Playing unhappy families with the Beckhams and the Windsors
Opinion
What does a young Beckham have in common with a young Windsor? Both are content to vent their rage in public to the detriment of future happiness.
As Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in the opening words of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Tolstoy went on to explain the Karenina principle – his belief that happy families achieve their success by meeting universal requirements, while unhappiness stems from unique, varied failures.
Two very different unhappy families were on very, almost embarrassing public display in the media this week, where, to a considerable extent, the pain and the exposure are self-inflicted.
Perhaps not by chance, the families involved are two of the biggest brands in the land, brands cultivated tenderly over the years to generate wealth, power and impact.
They are, of course, Brand Beckam and the Royal family sub-brand, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Both involve, in their different ways, varied and unique failures and demonstrate where, if anywhere, the limits of privacy lie.
Naturally, the media and the popular tabloids in particular will lap up every word and will be happy to stoke the fires of controversy.
Amid the differences, there are almost spooky parallels between these two unhappy families.
Both Brooklyn Beckham and Prince Harry, in a sense, have inherited rather than created the position and wealth they enjoy.
Both, it is said, have difficult wives who just happen to be actresses. And each has kicked over the traces and gone public on matters that might have stood a better chance of resolution had they remained firmly indoors, thereby causing not just self-harm but considerable hurt and damage to their families.
Brooklyn’s Instagram tirade
If he had been a tad wiser, Brooklyn Beckham might have learned from the opprobrium that Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, pulled down on themselves by washing the dirty linen of the Royal Family in public.
Instead, the young Beckham decided to ‘go nuclear’ and expose the long-rumoured family rift, which first seeped into the public consciousness when the young Beckhams failed to turn up for any of the parties held to mark Sir David Beckham’s 50th birthday last spring.
Then there was the legal letter from Brooklyn, saying his parents should contact him in the future only through lawyers.
It is difficult to know what to make of Brooklyn’s tirade on Instagram Stories, much of which seems to involve the relatively small change of family spite: a Victoria Beckham-designed wedding dress cancelled at the 11th hour and Victoria “hijacking” the first dance, which should have been with his new wife Nicola Peltz.
Rather more substantially, Brooklyn claims that he was repeatedly put under considerable pressure by his parents to sign away the rights to his name, “which would have affected me, my wife and our future children.”
Brooklyn claims there was a determination to make him sign before his wedding day.
We are perhaps getting closer to the nub of the matter when Brooklyn points to what he sees as being forced to perform as a full member of Brand Beckham.
“The performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships have been a fixture of the life I was born into,” says Brooklyn, who does not appear so far to have carved much of a successful path of his own.
“Recently, I have seen with my own eyes the lengths that they will go to, to place countless lies in the media, mostly at the expense of innocent people to preserve their own façade,” Brooklyn argues.
He insists he has no wish to be reconciled with his family, which, without need of amateur psychology, is just as well.
Sometimes, unhappy families can get away with hurtful things said in private, though things said can never be unsaid.
But to stick such a knife in so publicly, using Instagram as the weapon in full knowledge that the story will go round the world and will define him forever, means there will never, ever be a way back for Brooklyn Beckham.
It’s a good job that his wife, Nicola, is not just an actress but is also the daughter of billionaire businessman Norman Peltz and his model wife, Claudia Heffner.
Brooklyn says his previous “overwhelming” anxiety has lifted since his breach with his family.
Good luck to that, but the journey he is now on is long and possibly difficult, forever part of an unhappy family.
Prince Harry’s rage against the press machine
On to the next, less than wholly happy family- the Windsors – who have not just an angry Prince Harry but an even more unhappy uncle, the former Prince now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
But is the answer to Prince Harry’s rage against what he claims are the press’s illegalities really a nine-week case in the High Court, with costs believed to have already reached around £40m and rising?
There was a cheaper way of doing it.
Prince Harry could have brought a privacy case against the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) at no cost whatsoever.
There was also the deluxe version considered particularly suitable in libel and privacy cases- the IPSO arbitration process.
This would have cost between £55 and £100.
Obviously, Prince Harry would have never darkened such a door, and he was always going to go for the high-profile, high-risk option deploying expensive KCs with associated complainants such as Sir Elton John and his husband, the actress Elizabeth Hurley, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and the Liberal Democrat MP Sir Simon Hughes.
They are all probably pretty angry, but Prince Harry is almost certainly the most angry of them all, because he has always blamed the media for the death of his mother- with less than overwhelming evidence- and all the subsequent unhappiness he has suffered as a result.
The very case itself is a blatant breach of Royal tradition. The media mantra of the late Queen Elizabeth II was “never complain, never explain.”
The irony is that, unlike Brooklyn Beckham, Prince Harry is attacking alleged breaches of his privacy by, in a sense, exposing many aspects of his privacy to cross-examination in the witness box.
By giving evidence, he could face great uncertainty as the Daily Mail and General Trust, publisher of the Daily Mail, has staked not just a large pile of their money, but more importantly, its reputation by insisting that the allegations of the complainants are not just untrue but “preposterous.”
There is no way to reconcile the blunt differences between the two sides in what is already one of the classic privacy cases of this century.
Either the Daily Mail and those it is accused of hiring were ultimately responsible for hacking phones and blagging information, or they are not.
It is too early to say for sure so early in the case, but the Daily Mail will almost certainly try to argue that the stories complained of were obtained by the usual “legitimate” if not entirely edifying journalistic means, gossip and loose-lipped friends.
We shall see.
The return of Leveson II?
If Prince Harry and his associates lose, he will become ever more perpetually unhappy,
If Harry wins, the consequences for the Daily Mail and its editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, will be considerable and will surely involve a resignation.
The consequences for the press overall could be equally serious.
After a period of relative silence, anti-press campaigners such as Gerry and Kate McCann, parents of the long-missing Madeleine, and the Hacked Off campaigning organisation, have renewed their plea for stronger press regulation.
In particular, they want to persuade the Government to set up the long-anticipated Leveson II, something that the Government has rejected.
A High Court win against the Daily Mail could reopen all the old, mainly historic arguments.
As for Leo Tolstoy, that connoisseur of the exquisite differences in unhappy families, he was, at least in principle, a strong supporter of freedom of the press.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.