Trump attacks ‘stupid’ Starmer over Chagos and China blunders

0:02The Telegraph

0:09He wanted to be the Trump whisperer, but now the President has humiliated the Prime Minister, calling Keir Starmer's policies stupid. Having given away the Chagos Islands and now green-lighted the Chinese super-spying embassy in London, doesn't the Donald have a point? Also, Brooklyn Beckham has unleashed on his idiotic parents in an Insta post that's got everyone talking. Is he really the victim of Bran Beckham and media control or is he simply just a nepo brat? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me Camilla Tomini and me Tim Stanley.

0:52Tim, turns out we were quite prescient yesterday because no one had really... I saw that coming. You saw it coming indeed, yes. The Mystic Meg Ball was out, the crystal ball. To be fair, a kind of rare blow of my, a little toot of my own trumpet. I did point this out with Lisa Nandy at the weekend on my GB News show. I said, well, hang on a minute. Starmer's talking about the self-determination of Greenlanders and trying to protect their interests, yet he's sold out the Chagossans and therefore he can be criticised for the great Chagoss sellout. And then Andrew Rossendale, having recently defected from the Tories to reform, made that very point in this Daily Tea studio.

1:31He claims the straw that broke the conservative camel's back for him was this idea that the Tories started the process of selling the Chagos Islands. And OK, Labour gave it rocket fuel. But what on earth were they thinking in the first place? And now, lo and behold, Trump has called Starmer out on this idiotic foreign policy decision by Labour. Overnight, Donald Trump went on the Truth Social platform to describe Starmer's plan to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius as, quote, an act of great stupidity. He said, and you have to imagine this in the style of a Jackanory reading in the early 80s with Trump in a comfortable jumper and a rocking chair talking to the audience.

2:16Shockingly, our brilliant, that's in inverted commas, NATO ally of the United Kingdom is currently planning to give away the island of Diego Garcia. He'd have loved saying that. Yes. Diego Garcia, we love to say that. The sight of a vital US military base to Mauritius and to do so for no good reason whatsoever. That was in capital letters. There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness. These are international powers. That's capitalized. Yes. It's interesting. who only recognize strength, which is why the United States of America under my leadership is now, after only one year, respected like never before.

2:59The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of great stupidity, capitalized, and is another in a very long line of national security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired. Denmark and its European allies have to do the right thing. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. I love, thank you for your attention to this matter. Yes, thank you for coming. Like you've been punching someone and saying, thank you for taking this in the belly. Well, you can't not notice it, not least for its capitalisation. So are we really saying now that the same President Trump who appeared to not really bat an eyelid when this great Chagos giveaway happened...

3:42And that, on the contrary, he said he thought the deal would, quote, work out very well. Yes. So weren't we all expecting at the time, I tell you who was really expecting it, Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage was railing against this, saying it was all Starmer and his Attorney General Lord Hermes doing, that it was benefiting the Chinese because of their own interests in Mauritius. And don't forget as well, it was predicated on an international court of law decision, which was presided over by a member of the Communist Party in China. So the whole thing looked like a glorious stitch up. wasn't Farage and most of the right waiting for Donald Trump to say, what the hell is going on here?

4:19We can't let this happen. And they were disappointed when he didn't, by the way. And now he's saying it. So is he saying basically that he's allowed to do what he likes to Greenland because of the stupidity of Starmer's actions over the Chagos Islands? I think there are two interpretations. They're both correct. One is that Donald Trump is being entirely cynical. He believes he's about to enter a negotiation with Europe because he thinks continentally, Russia, Europe, China. He's going to enter a negotiation with Europe over the future of Greenland. And so he is raising Chagos along with many other reasons as to why he's furious with the Europeans.

4:56They can't run their own affairs. So this is partly a cynical negotiating ploy. It's one which, of course, undermines Keir Starmer's claim to be the Trump whisperer. Yes. The one man who could understand this man and bring him around to reason. Well, he can't because on one of his signature foreign policies, Trump is willing to do a U-turn and criticize him publicly over it. So the whispering isn't working. So the cynical interpretation, the slightly more sympathetic interpretation is Chagos is why Trump is buying Greenland. because European countries are weak, as he would put it, and they have slowly surrendered their strategic presence overseas.

