture itself, still a huge force gripping the nation, and this week’s unexpected online post in which Brooklyn tears down his parents, David and Victoria Beckham. He says the family brand which they have spent almost 30 years building is false and damaging; he says he wants no part of it ever again. His message to his parents’ millions of followers is that they have all been deceived.

For several years now, ever since he got married to American heiress Nicola Peltz at the tender age of 23, there have been rumors of a feud between him and the family he left behind. Something to do with his bride, his fashion designer mother, and a wedding dress, the gossipmongers said. Now, in a sensational move, Brooklyn has confirmed all of this and more.

Via a post on his Instagram account, the 26-year-old said his parents had left him with “no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about some of the lies”. He complained that they have “controlled narratives in the press” for his entire life, with “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships” being “a fixture of the life I was born into”. He has seen them “place countless lies in the media”, he alleged, “mostly at the expense of innocent people, to preserve their own facade”. His wedding day was one of anxiety and embarrassment, he said, with his mother allegedly hogging what should have been his first dance with his bride to dance “very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.” Yes, that would be “on” me, rather than “with” me — does he mean a lap dance? Ouch. Oedipus Becks, indeed.

David and Victoria have not responded to Brooklyn’s allegations. But, as someone who has spent 20 years interviewing celebrities, with their consent but not always with their enthusiasm, I see this development as a significant one. Not so much for what it might reveal about Brand Beckham from behind the scenes — I mean, come on, how did we really think they managed to stay in favor for such a long time? — but for what it means. A younger generation of stars, Brooklyn’s generation, no longer wants to play the old game. They would rather go scorched-earth on their own families than pose for one more group photo with one more fake smile.

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To my mind, having watched up close how such people operate, Brooklyn’s words have the ring of truth to them. But it still feels rather incredible that we should have heard it from his lips. This is partly because — and let’s be honest here — compared to his canny parents, Brooklyn always seemed like a simpler kind of guy. If you’ve watched either of his parents’ recent documentary series on Netflix, you’ll know how hard they have worked to get where they are. Their eldest child Brooklyn, however, has always seemed the clown prince of nepo-babies, announcing that he’s a photographer one week and a chef the next, in much the same way that I might fix a dripping tap and declare myself a plumber. So for him to take control of the narrative like this, revealing his anxiety, his pain but also his happiness, is quite startling.

You see, after the News of the World shut down in 2011, with the Leveson Inquiry subsequently exposing the underhand methods by which the tabloids had harvested gossip, it felt like the end of an era. We had known so much about the lives of the rich and famous, but now reporters were on edge, celebrities felt betrayed, and the creative industries of film, fashion and music were unsure how to rebuild their relationship with the media. Who in their right mind would want their private life splashed across the press anyway?

What followed was an era in which celebrities communicated on their own terms, with families like the Beckhams taking advantage of what had become a weakened press. Reporters no longer rifled through voicemail inboxes. Social media permitted one-way, polished communication. Today, long lens paparazzi shots from photographers hiding in bushes are almost a thing of the past, for Instagram is full of celebs acting as their own paparazzi and posting their own bikini photos from the beach — though more flatteringly staged, of course. All this means that celebrities have far more control over their public image than they ever used to.

The Beckhams are among the best practitioners of this new style of celebrity, notably via the medium of the self-produced TV documentary. Here, more than any other medium except perhaps Instagram, stars can secure their reputations on their own terms. And this is where Brand Beckham has played a blinder — perhaps because David and Victoria knew that Brooklyn was a bomb waiting to go off, and therefore wanted an early victory in the court of public opinion.

David’s three-episode life story, released in 2023, outlined how hard he had worked at soccer from boyhood, pushed unrelentingly by a father who never praised his talent or said well done. We heard about the hard yards and sheer joy of his early success with England, only to be followed by years of rejection: the young midfielder was blamed for the team’s failure and had a bad time in Spain. There was a brief allusion to Rebecca Loos and tabloid stories about alleged infidelity, somehow told as if David was once again the victim of a story in which he might just, you know, not be. The series was a hit.

So was Victoria’s, which came out in 2025. It showed her to have a sense of humor that had previously been missed by many. The series emphasized how doggedly Victoria had worked to be taken seriously in the fashion industry after her pop career in the Spice Girls came to an end. Having watched the show, former doubters came away saying how much they liked her now.

