Brooklyn Beckham has officially severed ties with his family, a move he explained in a revealing post on Monday. According to Brooklyn, his decision stems from his belief that his family has made continuous attempts to undermine his relationship with his wife, actress and heiress Nicola Peltz, ever since before their wedding in 2022.

The question remains: what is it about Nicola, now 31, that rubs the Beckham family the wrong way?

A source with insider knowledge shared, “The issue seems straightforward: whenever Nicola is upset, it results in Brooklyn distancing himself from his family.”

In response to the situation, David and Victoria Beckham have chosen to adopt a “business as usual” approach, opting not to address the matter publicly and continuing with their lives.

Victoria is gearing up to attend fellow Spice Girl Emma Bunton’s 50th birthday celebration on Saturday at Soho Farmhouse, conveniently close to their Cotswolds home. Meanwhile, David is fulfilling his commitments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

The media will say what they will, but the Beckhams won’t speak. One in their camp says: ‘Look, nobody cares what the press says. All they care about is that they have lost their son.’

I’m told both David and Victoria are devastated and they all miss him – even his brothers Romeo and Cruz who have been notably hostile to Brooklyn in recent weeks.

It’s a complicated situation, but it can be revealed that ever since they were introduced, the Beckhams have been left reeling by ‘the Peltz way’ – which involves the use of lawyers in family disputes, a concept which is entirely alien to the Beckhams’ sensibilities.

(Nicola sued the dog groomers after her chihuahua died, and her father, billionaire businessman Nelson Peltz, sued the wedding planners who were sacked in the run-up to her 2022 wedding.)

Then – in July last year – though it only came to light this January lawyers acting for Brooklyn told his parents to contact him only via lawyers in future.

All that the Beckhams had been doing, they say, was trying to reach out and beg him to talk to them, so they could meet up. But as the months have turned into years – with Brooklyn last seeing his family in person in September 2024 – they have been left watching his new life from the sidelines.

One of the Beckhams’ greatest concerns is about the nature of their son’s relationship. Brooklyn is covered in dozens and dozens of tattoos of his wife – her eyes, their wedding vows and even tributes to her grandmothers.

One friend says: ‘Does it look normal to you?’ and asks if the relationship could be ‘controlling?’ or ‘weird?’ adding: ‘Why does Nicola seems so childlike?’ Nicola’s recent action, to scrub her Instagram feed of all pictures of the Beckhams, is described as ‘very childish’.

It’s notable that Brooklyn always calls Nicola ‘baby’ or ‘babygirl’ and she seems to lean into a view of herself as a child, even though she is now 31.

Indeed, her 31st birthday party in January was ballerina themed, with a doll in a tutu on top of her cake.

One view is that Nicola is the ‘spoiled’ daughter of a billionaire who is used to getting exactly what she wants, and in this case, what she wanted was for Brooklyn to ‘protect’ her from his family.

I’m told: ‘Nicola is someone who has grown up with so much wealth and power. If you have grown up like that, your whole view of life and other people is so warped. Everyone is your plaything and if something or someone displeases you, it’s got rid of.’

It’s been reported that the Beckhams now fear they will only be able to mend the feud with Brooklyn if he and Nicola split up, which seems desperately sad.

Meanwhile, the Nicola/Brooklyn side is simple: the couple think his parents have been nasty to her from the start, and that the current schism is absolutely David and Victoria’s fault.

In truth, the key relationship which has gone awry is that between Victoria Beckham and her daughter-in-law.

Which is sad, given it started so auspiciously. When Nicola began dating Brooklyn, she and Victoria hit it off fantastically well. Remember those posts after Brooklyn’s 21st birthday, where the two women had been dancing all night?

I’m told that Nicola and Victoria bonded over fashion, with Nicola borrowing clothes and sharing make-up with the former Spice Girl, much as Victoria now does with her 14-year-old daughter Harper. They had a real ‘girlie’ bond, which Victoria, the mother of three boys, found joyful.

But tensions arose, as they so often do, in the run up to the wedding. Nicola and Brooklyn announced the engagement in July 2020, just as the first Covid lockdown was lifting in the UK.

Nicola posed for pictures in a canary yellow Victoria Beckham dress and Victoria penned a gushing welcome on Instagram ‘The MOST exciting news!! We could not be happier. Wishing you so much love and a lifetime of happiness. We all love you both so much x.’

But I’m told by a well-placed friend that the cracks started to appear soon afterwards when the Beckhams were invited to meet her parents Nelson and Claudia Peltz at their £76 million home in Palm Beach, Florida. In normal circumstances, this would have happened before the engagement, but the pandemic put pay to that.

‘When they first went to the Peltz house, the Beckhams sent their security team in advance to sweep the place,’ says the source. ‘It’s standard procedure when you are a couple with that level of fame, but it did not go down well with the Peltz family. They have their own security, of course, and naturally it is the best that money can buy, so there was no need for their visitors to do this. It raised eyebrows.

‘The feeling was that the Beckhams were somehow saying they were more important than the Peltzes. It was a simple misstep, but a bad start.’

Thoughts then turned to wedding planning.