5:43So the government says the reason why it agreed to the Chagos deal is because there were lots of legal actions against the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia. Yes. And the Tories say, well, we entertained those legal challenges. We flattered them, but we had no intention of ever going along with them. Labour comes into office and says, well, there was a risk that one of these legal challenges would eventually win. And suddenly we could find that we're not legally allowed to fly in and out. I think that's a stupid argument. It's the United States of America. It can fly wherever it wants.

6:18But that is their argument. So because of Starmer's obsession with the rules-based order, which is a very European Davos perspective, Europe is no longer pulling its weight overseas. And what Trump says is the same was about to happen to Greenland. That Denmark had been gradually granting more and more autonomy to the greenish. And we were reaching a point where Greenland would eventually be effectively independent. And at that point, the Chinese would move in. They would buy up all the rare earth minerals. So because the Europeans are slaves to the rules-based order, and because that leaves them weak, they are surrendering on points that matter to America's national defence.

7:04So to repeat, either bringing up Chagos as a cynical way of undermining Keir Starmer ahead of negotiations, or, and I think it's as well as, he's also pointing out that he is trying to take over other countries because the Europeans no longer have any interest in running them. Yes. And when it comes to trying to undermine Starmer, that theory would make sense if you think about the art of the deal and this idea that you can try and discombobulate the person you're having to negotiate with on behalf of Europe very early by getting in this early attack. And Trump has also said, well, I'm not even dealing with Macron because he's yesterday's man.

7:46He's not going to be French president for much longer. He's out of the scene. Maloney's doing this careful thing of saying, oh, I think Trump's a bit misunderstood to try and keep both sides happy. So it is a good way of destabilising Starmer if Starmer's leading the so-called, I know he uses this term when it comes to the negotiations over the Ukrainian territory, but say if he is the head of the coalition of the willing, that will be the same troop of Europeans that are going in to try and talk Trump down. That's good. But there still remains an elephant in the room here and that's Starmer's not in a negotiation, he's not at the negotiating table at all if he doesn't go to Davos.

8:28So I asked Ben Reilly-Smith, because there's a lobby meeting going on, just for some clarity on whether or not, because you made that brilliant point yesterday, of all the summits in all the world, this is the one he chooses not to go to, having literally clocked up more air miles than the Duke of York in the 1990s. Unbelievable. and Ben says current position is not planning to. Can we caveat this podcast by saying we film it when we film it and if the plans change, forgive us. Current position is not planning to with an acceptance anything can change with Trump. It's quite a complicated decision.

9:06Do you want to go to Davos to talk about Ukraine while also telling Trump you won't join his board of peace, that he wants a signing ceremony for there? For example, will you actually get proper time with Trump and if not, will the press portray it as a snub? Now, that's important. Imagine as well you've got to throw Nigel Farage into this mix. So somebody was telling me that both... The future Prime Minister Nigel Farage. The future Prime Minister Nigel Farage. There's an event Wednesday night which Trump and Farage are both going to attend. Starmer turns up, gets snubbed. Farage gets time with Trump.

9:43Trump changes his mind on something. Farage claims a victory over the Prime Minister's head. even though Farage has been quite careful, to be fair to him, to say, well, I'm not the prime minister brackets yet and I can't cut across diplomatic relations. It's really curious, this. But don't you think he should go to Davos, Starmer? Otherwise, he's not in the room. He absolutely should go. I just want to note that his position on Greenland also makes no sense vis -à-vis other British overseas territories. What he's saying here is there is a principle. It's the principle of the right of self-determination.

10:15But of course, the Chagossian people were cut out of the discussion over who should own Chagos. Mauritius's claim to it is heavily disputed. When that base was built in the 1960s, the British quite disgracefully kicked out all the Chagossians and moved them to Crawley. I mean, talk about kicking someone when they're down. Yeah, could have been Croydon. Many of them say they would rather remain part of Britain than be part of Mauritius. But their voices didn't count. if this Labour government in its rules-based order obsession would throw them under the bus, if in some future date it's ruled that the Falkland Islands are in fact the Malvinas, do you trust that a Labour government would stand up for the principle of self-determination in that case?

10:59I mean, they stand up for self-determination when it's in their interest, but not in others. And yet Greenland comes along and suddenly he's Mr. Smith goes to Washington. He's Hugh Grant. Yes, I know. He's taking a stand against the Americans. Well, he's not really, though, is he? Because it was a limp-wristed stand that was taken yesterday. There was no stand at all. It was, and it looks even more ridiculous now that the president is attacking him directly. This is all world wrestling type behaviour, you know, isn't it? This is all people playing parts and all that sort of thing. So Trump is big daddy and Starmer is a puny little guy who unfortunately has gone into the wrong arena.

