Geri Halliwell-Horner at 51 by Spice Girls super fan Dolly Alderton

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Geri Halliwell was always my favourite Spice Girl. When the band’s first single, Wannabe, was released in 1996, I was three months shy of eight years old and that summer is the first I can remember as having a soundtrack. My parents had just moved to the north London suburbs (excitingly, just 20 minutes away from where Ginger Spice grew up) and I spent every day of the holiday listening to the A and B sides of Wannabe on a Walkman while cycling around in circles in our cul-de-sac.

Back at school, there was Spice fever – year groups were torn apart by playground arguments about who was going to be whom in re-enactments of their music videos. I begged my mum for Body Shop copper hair mascara to match Halliwell’s famous red locks.

I went to watch Spice World the day it came out at the cinema in 1997. I formed my own girl band at school and, like Halliwell, was accused of creative micromanagement, which led to its demise.

My first experience of unrequited love was May 31, 1998, when Halliwell announced that she had left the group. I did what all millennial girls did – I cried. I took down my posters. But I still somehow managed to pull myself together to go to Wembley Arena to see the remaining members – Victoria Beckham, Melanie “Mel B” Brown, Emma Bunton and Melanie “Mel C” Chisholm – perform. I put on a Camden Market copy of the red cheongsam Halliwell wore to meet Nelson Mandela (what a sentence). Mum helped me to make a banner from an old sheet and two garden stakes, and we drew the faces of all five girls on it, unable to accept their new formation. I didn’t buy any Spice Girls albums after Spice World, as a mark of loyalty to Geri Halliwell, even though she’d broken my heart.

And now it’s 2023 – 27 years almost to the week since Wannabe was released. I’m just shy of 35 years old and I listen to Wannabe, not on a Walkman but on the train to where I’m about to meet my favourite Spice Girl.

The Spice Girls at the Brit Awards in 1995. Left to right: Geri Halliwell (now Halliwell-Horner), Victoria Adams (now Beckham), Emma Bunton, Melanie Brown and Melanie Chisholm. Credit: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

A cab takes me through winding lanes until we get to a small village, where it drops me off in front of a large honey-stone house surrounded by high walls. I stand at the gate and ring the doorbell. There is total quiet except for birdsong and bleating sheep.

I’m shown into Halliwell’s kitchen by her assistant and she walks out, arms outstretched to pull me into a hug. “Hello!” she says, in that distinctively animated voice, full of husk and squeaks and d’you-know-what-I-means.

Much has been said of her changing accent, particularly since getting married, moving into a country pile and taking up horse riding, but in real life, to my ear, she sounds pretty much as she’s always sounded. She is even tinier than I imagined she’d be, with a Jayne Mansfield waist and, as she later tells me, UK shoe size 2½. When my six-foot frame reciprocates her embrace, I feel like she is almost the same size as the Geri Barbie doll I once owned.

She offers me a cup of tea and pulls out a mug with the Queen’s face on it from the cupboard. I ask if it is commemorative or comic. “What do you mean?” she asks, her Disney princess eyes unblinking. I disclose that I’m anti-monarchist. She wonders why.

A little boy with strawberry-blond hair and sweet manners runs into the kitchen. She introduces him as her son, Monty, aged six, and crouches down to help him fix a broken toy while I use the downstairs loo.

Halliwell-Horner’s transformation from the cheeky redhead who pinched Prince Charles’s bum to refined country wife fascinates people.Credit: Stefano Galuzzi/The Sunday Times Magazine/News Licensing

I’ve watched enough episodes of Come Dine with Me to know that the downstairs loo is the key to the soul. Just as I hoped, the walls are covered in framed photos. Half are of her husband, Christian Horner, Monty’s father and the former Formula 1 racing driver who now runs the Red Bull Racing team, which has won 11 world titles since 2005.

Horner, 49, has recently found mainstream fame in the critically acclaimed Formula 1: Drive to Survive TV show, a five series-strong Netflix documentary about the world of F1 (he has a cool 2.3 million followers on Instagram; his wife just 1.3 million). Pictures of him standing by cars and holding cups hang next to wedding photos and a framed front page of The Sun decreeing Geri, now Halliwell-Horner, Sexiest Woman of the Year.