Yet celebrity culture is changing. In some cases, the glossiness has been torn away. Little more than a decade after the end of the Leveson Inquiry, Prince Harry, one of the people most aggrieved by Leveson’s subject matter, was giving us more of his private life than any journalist had ever dredged up. In a move that surely inspired Brooklyn, Harry had married a glamorous American, turned his back on a dynastic British family, and then written a memoir so long that after 12 hours of the audiobook I couldn’t take any more revelations and gave up listening.

The painful authenticity, so unlike the staged photos, is evident in music, too. Lily Allen ended last year with an incredibly revealing album about the breakdown of her celebrity marriage, while other pop stars, such as Charli XCX and Lizzo, have unexpectedly taken to Substack to write long essays about their lives. Sometimes that authenticity is being foisted on the rich and powerful rather than chosen by them: this week, Donald Trump has been posting Emmanuel Macron’s private appeals for diplomacy straight onto the internet for the world to see.

As for the Beckhams, their near-pristine public image has been damaged, but they are unlikely to lose the affection of the public. The thing is, Victoria and David are both clearly hard workers: nobody can deny the lifetime of effort they have put in. So I’m sure their son won’t turn everyone against them. A brief check online shows all sorts of commenters saying that Brooklyn is a brat who will soon be running back to Mummy and Daddy for cash, apparently not having noticed that he’s left a family of multi-millionaires to live with one of actual billionaires. (His father-in-law, Nelson Peltz, is a well-known investor and businessman.) Perhaps it feels safe to publicly denounce your parents as liars once you have access to even more expensive lawyers than they do.

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Of course, one can’t guarantee that the person saying “It was all lies!” is any closer to the truth than those they accuse. But in an age of younger celebrities seeking to claim their “truth”, Brand Family is going to be harder to maintain. The Royals can’t do it, the Beckhams can’t do it — but does their survival actually depend on it? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes, in that they won’t be able to carry on in quite the same way. Victoria’s already been through this with the Spice Girls, who tried and failed to carry on after Geri Halliwell walked out. David Beckham, an experienced captain, knows a winning soccer team creates a magic that is greater than the sum of its parts. With videos showing the apparent frostiness of Victoria towards her son and her daughter-in-law, the PR campaign that so recently revealed her warmth and sense of humor might all be in vain. Plus, Brooklyn may have further bombshells yet to come. Then there are the rumors about David and Victoria’s marriage that have swirled around the media for years. None of our business you might say, and you’d be absolutely right — if Brand Beckham weren’t trading on their nuclear family image for quite so many business deals.

So might this be the thread that, after so many other dramas have been successfully stitched over, finally starts to pull Brand Beckham apart? And, in an even more unlikely twist, could it be that the formerly-derided Brooklyn, only recently presumed too young to know his own mind, turns out to be the wise old sage who wakes us all up to the truth of celebrity, once and for all? He was the first nepo-baby that my generation, young in the Nineties, paid much attention to, making him all too easy to mock. Now that he’s revealed how it feels to grow up in one’s very own Truman Show, perhaps we’ll be less quick to believe any other celebrities who still play the glossy reality card. And perhaps we’ll also be less surprised when their children try to leave.

But offstage, all is not well. For this Beckham-Peltz alliance, between a footballer’s scion and a billionaire American heiress, has come at the cost of disharmony in the Beckham bloodline. The lore runs deep: what began with a spat between Queen Victoria and her future daughter-in-law over who would design her wedding dress (Nicola opted for custom Valentino over Posh’s own label) has deteriorated into a transatlantic battle of wills, with the eldest Beckham son shunning his father’s 50th birthday celebrations in London for the comforts of LA, a dynastic death blow which has kept the red tops going for weeks. And just before it was announced that David had at last snagged a knighthood, the final flourish in a decades-long hustle to accrue national-treasure status, it emerged that Brooklyn and Nicola had engaged the services of Jenny Afia to stop their PR going into tailspin. That’s Meghan and Harry’s lawyer, if you didn’t know. It seems errant celebrity sons and their Lady Macbeth wives are keeping the bright minds of Lincoln’s Inn in the finest horsehair.