11:35He thought he was giving a presentation on paperclips. Oh, my God, I've actually ended up in the WWF arena and I've got a big orange monster absolutely slam dunking me to the floor. Yes, at some point he's going to have to man up and break a chair over Donald Trump's head. But to go back to Davos, what is the point of Davos? The meaning of Davos has changed. Have you ever been to Davos? No, thank God. I'd rather die than go to Davos. But I don't own a country, so I've never been invited. I mean, honestly. But it's the meeting of the new world order, right? And it's the point where the global elite came together to reassert whatever the consensus of the day was.

12:07Donald Trump has already, we've spoken in previous years in Trump administrations of Davos losing all its meaning because the president didn't want to go or if he did go, he just insulted everyone. And so it's become a kind of a stage. But what's interesting is that I think world leaders have worked out what Keir Starmer has not, which is it's just a chance to talk to Trump. Yes. That's why they're all there. And so the other thing he did, sometimes I do love the president, is he shared the texts that were sent to him by Emmanuel Macron and Mark Rutter ahead of the meeting at Davos. Both saying, essentially, we think you're great.

12:44We think you're marvellous. You're so cool. I know he's exposing that absolute two-faced cynicism. And we believe we can sort something out on Greenland. But the most interesting text from Macron is, he said, and we can meet on the margins with the Syrians and the Russians. That's being facilitated by Macron. When you say Davos has lost all its meaning, and we're getting onto this in the second half of the Daily Tea, David Beckham is there. Everyone's there. And we're going to be talking about Brooklyn Beckham's departure from the Beckham family, which Will, our video editor, is describing as Bexit, which I think is right.

13:23That's very clever. Bexit, I should say. Do you see what we've done there? We'll get on to that in a minute. But if David Beckham is turning up, what is the meaning of Davos? Yes, yes. Odd. It becomes, as I say, an opportunity to meet celebs. I was overhearing in conversation just at the news meeting where they were saying about Davos, right, how are we actually going to present this on the website? Because we've got the serious geopolitical stuff going. Yes. And then one of our esteemed editors said, and what are we going to do with Katy Perry? if Katy Perry turns up with Justin Trudeau, what do we do with that?

13:57What do we do with Beckham? What do we do with this cast of strange characters that turn up at this thing? Yes, because actually the meetings and discussions themselves are inanely boring. As I have said, I've never physically been because I didn't kill Jack Kennedy. But for those members of the lizard elite that do get invited, I have watched on telly live broadcasts and they are discussions like what is the eco-synergistic future of the solar energy industry and utter volta. It's really boring stuff. It's just a chance to be seen with Trump and to talk to Trump, which again is why this is the one case in which I'm really surprised Keir Starmer chose not to go.

14:38We could take the Daily Tea on the road to Davos next year and pick the most fringy, irrelevant discussions. We'd have to camp outside with David Icke. They wouldn't let us in. Because we didn't fake the moon landings, we didn't get invited. This is who it's for. I do want to mention, while all this is going on, we're being visited by the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. You were there this morning. Did you see Big Mike? I wasn't there because I couldn't get in because all the tickets were taken. It was held in a committee room. They didn't put him, as you would expect them to do, in the big royal apartments.

15:08Yes, of course. Where hundreds of people couldn't fit in. Instead, it was in the committee room. It's always interesting when an American visits, there was a disproportionate number of Tory MPs attending rather than Labour ones because they take the Atlantic partnership so terribly seriously. And I thought the speeches were interesting in the way they were calibrated. So Lindsay Hoyle was talking about the history. The speaker introduced him and talked about the history of cooperation between our two countries, how much we have in common. There may be disagreements, but we can resolve it through dialogue.

15:35I felt it was well phrased and pointed. Mike Johnson got up and observed that Lindsay Hoyle was like Churchill, though he can speak far too long. which is it's it's funny how people now just make gags about how much Lindsay Hall says but I think I still think Lindsay Hall said it very well but again Mike Johnson's are very carefully calibrated we can discuss this we have something to resolve here but ultimately we have more in common than what divides us and he also talked about how the younger generation risks losing its inheritance because it's not been educated in liberty it's not been raised to value those things that make Britain and America great.