The Beckhams were interested in having weddings on both sides of the Atlantic, with a celebration at their house in the Cotswolds as they did for Brooklyn’s 21st, plus one in America.

The Peltzes, as is traditional, wanted to have just one wedding at their immense house in Florida, complete with its own jetty and beach.

Nicola’s mother, a titanium socialite and former top model, firmly took charge, making a number of decisions, including the fact there would be just the one wedding. She’s had years of experience hosting mega-budget parties and charity events – a bar mitzvah she threw for her twin sons at the St Regis in New York is said to have cost £2million.

At the outset, Nicola said she wanted her mother to be her wedding planner, last saying in an interview with Wonderland magazine that, ‘my mom was such a big help in my wedding’.

With the question of the venue sorted, attentions turned to the dress. As Nicola has said, Victoria Beckham offered to do the honours and her offer was accepted.

But it then transpired that Nicola, a full-on fashionista, had set her heart on going down the couture route for this, the biggest dress of her life. What she wanted was for her prospective mother-in-law Victoria to design one of the other dresses she would wear on her wedding day.

It was this that Victoria opted not to do.

A source said this week: ‘It became apparent that the Victoria dress was not the only one Nicola would be wearing and when that happened, the agreement fell apart.’

Victoria told Nicola’s mother that her atelier wouldn’t be able to do it. That had happened by October 2020 – 18 months before the wedding – when Nicola gave an interview about it, so how Brooklyn can say it was at the ‘11th hour’ is unclear.

Certainly by September 2021, Nicola was visiting Pierpaolo Piccioli, then creative director at Valentino, in Rome. She had her mother Claudia and her stylist in attendance and was fitted for her dream dress. Nicola wore a Dior trouser suit on the eve of her wedding and a Versace mini-dress for the post-wedding party. The mother of the bride wore Versace throughout.

Indeed there was no mention in the gushing Vogue write up – overseen by the Peltzes – that Victoria Beckham was a fashion designer.

It was a serious snub, but it followed a more catastrophic episode at the wedding – the ‘first dance’ fallout.

The Beckhams chose their friend, DJ Fat Tony, to provide a set at the wedding, and are thought to have paid for both this and a performance by the singer Marc Anthony, also a pal.

There was trouble with Marc Anthony’s set. It can be revealed that even before that ‘first dance’, Marc Anthony blundered by giving a ‘rambling’ speech which was all about how Nicola and Brooklyn would be lucky to have a marriage as wonderful as David and Victoria Beckham’s.

That caused offence to the Peltzes, who were the hosts of the event and are proud of their own marriage. They have been married since 1985 and have eight children together.

Then came Marc Anthony’s salute to ‘the most beautiful woman in the room – Victoria Beckham’ which made the bride cry. And then, after all that, came the Brooklyn and Victoria dance at 11pm which Brooklyn described as humiliating.

He wrote:’ My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife, which had been planned weeks in advance to a romantic love song.

‘In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage, where in the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead. She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.’

I’ve spoken to two guests at the wedding who say that, despite this odd wording, there was no ‘grinding’ or overtly inappropriate behaviour observed by them. They said it was just a ‘slow dance’, ‘such as a husband and wife might have’. But in those circumstances, you can see how it would have felt inappropriate. It left Brooklyn, Nicola and her family appalled.

After the wedding, there was an obvious distance between the newlyweds and his family. Nicola posted a carousel of pictures from the wedding which didn’t include a single image of the Beckham family.

There seems to have been a suspicion that the Beckhams were using the event in some way to push their brand – that love of social media which Brooklyn talked about in his release.

Take their wedding present. David presented the happy couple with a £350,000 powder blue vintage Jaguar, which had been converted into an electric vehicle. A nice gesture you might think, but it turned out that he is an investor in the company which did the conversion – and wrote a press release about it.

The Founder and CEO of Lunaz, David Lorenz, said: ‘In creating this beautiful, electrified Jaguar XK140, we are honoured to bridge the gap between David Beckham’s professional life, where he is an investor in Lunaz, and his family life. This remarkable car is the perfect gift to his son Brooklyn and daughter-in-law, Nicola, on their wedding day. In every respect, this extraordinary electric classic car by Lunaz symbolises a bright, positive future.’

Meanwhile Victoria posted pictures of her friends wearing her designs on the night and also pictures of her own silver Victoria Beckham slip dress. You could argue it was crass – or worse – to use a wedding in this way. Was this the start of those ‘performative social media posts’ which Brooklyn complains about?

After the wedding, Brooklyn and Nicola made their life in California and he started to spend a lot of time with the Peltz family. He had the support of tycoon Nelson in starting his hot sauce business, Cloud 23.

The relationship with the Beckhams never really recovered. He and Nicola felt that nothing that they did was ever enough for the Beckhams; the Beckhams felt that they were being cut out of his life.

One Beckham pal said to me after the wedding: ‘Nobody can talk any sense into him. He’s gaga about her and he is spending all his time with her family – it’s all Peltz, Peltz Peltz.’

Both sides have said they have made efforts to make up – the Beckhams even invited him to come to a party after David got his knighthood last year. But by that point there was no trust. Both sides felt briefed against and wronged. And now it’s hard to see how they can ever reconcile.