Crowning glory. The jewel in the crown. The royal treatment.
Choose your go-to idiom here and slap it on Victoria Beckham, because the woman formerly known as Posh Spice has gone to the world’s poshest dinner with the world’s poshest people.
There can be no grander, more exclusive or more prestigious invitation than to a full bells and whistles, pull out all the stops and go hell for leather on the gold forks banquet at Buckingham Palace.
On Tuesday night, King Charles and Queen Camilla hosted just such a State dinner for the Emir and Sheikha of Qatar and there, proceeding graciously into the lavishly set ballroom, were none other than David and Victoria Beckham, having gotten their own thrones 23 years before Their Majesties did. (Never forget the velvet crimes-against-taste the Beckhams had at their 1999 wedding …)
David and Victoria Beckham’s 1999 wedding.
So, David and Victoria? Not only have they officially now Made It, having breached the highest and most rarefied echelons of society, they have also definitely picked which horse they are backing in the trans-Atlantic post-Megxit cold war that has broken out between London and Montecito.
David and Victoria processing into the ballroom marks the apogee of their Everest-like social ascent – and possibly the death knell for any chance of any sort of reconciliation with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Posh and Becks would seem to have decided – they are throwing their lot in with Crown Inc, never mind the self-exiled duo.
And yet once upon a time, things looked remarkably different.
Both couples were connected to the Soho House set and from 2017, the Sussexes were renting a country cottage not far from the Beckhams’ estate.
New details emerged this year about their former ties in Tom Bower’s House of Beckham.
He revealed that the superstar, self-made couple had let the soon-to-be duchess stay at their Beverly Hills home when she made a secret trip back to the US where “all her needs were secretly provided for by the Beckhams’ staff”.
However, things soured, allegedly, when in late 2017, The Sun reported that Victoria had given Meghan her London beauty contacts, which left the LA native “outraged”, according to Bower.
When their Windsor wedding came about in May 2018, “Meghan appeared to want to punish the Beckhams” by having left them off the guest list for the night-time reception.
But Harry blanked David in Sydney later that year. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images for the Invictus Games Foundation
Then, Harry invited David to attend that year’s Invictus Games in Sydney, flying himself and his family to Australia, only for the sportsman to be essentially blanked by the royal.
Per Bower: “Beckham was unaware that the Prince had ordered that under no circumstances was the footballer to be allowed near him. Photographs of the two together were forbidden”. The royal snub was brutal.
“The exclusion order, it later transpired, was issued by Meghan. She did not want any competition in the media from Beckham, and especially not from his wife Victoria,” Bower wrote.
“Meghan deluded herself that her status in the Royal Family placed her above Victoria in the social pecking order. She was irritated to discover that the Beckhams had considerably more wealth than herself.”
Well, now the Beckhams (worth more than $700 million, according to the Daily Mail) not only have more lolly than the Sussexes, but they have also been warmly embraced by Crown Inc.
Against this tangled backstory of reported ‘brutal snubs’ and ‘exclusion orders’, it is impossible to ignore the multi-course buffet of irony that these images of the Beckhams at the Palace represent.
With these new photos, here the King is welcoming David into the rarefied air of a State event, but he will not even take his own son’s phone calls. ([Harry] gets “unavailable right now”, a friend of the duke’s previously told People. “His calls go unanswered. He has tried to reach out about the King’s health, but those calls go unanswered too”).
And here is Victoria all graciously done up in black tie getting to literally and socially feast away, while Meghan never made it to a State dinner during her royal career. (The only State visit that happened while the Duchess of Sussex was on the official royal books was for Donald Trump, and she was on maternity leave at the time).
The ties between David and the King were formalised in May when the former footballer met with Charles at his Highgrove estate and was made an official ambassador of The King’s Trust charity. Here’s the salt-in-the-wound part: Around the time that meeting was held, Harry was back in the UK, but had been told his father was “too busy” to see him.
If the Beckhams are now officially in, socially, then the Sussexes would have to be on the cusp of out.
Oh, we know all about them having been dumped in the royal equivalent of Siberia, a remote, frosty gulag with no phones, but you have to wonder how they are doing in their now home state of California.
Meghan never made it to a State dinner during her royal career. Picture: CBS Sunday Morning
The instances of them being seen with the great, the good and the Vanity Fair cover-worthy seem to have dried up, their 2024 a far cry from 2023, which saw them socialise with names including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bezos and his finance Lauren Sanchez, Cameron Diaz, Benji Madden, Bumble billionaire Whitney Wolfe Herd, Kris Jenner, Kerry Washington and Ellen DeGeneres.
All of this could mean absolutely nothing and maybe the Sussexes are just in a nesting phase, soaking up all that hearth and their $20 million home. It’s costing them enough after all. (They took out a reported approximate $14 million mortgage when they bought it in 2020).
But what the Beckhams-take-Buckingham shots confirm is the previously unthinkable rearrangement of them having cracked Crown Inc while the Sussexes are facing a cooling Hollywood, the possible end of their Netflix deal and a massive, looming question mark over their relevance.
It’s just the latest update in the Meghan Markle/Victoria Beckham feud.
Unlikely to help things is the fact that the streamer announced they are doing a series all about the designer called The House of VB following the hugely successful Emmy-winning Beckham doco. Meanwhile, there is a huge grey cloud hanging over the future of the Sussexes’ relationship with the streamer.
Here’s another idiom – the last laugh. David and Victoria have definitely just been enjoying theirs.
In 2012, for the late Queen’s Golden Jubilee, Her late Majesty and Prince Philip had eschewed sitting on the throne-like chairs provided for them on the royal barge and instead stood standing in the rain for hours. Questioned why later, Philip, according to royal family intimate Gyles Brandreth, joked: “We’d have looked like Mr and Mrs Beckham, wouldn’t we?”
Humble pie anyone?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