16:11So I thought that back slapping while all this was happening was quite good. Not just interesting to watch, but also reassuring. We focus on Trump and Trump is obviously really important because he runs the world. But there is still dialogue among elites. And I think they are still hoping to find a way through this. Trouble for Starmer, though, is he's domestically compromised. And there was this theory going around last year that he was never here, Keir, precisely because he was just trying to avoid the pain on his own doorstep. We've had a bit more of that today. Unemployment up. So under Labour, 40 ,000 jobs lost in November.

16:48We now discover that another 40 ,000 have been lost in December. That evil Liz Truss, at it again. At it again. Breaking our economy. Very interesting report from the Centre for Social Justice talking about a crisis in youth employment or the lack thereof in the aftermath of the last budget. Minimum wage going up and making it more expensive to employ 18 to 21-year-olds. So you've got all that going on now. Which you warned about. Which I did warn about this. You had him kind of in a domestic soup of hell and he was kind of doing okay as the kind of international statesman. Okay, yeah, Trump whisperer.

17:24He's fiddling around on the floor picking up his papers, but there was this notion. It is a bit of a boon for him to be perceived as the leader of Europe. He was indispensable. Fair enough, okay. But now this Trump assault on him has made him look bungling on the world stage as well. We were talking about it yesterday and it was sort of like Andrew Rossendale was here. What would Thatcher do? I mean, Thatcher would not. What would Thatcher do, Tim? She wouldn't have given a press conference yesterday in Downing Street, analysing, telling us all what we already knew, but not providing any solutions.

18:02In fact, would she even have been in Downing Street or would she have been on a plane to the White House on Saturday? Genuinely. She'd have been on the phone chewing his ear off because that's what she did to Ronald Reagan if she ever disagreed with something. Yeah, I think that's fair. But then Thatcher was defending, I think Thatcher really was defending a proper rules-based order. Yes. In the sense that she had a philosophy and an understanding of how the world should work. Starmer's sense of a rules-based order is based not upon values or philosophy, but the rules themselves. Yes, regardless of whether they're good or not.

18:36Are you just obeying the rule? Because they're there. So the rule for the Chagossians is totally different from the rule for the people of Greenland or the Falklands. But the point for him is simply that the rules are being followed. And I think that's part of the problem here. He doesn't know how to defend something because he doesn't believe in anything. No, he's the kid who obeyed the no ball game sign against all logic. But I do think, to go back to if this is a cynical play, there is a case for standing up to Trump. There is a case for just digging in and holding tight and he may well back down.

19:08But Starmer's not really doing that. He's playing both sides. No, and his indispensability has been exposed as he is indispensable so long as Trump thinks he's useful. Yes. Not so long as he's useful for us, but useful for the White House. Also, this decision to green light the Chinese super embassy on the site of the Royal Mint near Tower Hamlets, near, in fact, in very close proximity, as we interviewed Gareth Caulfield, our colleague last week, within 1.5 metres of this super cable that links all of the data coming from the city of London to the rest of the country and in turn to the rest of Europe and in turn to the rest of the world.

19:47The green lighting of that and this proposed visit, this is the other thing about the Davos thing. You're not going to go to Davos to talk Trump down, but you are going to go to Beijing and you are going to presumably hand this planning application to Xi Jinping on a plate. And yes, it may be subject to a judicial review because of the concerns that have been raised about the unredacted blueprints appearing to show the potential for the basement to be turned into some kind of super spying dungeon. This comes back to Sear from Trump's point of view. The way he sees it, his argument on Greenland is, I can't trust you because the moment this place gets its independence, you're going to sell it out to the Chinese.

20:28And his proof of that is you have just invited the Chinese to build this mega embassy in the heart of your city, even though I would advise you not to. And it's actually situated next to the cables. It's like perfectly set up to wiretap our entire financial structure. So again, think of it from his point of view. He just sees it as the Europeans surrendering every time. But he's right. The other thing that goes undocumented and unreported, it's all very well we have the focus on the super embassy, and rightly so because it's a massive site. One has to question, by the way, again, the Tories criticising this.

21:01You sold the Royal Mint to the Chinese in 2018. What were you thinking? George Osborne. You knew it's close proximity to the super cables. I know. You knew it was on the doorstep of some of our own national monuments. I know. You know, there was an argument, well, we can't have lots of different spying centres. We need to consolidate them all into one super spying centre. No, not in the current climate. But also it's the fact that the genie's out of the bottle because the Chinese own so much of our critical national infrastructure anyway. They own waterboards. They own electricity. They own rail.

