Beckhams’ major win over Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
The ugly feud between the Beckhams and the Sussexes shows no sign of slowing - and now, the former Spice Girl has had a big victory.
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Grilled fish and steamed vegetables. That’s all Victoria Beckham eats, ever, her husband David said during a podcast in 2022.
It’s not really going out on a limb then to suggest that the four courses of Yorkshire Pecorino cheese puffs, caponata tartelletta, Scottish crab panzanella, ravioli made with Westcombe ricotta and Suffolk red porchetta that the former Spice Girl was served on Friday night just might have gone to waste.
Who, you ask? Just where and how and why would Posh Spice, who has added extreme wealth and fashion designer renown to her poshness, agree to go out for just such a dinner without a limp asparagus spear in sight?
When King Charles invites one around for a spot of grub.
Over the weekend, in a scene that would have had The Lady readers circa 1999 reaching for their smelling salts, the Beckhams, two people who brought in their own gold thrones for their wedding that year, were among the starry names, including Helen Mirren, Donatella Versace, and former Vogue editor Edward Enniful who were guests at His Majesty’s Highgrove estate for dinner.
Video from the event, a black tie do to celebrate Anglo-Italian relations and the slow food movement, and shared by the official Buckingham Palace social media accounts, shows the Beckhams enjoying quite the pally chitchat with the King. Ziggah zig ah…
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But you know who is much less likely to be entertained by watching this royal shoulder rubbing and this blooming, strange bedfellows friendship? The man who can’t get his father the King to spare a few minutes for him on the phone anymore. (“He gets ‘unavailable right now’,” a friend of Harry’s told People last year. “His calls go unanswered.”)
Forget Scottish crab panzanella. The days of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex managing to get his father to share even a glass of flat tap water with him are long gone. In fact, last week marks exactly a year since the duke last saw his father in person, the Netflix producer having made an international dash to see his Pa after the King revealed he has cancer.
It was hardly a reunion worthy of Hallmark. Having flown for 10 hours, Harry spent just half an hour with his father, with the original plans for him to travel to Sandringham that day with Charles and Queen Camilla “vetoed at the last minute,” according to the Telegraph.
“Harry came over to see his father, expecting to go to Sandringham,” an insider told the Sun at the time. “But instead he was asked to be at Clarence House and was restricted to 30 minutes.
“The fear was that if he went to Sandringham they would never get rid of him.”
Meanwhile, Posh Spice is getting to enjoy artfully toying with her ravioli made with Westcombe ricotta and regal bonding time.
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The King’s cold-shouldering of his son only continued as 2024 progressed.
On three further occasions last year when the Duke was back in London, each time out came the same line. The King’s schedule was just too jam-packed for him to see his son, let alone anything necessitating busting out the good afternoon tea cakes.
Take in May last year when Harry returned to attend a St Paul’s service to mark 10 years of his highly successful Invictus Games. Charles? Just too darn tootin’ busy to make time for any father-son time.
This “deeply stung Harry”, the Times reported. A friend who spent time with Harry in London during that trip said: “I was fully expecting them to meet. I know that’s what he wanted to happen.”
Yet that same week His Majesty couldn’t find the time to see Harry, he managed to find the time to have David Beckham round to Highgrove where they bonded over beekeeping and a mutual adoration of flat caps. A month later, in June, it was announced David had signed on as an official ambassador for The King’s Trust charity.
Complicating this all further is that the Beckhams used to be firmly in Harry and wife Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex’s corner, attending their 2018 wedding and flying out to Sydney the same year to attend the Invictus Games, reportedly at Harry’s personal request. Yet a great friendship this was not to be, with the couples reportedly soon falling out.
The reason, according to 2024’s House of Beckham by seasoned biographer Tom Bower (who also happens to be a staunch critic of the Sussexes) claimed that Mehgan had issued an “exclusion order”. The former Suits star, he wrote, “did not want any competition in the media from Beckham, and especially not from his wife Victoria.”
Harry, Bower claimed, “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.”
Bower also said the Sussexes accused the Beckhams of leaking to the press. The nail was in the coffin.
However, David and Victoria have traded up, going from being “brutally snubbed” to winning the far grander imprimatur and favour of none other than the King himself. In December last year, the Beckhams made the ultra exclusive guest list for the Buckingham Palace State banquet for the Emir of Qatar, the ultimate tick of regal approval. (The outing also further fuelled speculation that David is, as the kids say, dead thirsty to finally get his hands on a knighthood.)
This week though, it’s debatable if Harry and Meghan even have time to do any possible stewing over the King and the Beckhams latest get-together.
Currently, they are in Vancouver for the latest Invictus Games, really wringing all the good PR possible out of the event. If ever there was a moment they could do with a healthy fat injection of feel-good publicity, it’s now with their TV making careers hanging in the balance and their US brand having taken a series of punishing knocks of late.
The litany: Vanity Fair turning on them and saying former staffers quit or needed long term therapy, that working with the Duchess was “really, really, really awful” and that Meghan’s team had pitched a post-Harry divorce book.
Then came the dubbing of them as “disaster tourists”. Being given a look see at the charred remains of someone’s home by a local mayor was not the greatest of looks.
Last week the Duchess shared an odd, giddy Instagram video about tracking down some Billie Eilish merch for a teenager who lost everything in the LA fires. Righto, lovely of her and all, but did sourcing a few free t-shirts really necessitate her immediately grabbing her phone to breathlessly tell the world? Maybe just do the nice thing for the sake of doing the nice thing?
Now might be the moment to remember that former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown (who used to lunch with Diana, Princess of Wales) said last October of Meghan, “she has the worst judgment of anyone in the entire world. She’s flawless about getting it all wrong…And all of her ideas are total crap, unfortunately”.
Meanwhile, the royal family/Beckham love-in has chugged along. When golden boots himself was honoured with an award at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month for his 20 years of service as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador he rhapsodised, “I always get emotional talking about anything that I do with our royal family, because I’ve always been a huge royalist.”
Prince William got a look in too with Beckham saying that, “I’ve always been there, when he’s asked me to get involved with things…Whenever the Prince of Wales sends me a message and says, ‘I need you to do this’ or ‘Be there’, it’s always a ‘Yes’”.
What comes next I wonder? Will David finally get his “K”? Will Harry and Meghan’s luck turn? And will Victoria reciprocate and one day invite Charles and Queen Camilla around for kitchen sups? At least the notoriously health conscious King will know what he’s getting. More steamed broccoli Your Majesty?
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.
Originally published as Beckhams’ major win over Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
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