I sit at a long kitchen table while she makes us scrambled eggs. Her face, in the bright morning light, is aged but unchanged. Rosy cheeks, Doris Day nose. I tell her how unusual it is to meet a female celebrity over 50 (Halliwell-Horner turned 51 in August) whose face moves.

“I think it’s really important to celebrate our age. I’m happy I get to be this age,” she says. “I’ve just tried to keep myself as natural as possible. Each to their own and, who knows, in 10 years I may do something different. But I think there’s something really honest and beautiful when a woman still looks like herself.”

“I’ve just tried to keep myself as natural as possible. Each to their own and, who knows, in 10 years I may do something different.”

Geri Halliwell-Horner

She tells me that her inspiration is Judi Dench, her new friend. I ask how they met. “Oh my god, you’re gonna love this,” she screeches. “I met her at the James Bond premiere. She had such a beautiful energy.

“Recently I had dinner with her and we did some Shakespeare together. We were quoting The Merchant of Venice – ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’,” she recites excitedly.

It is one of many times during our day together that she quotes literature. “I could eat books,” she tells me. “I love the transportation.” She’s currently reading a book on physics and she’s taking George Orwell on holiday.

One day, she’d love to go back into education and study English literature. It was always her passion at school, along with acting. The last thing she studied was Hamlet. “They pulled me out of the English class to say my father was dead, which was so ironic,” she says. “It suddenly woke me up to my own mortality. Before a parent dies, there’s a person standing between you and your own death. It woke me up. I call it death energy.”

She says that her father Laurence’s death from a heart attack in 1993, which happened right before she joined the Spice Girls, gave her ambition she’d never had before, and she often wonders who she would have been had he not died when she was so young. “It was my gas in the tank.”

The gas has gone a long way. With nine UK No. 1 singles and more than 100 million records sold worldwide, the Spice Girls are the bestselling female group of all time. As a solo artist, Halliwell-Horner has had four chart-topping singles, including Mi Chico Latino and It’s Raining Men, and two Top Ten albums. She’s released two bestselling autobiographies and a children’s book that sold a quarter of a million copies in five months.

Geri Halliwell-Horner and her husband Christian Horner at the FIA Prize Giving Ceremony in Paris in 2021.Credit: AP

She’s also been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations for 15 years. She’s about to publish the first of a series of children’s books (she sees it as a trilogy), which has already been picked up for screen adaptation.

Halliwell-Horner might seem an unlikely author. She grew up on a council estate; her mother was a cleaner and her late father was a car dealer. “You’re allowed to be aspirational,” she says. “That’s okay if you keep your feet on the ground.”

The novel, Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen, follows the titular Rosie, newly orphaned and sent to the mysterious Bloodstone Island – home to a school for extraordinary teens and a sanctuary for endangered species. The book explores themes of friendship, kindness, bullying, ambition and environmental conservation.

Halliwell-Horner was inspired to write Rosie because she felt “the world needs a new hero. Rosie is ordinary. She has feelings she doesn’t know what to do with. She gets angry and frustrated. She sometimes feels fat. Sometimes she falls flat on her face and feels like an idiot. To me, that’s a modern-day hero.”

Writing it was one of the hardest things she’s ever done and, altogether, took her nine years. She read Stephen King’s On Writing and learnt that it’s good to write in a dark room and that she must learn to kill her darlings.

She had a chorus of mentors – novelist Jacqueline Wilson was her first reader, comedian Dawn French gave her tips. She met Scottish writer William Boyd at Buckingham Palace in her role as an ambassador for the Commonwealth Literacy Campaign and asked if she could send him an early draft. He agreed and gave her detailed notes, telling her she had to rewrite the whole thing. “It defined what Rosie Frost is now,” she says. “Giving him that draft was like giving Humpty Dumpty to Mozart.”

“My favourite memories were when we didn’t have much money, going on a regional radio tour in the back of a crap minivan, laughing.”

Geri Halliwell-Horner

She’d like to write the screen adaptation herself. She loved making Spice World the movie (an underrated masterpiece, in my opinion) and would meet Kim Fuller, who wrote the screenplay, every week so they could work together on it. (Kim is the brother of Simon Fuller, the Spice Girls’ manager in the ’90s.)