21:41They own buildings. They own huge swathes of land. They now have a massive HQ in the middle of our capital. They don't own Great British Energy. We've got that. Thank God for that. Yeah. I mean, funny enough, they have huge stakes in the water companies currently failing people down in your neck of the woods. That's true. In Kent and beyond. So it's a bit too late for all this. But to then add to that, you knew what you knew and you're still green lighting this project. Yes. I think it's just it's it's unfathomably stupid. I mean, I will echo Trump in saying Starmer, that is really irretrievably idiotic.

22:20Well, this is the difficult situation small C conservatives find themselves in. They actually agree with a lot of Trump's analysis of what's gone wrong with Europe. Yeah. But they also rightly cannot abide Trump kicking us around. No. Because we're patriots. We love our country and our continent. The bully's got a point, but could you please take off your size 10s? This is too much. But then you think this is complex? Coming up next. Wars of the Roses. Let's discuss the war that has engulfed the Beckham family, Brooklyn's departure from said family, which is something that we are going to nickname Bexit.

23:10Tim, so I'm waiting to go on Australian telly last night because that's another little string to my cravingly self-interested media-whoring beau. But I go on Australian breakfast TV in the evening, sometimes to talk about the royals and other British matters. And I was waiting to go on to talk about Prince Harry appearing in court because he's got the hacking trial against the mail going on. And then in the commercial break, as I'm waiting to go on air, I hear a voice going, Camilla, have you seen Brooklyn Beckham's Instagram story? And I'm like, no, I'm not really across his social media. Have a quick read of it because we're going to pivot.

23:47We don't want to talk about Harry anymore. We want to talk about Brooklyn. I thought, well, it's actually a correlation between these two famous sons of famous people, right? Because just as Harry has been defenestrated from his family following his love affair with the American that is Meghan Markle, similarly, Brooklyn Beckham married Nicola Peltz, daughter of a billionaire, several years ago and no longer appears to be speaking to his family. But it was the nature of it all. And the parallel is clear. Just as Oprah Winfrey, Netflix and Spare served up on a plate, the sort of headline, the headlines of tabloid writers dreams.

24:31Yes. So, too, we have. Because for years, people have thought, what's the truth about the Beckhams? You know, since Rebecca Lew's alleged the affair, is it all, as it seems, this carefully curated life that they've built on social media of love and loyalty and everything's perfect? Everything is slick. There's no clutter in the house. People are wearing silk dresses and enjoying nights out at expensive Mayfair restaurants. Is it all too good to be true? Or has something gone wrong at the heart of this supposedly nuclear British family? And when I say nuclear, somebody's detonated a bomb. A bomb's been detonated, bang, by Brooklyn himself, who has blown the whole thing up.

25:20And the Beckham PR machine, which is extremely formidable, can I just suggest that probably most journalists who have ever worked on showbiz stories are very familiar with just how comprehensive the response is, should you ever try to sully the Beckhams in copy. My God, there must have been a few people around Simon Fuller who's looked after their management for some time, tearing their hair out last night as they are blown up by their oldest child. A lot of us were surprised to discover they had a child. I know nothing about these people. I know. And I have zero interest in them. But they do make good copy.

26:00Let's go through some of the killer lines of Brooklyn's tell-all Instagram post. In the good old days, people wrote books. I know. Quotes. I'm not sure he could write a book. He did do a photography book once, which famously featured one of the worst photographs of an elephant ever taken. Just an elephant's shape in total shadow. and I think the caption on it was something like yeah it's a bit tricky to take this one and you have to ask yourself well I wonder why you got that photography book if it wasn't for the fact that you were a part of the brand that is Beckham and you carry on with the lines I have been silent for years and made every effort to keep these matters private unfortunately my parents and their team have continued to go to the press leaving me with no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about only some of the lies that have been printed I do not want to reconcile with my family.

26:49I am not being controlled. I'm standing up for myself for the first time in my life. You can imagine his wife standing over his shoulder saying, and say you're not being controlled. I know. Nicola and Megan may have swapped notes here, right? Yeah. He accuses his parents of controlling narratives in the press about our family and placing countless lies to preserve their own facade. Are you doing the little voice because you're saying he's being a bit man-child? Well, come on to why I'm doing the little voice, because there is something deliciously adolescent about all this. Yes. He says they have been trying endlessly to ruin my relationship.

