I winced when Brooklyn pressed the Insta button

I first met Victoria Beckham, or, as she was then known, Posh Spice – the British public’s use of the designation “posh” was less finely tuned in those days – at the 1997 Brit awards. The backstage area was a sea of cool indifference, with ragamuffin music stars carrying their awards like one might carry a dog-poo bag in anticipation of a bin. In the middle of this jaded scene, Victoria and her glamorous bandmates were literally jumping up and down with jubilation. Their unashamed exuberance was lovely to see.

Meanwhile, as the story goes, Manchester United golden boy David Beckham was watching that award-winning video and focusing in on Victoria. He declared, to anyone in earshot, “I’m going to marry that woman”. Admittedly, as this was a footballer speaking, there may have been a retrospective change of verb to give the statement a little more romance.

I’ve never been sure about showbiz marriages. I think celebrities have an obligation to spread it around a bit. Your plus-one brings the water, you bring the Ribena. The showbiz marriage is undiluted.

Anyway, eventually Victoria found the music business too toxic and superficial, so she moved into fashion. David gave up footballing and became, erm… an ambassador. It’s hard to keep count, but having fulfilled that role for the 2012 Olympics bid and the 2022 Qatar World Cup, he is now an ambassador for, among others, Nespresso, Pepsi and Unicef. He must be getting through a lot of Ferrero Rocher.

Somehow, that excited pop queen and that equally-excited video-watcher morphed into Brand Beckham. Everything felt a bit more clenched. Access was now via the palace gates rather than the turnstile. I suppose, when the Ribena becomes that concentrated, you need to keep it in a tantalus. We still love them – the Spice Girls always light up a karaoke night and that free-kick against Greece always raises goosebumps – but they seem to dwell on a higher plane now.

That’s why Brooklyn Peltz Beckham’s Instagram post last week really pressed the trouble-in-paradise button: “My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else. Brand Beckham comes first.” I winced. In my youth, I watched a lot of live professional wrestling. Me and my fellow grapple-fans knew, deep-down, that the fights were fixed but we needed the participants to respect that facade. We’d feel let down if a wrestler’s faux actions were too obviously faux. We’d willingly suspended our disbelief and we didn’t want our noses rubbed in it. That’s sort of how I felt about Brand Beckham. I liked to think that David and Victoria had never even heard the term. Now, according to Brooklyn, it was Brand Beckham this and Brand Beckham that. And Brand Borgia for anyone who didn’t join in.

Kids can be cruel. My son, when he was 12, told me his favourite comedian was Alan Carr. I didn’t think the blows would come that soon or be that low. Brooklyn went in hard but at least he didn’t compare David unfavourably to a rival ambassador.

I feel for Brooklyn. His parents were born into non-celebrity families and their own fame and fortune came in gradual instalments. There must have been lots of character-building muddy defeats and failed auditions on the path to stardom. Brooklyn had no ramp, no decompression chamber. His amniotic fluid was pure Ribena. I remember his birth being announced like a royal baby. Some might say, as the angry offspring of a high-status family who rejects their ethos and claims they hate his glamorous American wife, he is still keeping it royal. The ever-litigious Prince Harry is probably about to sue for identity theft.

Brooklyn failed as a professional footballer. That’s tough. When a parent is famously good at something, their child is judged by the same high bar. That’s probably why Brooklyn’s brother, Cruz, became a singer.

I hope that Instagram meltdown isn’t just a calculated teaser for the multi-million dollar tell-all autobiography that completes Brooklyn’s Harry-fication process. I suppose it could be called Going Spare. Dirty linen is a bestseller, nowadays, especially if it reeks of the ambassadorial. Shakespeare knew about tragedy: how we love to see the great brought to their knees by the suddenly spinning wheel of fortune and, indeed, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child”. We Brits are happy to see our fellows leave us in their slipstream as they rise to unimagined wealth and fame, but only if we can believe they’ve done it at the expense of all inner peace.

For me, I hope the wounds will be licked, preferably not in the context of a seductive dance, and the sun will shine on Camelot once more.

Photograph by @davidbeckham/Instagram