When I refer to her 2½ years in the group, Halliwell-Horner corrects me: “I never felt like I left.” She thinks most fondly on the early days. “I’m very much a romantic about my friendships. My favourite memories were when we didn’t have much money, going on a regional radio tour in the back of a crap minivan, laughing.” The worst memories are the relentless exhaustion that accompanied their schedule. “But I’m not going to complain about that,” she says. “Champagne problems.”

She tells me that she wrote the lyrics, “Stop right now/Thank you very much/I need somebody with a human touch” when she was lying in bed after a gig in Manchester, burnt out and needing to rest, but knowing she had to go into the studio the next morning.

I ask which of her fellow Spice Girls she’s closest to and she looks anguished. “Emma, I feel the most protective of,” she finally says. “I always have. Victoria and I parent the band together – she is father, I’m mother. Mel C was my best writing partner ever. Melanie B is a brave warrior standing next to you. They’re all brilliant in different ways.”

The weekend before our interview, the front page of a tabloid claims that the five are reuniting next year and there are rumours they will headline Glastonbury. I’m gutted when she tells me that neither of these things is true and are just speculation. “At some point there will be something,” she says enigmatically.

She describes life after the Spice Girls as the “no-man’s land” of her 30s. She was busy – she had a successful solo career, studied acting in Los Angeles and wrote her first children’s book. But she felt stuck between her youth and coming into her own as a woman: “It felt like my clothes didn’t fit.” She also said it was a decade of feeling “a pressure to tick boxes”. She assures me the 30s are the hardest time for a woman and that things get easier: “I have a duty of care to share with younger women that getting older is okay. You get a different set of challenges and worries to face. But I definitely feel more content and confident in certain ways.”

Halliwell-Horner refuses to wear anything but white – perhaps cream or ecru, at best. It is, she says, the same as a CEO wearing a suit every day.Credit: Stefano Galuzzi/The Sunday Times Magazine/News Licensing

In May 2006 she gave birth to her daughter Bluebell, now 17. Bluebell’s father is the film-maker Sacha Gervasi, with whom Halliwell-Horner was in a relationship the year before. When Bluebell was born, Halliwell-Horner, at 33, was a single parent and immediately her priorities changed.

She says it took “a village” to raise Bluebell and credits her close friend George Michael for helping her in the early days: “He was always present.” She even goes as far as to say that she thinks her friendship with Michael and his long-term former partner, Kenny Goss, was one of the reasons she didn’t have many long-term relationships – she got her stability from them instead. She found out he had died, on Christmas Day 2016, while unwrapping presents from him.

By her late 30s, she was finally “okay with being me” and felt open and ready for a relationship that was “deeper and more real”. “I was a late developer,” she explains. She got together with Horner when she was 40, having met him a few years previously in Monaco. “The brilliant thing was I was just, like: this is me. I’m not going to hold myself in in a Hervé Léger dress. I was quite grumpy to Christian, actually, and my sillier self came out. I was just real.”

She says it took her time to feel comfortable, having been alone for so long, but she now feels “incredibly grateful” to be in a “really loving relationship”. They got married in 2015 and she gave birth to Monty in 2017, when she was 44. “To every 30-year-old I want to say: ‘Tranquilo’ [don’t worry],” she says, her Spanish heritage emerging (her mother is from northern Spain). “You’ve got time. I’m so grateful that I had that time to evolve into who I am.”

She and Horner split their time between their houses in Oxfordshire and north London. “We’re best friends. And I went to an all-girls school – I didn’t know I could be best friends with a man.”

Her transformation from the cheeky redhead who pinched Prince Charles’ bum to refined country wife fascinates people. Having been known for her glittering, multicoloured, home-made showgirl outfits in the ’90s, she now wears only white. She is dressed in a white T-shirt and white jeans when we meet and refuses to wear anything but white – perhaps cream or ecru, at best – for this photo shoot. It is, she says, the same as a CEO wearing a suit every day. “There’s a power in covering up,” she says. “I didn’t realise that. I don’t need to overshare.”