27:22Oh, welcome to the world of everyone with in-laws. Exactly. For example, they got married. Yes, they did. They got married, this pair. And as you do, he got his mother's fashion brand to make his wife's wedding dress. Well, I think the suggestion is that Victoria offered to make the dress. Right. And then rescinded that offer at the last minute according to Brooklyn. although I think the PRs who did design Ms Peltz's dress have said that it was a year in the making. So she can't have backed out of the dress designing too late on because there were still 12 months to make the dress that the bride eventually wore.

28:01Yes, yes. And I'm someone who likes to mix romance with frugality. You can just go to second-hand shops nowadays and they sell other people's wedding dresses. There's a way around this. Can I point out the bride is the daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz, who seems to be, how was he describing this morning by somebody in LA? A ball breaker. A ball breaker, right. Yes. So I think, you know, we need to put the context of the Palm Beach wedding into this, the golden child of a billionaire. Yes. Just have that in your mind and then also have in your mind the Palm Beach set mixing with the Beckhams, you know, self-improved David, posh, who pretends she isn't posh even though her father drove her around in a Rolls Royce.

28:47There's a culture clash going on here which again has got echoes. Is posh spice actually posh? Well, she's not that posh but she's posher than she made out in the documentary and there's a famous kind of moment where David says, be honest, come on. Her father was a bit of a wide boy done good, I think, in the North Hertfordshire scene, which isn't far from me. Right. So they called her posh. She pretends not to be posh. It turns out she is a bit posh. Well, look, put it this way. She's posher than David, who, bless him, is from a nice Essex family and obviously came from nothing to be one of the world's most recognised and successful soccer stars.

29:25Well, you can't escape him, can you? He's even a ruddy Davos. But I'm just saying the parallels between them and the royal family continue because of the culture clash that was the royals and the marcles. That needs to be in the back of your mind as you go through this, because you're uninitiated. You're clearly not across these events. No, I'm not. No, go on. Well, Brooklyn's chatbot continues to write, During the wedding planning, my mum went so far as to call me evil, because Nicola and I chose to include my nanny Sandra and Nicola's nornie at our table, because they both didn't have their husbands.

29:59So basically, I've got to admit it. Basically, my understanding is they put the nanas on their table and then both sets of parents had adjacent tables. Now, I am familiar with table men. When I got married, my father famously turned around to me and my husband to me and said, when I questioned just how many people he had on the guest list, I said, Dad, this is a lot of people. He goes, it's none of your business who I invite to your wedding. And I said, come on a minute, Dad. Was he paying for it? Yes, he was. He then said, I'm paying for it. And I went, all right, Dad, you have as many tables as you like.

30:35So just, you know, these ructions do happen. Yes. Obviously. Yes. Carry on. Well, this is the best bit. My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife. In front of our 500 wedding guests, Mark Antony called me to the stage. Can I just say, it's not the Roman Emperor. brought back from the dead. It's like this Latino singing sensation that I think used to be married to Jennifer Lopez. Right, OK. Reports at the time said that family friend and singer Mark Antony invited, quote, the most beautiful woman in your room to join Brooklyn for the first dance, only to add, come on up, Victoria Beckham. This is brilliant.

31:18Carry on. In front of our 500 wedding guests, Mark Antony called me to the stage. wherein the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife, but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead. She danced very inappropriately on me. On me? In front of everyone. I've never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life. Will you confess to the Daily T audience what you said about that line? When you told me that his mother insisted on taking the first dance, that's exactly what my mother would do if I were to ever get married. Not that my mother would allow me to get married because there is no woman in the world who deserves me.

32:01I love that. But this is where the internet came into its own. It was almost worth inventing Tintinette for. Thank you, Al Gore. Was it Al Gore? I thought it was Berners-Lee. No, he invented it. So many people came up with very funny videos of obscene, dirty dancing to go with that. But the one thing people didn't bring up at the phrase inappropriate dancing, which jumped into my mind, Do you remember John Sargent on Strictly Come Dancing? Yes. When he was dragging that terrified woman across the floor. That's right. Can you imagine if that was the case? I imagined Posh Spice dragging her son across the floor.