What marks out nearly every player in this psychodrama is a distinctive deficit of flair; David’s brilliance at football is the only spark of talent in that entire extended family — the rest is luck and marketing. Victoria could not sing (roadies would turn her mic off during Spice Girls performances); Brooklyn cannot play football, model, photograph or cook. His younger brothers, Romeo and Cruz, dabble in fashion and music like all the other bottom-set nepo nippers. Nicola Peltz, the daughter of a billionaire, wrote and starred in a film about poverty last year. It was not well received. This clan’s rise to knightly success is purely the work of publicists — and it is this which makes the parable of the prodigal Beckham son in many ways the most telling story of our time.

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For in the Beckhams, we see the revival of the celebrity dynasty, the family as a brand. Like the Medicis before them, they have risen to aristocratic respectability though cynical spin: weddings double as brand mergers (OK! splashed out a record-breaking $1 million to cover Posh and Becks’ wedding), and children are bequeathed dukedoms in the form of little brands and film cameos. Thus the Beckhams reveal the true cost of nepotism: the desecration of skill and value in public life, the disappearance of a celebrity meritocracy where you were expected to be able to sing, dance or otherwise earn your adoration. They are little better than A-list Machiavels like the Kardashians or Molly-Mae Hague, who are simply “famous for being famous”. In such a world, the eldest Beckham child is cursed with an empty empire; he has been given the stand — riches, attention, business backers — but he has absolutely nothing to say.

The new royal court in which Brooklyn wages war is as ritualistic and rotten as any before it: there is confession (Brooklyn is rumored to be concocting a tell-all memoir of his eventless 26 years so far, in the style of Prince Harry’s Spare), portraiture (carefully choreographed dynastic lineups with out-of-favor members pointedly absent), assassination (deadly press briefings), succession (the careful delegation of nepo gigs), and exile (Brooklyn to Beverly Hills, away from his family’s newly settled kingdom — the Cotswolds).

Brooklyn’s conduct towards his parents, much like Prince Harry’s, reveals a vacuum of character which exposes the unfairness of undeserved fame: all the set-dressing and charitable works in the world cannot distract from the fact that we have allowed the wrong people to become famous. The parallel with the prince doesn’t stop there: the Peltz-Beckhams and the Sussexes are said to have held an exiled-son summit in Montecito. What outrages us about these two hit dogs, Brooklyn and Harry, is that despite all the privilege imaginable they dared to complain, driven by horridly un-American concerns like “boundaries” and “their truth”. The last resort of the overtherapized offspring, going “no contact” with one’s family, has reportedly now been taken by Brooklyn — a telling echo of “Megxit” apparently steered by Nicola, another slightly older American bride viewed with suspicion by the British public.

Yet the British public isn’t exactly team Becks either: part of our contempt for Brooklyn derives from disdain for his parents, and their own meteoric rise. Many still see them as arriviste; it was not long ago that Victoria had a spiky bob and bulletproof breast implants, and David has at great pains shaken off his once-mocked Chingford accent. This couple has undeniably made it — David is guest-editing none other than Country Life in October, with flat caps, tweeds and spaniels guaranteed to erase any memory of his bleached Nineties curtains; they have also made it easy for their children to follow suit.

But Brooklyn has so far floundered, going through something of a career identity crisis in the process. The footballer-cum-model-cum-photographer-cum-chef’s latest venture, a hot-sauce brand called Cloud 23, has been beset by trademark disputes — but his bigger problem is the mishandling of his personal brand, the ultimate selling point for anyone in the food aisle frowning over a celebrity product. Whereas David somehow cobbled together an aura of sophistication convincing enough to flog Haig Club whisky, it would be difficult to swallow a glob of Cloud 23 without imagining Brooklyn smirking in an apron.

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In the absence of talent or wit, Brooklyn must self-publicize relentlessly to retain his birthright. This is about vanity, yes — but also money. For the Beckham clan is also the Beckham conglomerate, in which children are spin-offs, subsidiaries, each expected to perform value for the business empire. In Brand Beckham, Victoria is the creative director; David is the legacy label. Brooklyn is the floundering prototype, launched too early. Romeo and Cruz are R&D projects, constantly retooled until the right note is hit. Harper, just 13, is a publicist’s dream: the only girl, she is primed for singing or modeling or, later down the line, a marriage alliance.