I am curious to know if she watched Spice Girls: How Girl Power Changed Britain, the 2021 documentary that took a deep dive into the Spice phenomenon in relation to feminism and the culture of the ’90s. “I watched a bit,” she says, wrinkling her nose like a disapproving bunny. I tell her that the three-part series detailing the scrutiny and misogyny they endured made me angry.

How does she feel about that time, looking back? “Okay. I’m going to take it back to Tudorism,” she says brightly, folding her legs under herself like a teenager. “Anne Boleyn. If you look at her life, it’s not that dissimilar to what happens now in the press. That woman was vilified, lied about and slut-shamed by misogynist pigs. It’s been happening for centuries. Is that different? No. I don’t take it personally.” So you don’t feel angry about how you were treated? “Not at all!” she chirps. “Change comes when we give each other grace. We’re all going to make mistakes. We’re all idiots at different times.”

But it is commonly known now that the 1990s and early noughties was the worst time in history to be a female celebrity, I lecture earnestly to the woman who lived through it. She lets out a cackle. “Resentment is drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. It’s all copy. I use it in art.”
“But the way you were treated in terms of the headlines,” I bleat, like her annoying millennial intern. “The invasion of privacy, the way your bodies were talked about, the way your male peers talked about you … I think you were all bullied. And I think you specifically bore the brunt of it, and
I think it was really unfair.”

“Well … thank you,” she says quietly. “We can’t change the past, we can only learn from it. Other women have experienced far worse than me.”

I wonder why she is so resistant to acknowledging the mistreatment she received. One friend suggests Halliwell-Horner is the classic Gen X woman who, in the words of Kate Moss, has learnt to never complain and never explain. Another friend says she thinks it’s because she has had to wear armour to survive half a lifetime in the public eye. Perhaps it’s galling to have someone 15 years her junior try to rip it off. And then another part of me wonders if she actually isn’t that upset about what happened back then.

Straight after she left the Spice Girls, she had the documentary-maker Molly Dineen follow her journey on camera. The 90-minute film is one of my favourite pop documentaries but is, in Halliwell-Horner’s own words when I ask her about it, “quite painful to watch”. It shows a young woman who seems lost and horribly lonely.

Christian Horner and Geri Halliwell-Horner at the F1 Grand Prix of Italy in 2014.Credit: Getty

It ends with her aged 26, buying her first-ever house, an enormous former monastery set on seven hectares. She tells Dineen that she thinks the only reason she did a documentary was so she would have someone to talk to. The parting shot is her roller-skating alone through the grand, empty corridors of her new home.

I think of that woman then and then I think of her now, with her husband and her children and her animals and the hours spent at “the top of the coach house” writing novels. Perhaps she isn’t angry at all. “I do think you’d love the whole history of Anne Boleyn,” she persists. “If you’re upset about what happened to women in the 2000s.”

I’m angry for you and Anne Boleyn, I say. “Be angry for Anne Boleyn – I think Henry VIII would have been MeToo-ed,” she giggles.

I turn off my tape and call it a day. We walk around the sprawling grounds and pick apples from the orchard to feed to the ponies and donkey and goats. As we amble back to the house, she says, “I love setting people up. What’s your type?”

“Funny and hot,” I reply.

“And loyal,” she says, the firm big sister as she puts her arm around me. “That’s what we want. Loyal and kind.”

A few months ago she appeared in Gran Turismo, a film starring David Harbour and Orlando Bloom based on the true story of a team of underdogs dreaming of becoming racing drivers. Halliwell-Horner plays opposite Djimon Hounsou as his wife.

William Boyd as a proofreader, Hounsou as an acting partner … one of the things I’ve always admired about Halliwell-Horner is her ability to blag and charm, her indisputable derring-do. “My husband calls me the Artful Dodger,” she says.

She thinks about this for a moment. “You know, only me and one other girl from my [primary] school got into the grammar school. I was a fish out of water. But there was something in me that felt like: can I have a go? Can I have an opportunity? It’s given me the ability to actually be able to communicate with anyone, whether you’re the postman or the president. If you throw me out of an aeroplane, I’ve always been able to make my parachute on the way down.”

The Sunday Times/News Licensing.

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