David and Victoria, for whom playing nice isn’t showing results, need only wait for their mutinous son’s bid for independence to fall on its face. Any attempt at freedom is cursed; this family has produced chicks with wings already clipped. Brand Beckham is too big to fail, and will crush any struggling subsidiaries.

Whether he realizes it or not, Brooklyn is doomed to lose the Battle of the Beckhams. He is destined to be a leisure prince, but through some misguided sense of his own value has instead been larping purpose which, owing to his privilege, he has never needed and is now too old to acquire. But this troubled son must soon accept that his inheritance is simply equity in his parents’ brand: his fame is not a reward for excellence. Get off the motorbike, get on a plane, and tell your mom and dad you’re sorry, Brooklyn. After all, who on earth would you be without them?

Was there a nadir? Was it the WAG parade at the World Cup in 2006, when Victoria Beckham drank bottles of Veuve Clicquot through a straw? (“We became a bit of a circus,” one player sagely reminisced a few years later.) Was it Ashley Cole’s admission, in 2006, that he nearly “swerved off the road” with anger when Arsenal offered him a new contract with a £55,000 weekly wage? Perhaps it was Wayne Rooney’s “romp with a granny” — or was it a naked Frank Lampard, jeering at grieving Americans in a Heathrow hotel bar on September 13, 2001? England expected that most footballers would try and sleep with their teammate’s wife.

That was off the pitch. On the field, if you can endure the recollection, they were even worse. England played like a scratch team dredged from the remedial unit of a Victorian institution. They burned up at tournaments in 2004, 2006 and 2010. They didn’t even qualify for Euro 2008. The game, through the Premier League, had never been more lucrative. The reputation of its players had never been lower. In a strange way it was appropriate. If England’s footballers were hideous in the 2000s, it was because England was. If they were trashily materialistic, it was because England was too. They were no better, and not much worse, than anyone else in public life at the time. That was the tragedy. “Morally corrupt” was how a group of bishops described the New Labour years in 2008. God only knows what the Right Reverends would have thought if they’d seen Footballers’ Wives.

Now the face of football is changing. England’s players are a source of pride rather than embarrassment. In 2018, led by Gareth Southgate, their impeccable manager, they reached the semi-finals of the World Cup — a moment of full-spectrum, flags-out, boozy national unity that most fans, inured to washout after washout, never thought they’d experience. Success brought English players an earned prestige, even an authority, that they hadn’t enjoyed since Italia ‘90. No more tragedy. They were just heroes. What would they do with it?

The answer, at least partially, lies in an office on Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia. That’s where Roc Nation Sports International’s headquarters is based. Founded in 2008 by Jay Z, Roc Nation has since washed into every cove in the modern entertainment industry. They manage artists and athletes, produce TV shows and films, and run a music label. Team Roc, a division within the company, is dedicated to efforts around social justice: bailing out BLM protestors in America this summer, offering pro-bono legal support for their families, creating buzzy media campaigns, and leveraging Roc Nation’s impressive celebrity roster to boost stories.

Their work blurs the lines between politics and sport, entertainment and activism. “We don’t consider ourselves a traditional agency — we really are a movement,” Roc Nation Sports International’s president Michael Yormark told the Telegraph in June.

The movement found a standard bearer in Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, who became one of Roc Nation’s European clients earlier this year. An icon of the 2018 World Cup, and a courageous high-pressure penalty taker, Rashford grew up in a single-parent family in Wythenshawe. When he heard that schools would be closing as part of the wider national lockdown in March, Rashford, who’d relied on free lunch programmes as a child, turned to Kelly Hogarth, his personal publicist, and VP of strategic communications at Roc Nation Sports International — what could they do to help poor children secure vital meals?

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Even hermits know what happened next. Rashford’s — and Hogarth’s — free school meals campaign, mammothly popular and relentlessly sincere, forced the Government into two U-turns. ‘RASHERS FOR PM’, screamed the Daily Star, one of dozens of headlines he made over the summer, then the autumn. Old media was full of sympathetic interviews with Rashford, or commentators, such as Matthew Parris, who were scared of criticising the campaign, for fear of sounding mean. Who, after all, wanted children to go hungry in a plague year?

Only monsters: when the Daily Mail tried to peg Rashford as a hypocrite for owning multiple homes, it was like watching a giraffe try to ride a bicycle. When you own new media as much as Rashford does — with 900,000 more followers than Boris Johnson on Twitter — attacks from mere newspapers don’t work. Alongside Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling and Aston Villa’s Tyrone Mings, who both campaigned for BLM after the death of George Floyd, Rashford was suddenly leading a generation of politically self-aware England players. The normally sedate New Statesman editor, Jason Cowley, called them — without mentioning the squadrons of PR flacks writing their tweets — “activist super players”.

Footballers, not poets, became England’s unacknowledged legislators. Rashford received an MBE, and millions of school children received lunch.

Traditional broadcast and print media never did more than boost Rashford’s signal. The narrative was too sexy — star footballer routs out of touch toffs at the top — for them to attempt anything else. To understand what was interesting about Rashford, and by extension Roc Nation, you had to go to the trade press, and media companies which focused on sports PR. The Rashford campaign was the subject of huge features in AdWeek and SportsPro, and he won PR Week’s “Communicator of The Year” award. What earned Rashford praise from them wasn’t feeding children. It was the exciting way Roc Nation has fused social justice and sport in order to boost Rashford’s profile, the better for him to serve as a conduit for digital marketing operations, the spread of branded content, and the sale of boxfresh trainers.

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The bottom line wasn’t doing good; the bottom line, as SportsPro noted, was that during the campaign, Rashford’s Twitter following had grown by 65%, whereas the total social following of Manchester United — which hasn’t run any political campaigns this summer — had grown a sluggish 8% in the same period. Simon Oliveira, a long-term advisor to David Beckham, labelled Roc Nation’s efforts “genius”.

For experienced sports marketeers like Oliveira, Rashford’s campaign set a new precedent. During Beckham’s glory days, the most social justice a player would indulge in might involve being chauffeured, blatantly hungover, to a children’s hospital to sign autographs, or to a community centre to cut a ribbon. Nobody cared what Gary Neville thought about child tax credits. Complicated policy matters were for Oliver Letwin or David Laws or Ed Balls to work out. Roc Nation and Rashford changed all that. “The barriers have been well and truly broken,” Oliveira wrote over the summer. “Top-athletes, and the organisations they represent, can collectively reach more people than almost any politician and connect.”

The next horizon stretches beyond Rashford. His authenticity, precisely calibrated by the 20 “subject-matter experts” who work for Roc Nation in that Fitzrovia office, is rare. As the first “activist super player” to cut through with the public, Rashford was able to give the impression of spontaneity, relatability and unfilteredness prized by PR world, whatever the contrary reality. Other PR firms will go further than Roc Nation, and take stands on issues with far less room for consensus than feeding hungry children during a pandemic.

This represents an enormous shift away from sport as it was traditionally understood in England. It would be wrong to say that sport was apolitical, but it has rarely been a space for activism. According to the historian Derek Birely in Sport and The Making of Britain, sport had a “chauvinistic” side, but its role lay in “providing a safety valve, escape, sublimation, [and] socially acceptable outlets” for aggression. For Robert Colls, in This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England 1760-1960, sport was defined by “knowing that not everyone is political”.

That knowledge is being replaced with the more contentious model of player-activism found in American sports. English football is already embroiled in a domestic culture war over the practice of “taking the knee” in support of BLM, and an international culture war over the Premier League’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign against homophobia. Perennial plans — looking ever more likely to come to fruition — for a European Super League will cement the game’s money-making capabilities, while severing the connection between England’s biggest clubs and their localities.

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The four divisions of English football were always a parody of the class system; if the top clubs jet off, it will mirror the growth of our own transnational elite, who, like Manchester United, would rather play in Milan than Middlesbrough. Look on the bright side: United will be able, finally, to compete with the Dallas Cowboys for overseas markets on a more equal footing.

Top players in such a system will be like the American celebrities repped by Roc Nation. Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, but blandly removed from the audiences they sell their apparel and their opinions too. Maybe it will be then, when Jack Grealish is co-hosting a podcast with Greta Thunberg, or Mason Greenwood is co-authoring a popular book about antiracism with Reni-Eddo Lodge, that fans will feel a touch — just a breath — of nostalgia for Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole. They were not good men, but at least their cynicism was genuine.