32:36I mean, would she be able to carry him? There's not much of her. Also, I just imagined like the embarrassing drunk mum twerking. Yes. But then I thought, I did reflect on that and I thought, I had a moment of just thinking, well, hang on a minute, mate. you know, you're at this billion dollar wedding in this billion dollar venue with your billion dollar bride and your billion dollar parents. Maybe you should just be grateful you had two living parents at your wedding. Who are still married, who are still married. And I think there's an element of maybe this is kind of cutesy behaviour misjudged.

33:09It wasn't intended to be. We still travel to London for my dad's birthday. He was 50. He was 15. And we missed it. Doesn't look it, looks 25, of course. Yes. He refused all of our attempts unless it was at his big birthday party with 100 guests and cameras at every corner. When he finally agreed to see me, it was under the condition that Nicola, his wife, wasn't invited. Later, when my family travelled to LA, they refused to see me at all. Now this is the killer line because this plays into everyone's suspicions about this extremely media savvy couple. Continue Tim, stroke Brooklyn. This is actually an interesting insight into the world of the rich and the famous.

33:51My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else. Brand Beckham comes first. Family love, in inverted commas, is decided by how much you post on social media or how quickly you drop everything to show up and post for a family photo op, even if it's at the expense of our professional obligations. Does he have professional obligations? He does not have any professional obligations. Well, hang on a minute. He did the photography thing and then he is like an online cook where famously, I think he went on a US talk show and told the Americans how to make a sausage sandwich. And as part of his advice, it was, it's a good idea.

34:27It's a good idea to slice the sausages lengthways to make sure that they go into the bread. Yes. And I thought, good God, this is... My goodness. Michel Roux, eat your heart out. It's the kind of very simple thing you either learn And in very expensive schools or prison. Quite. So bless them. Their professional obligations at the moment don't seem to be particularly extensive, although I do note that Nicola is a fabulously good-looking woman who I think has been a model in the past. And am I right that they felt their wedding was such a disaster that they had a recommitment ceremony or something?

35:01Yes, they renewed their vows in seconds because they wanted an event that they could enjoy for themselves without their brazen Beckham parents ruining everything. and crucially, subsequently, the Beckhams have not been able to reconcile. Again, just referring back to my LA source who was telling me that there'd been a great deal of consternation around Beckham getting this star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I sort of thought, why is he getting that? Well, apparently that's something you actually... You can pay for. You pay for. You pay for, yes. Management applies. You pay$75 ,000 and then you have to pay to maintain it and that's been delayed and delayed, the unveiling, And to be fair, he could have got it on the back of LA Galaxy.

35:43What? He moved from the premiership to then play in Spain, where the Rebecca Luce thing happened. And then he went over to America. And of course, they've got links to Miami now. Right. OK? That still doesn't make him an entertainment star. No, I know. Look, he's not Tom Cruise. But at the same time, this was about they wanted the whole family there and they haven't been in contact with Brooklyn. so it was all getting very awkward for this photo opportunity by this star and, you know, you plonk your hands in the concrete and all that jazz. So the whole thing is hashtag orcs to use social media parlance.

36:19Isn't the thing with the Beckhams, and shoot me down if I'm wrong, that they were famous specifically for something 10 or 20 years ago. She was a Spice Girl, he was a footballer. He was a football player. And since then they have taken that fame, turned it into a product with various sidelines, fashion and perfume. You can smell like David Beckham if you wish. But they don't really do anything. They are trading off their fame. And that's his point about branding. So the entire family becomes part of a product. And I will say in his defence, reading it, he does talk about growing up with anxiety.

36:57And you can imagine that if your childhood feels like you're on some kind of production line, I can imagine you might never quite feel like yourself and you might always be judging, do my parents love me or are they asking me to do this because it's part of the brand? Sure. To be fair, Victoria Beckham is now a fashion designer. Consistently that label has lost money and she's had to be bailed out by David. Right. She does do a great line of eyeliners, which are expensive but effective, but that's not a concern of yours right now, Tim, but I have in the past used them. And so have many, many, many other women.

37:31Donald Trump made ties. Quite. We should note that as we record this, David and what's her name? Victoria. Victoria Beckham have not yet commented. I think the problem here as well for the Beckhams is that as well as cultivating this brand, they've also in recent years tried to present themselves as the sort of the family, a celebrity family which is always aligned, which he particularly, since the Lew's debacle, has tried to reposition himself as dad of the year and husband of the year. And to be fair, anecdotally, I remember once going to a Taylor Swift concert because I had to cover it for the last newspaper I worked for, and the Beckhams were in the same area as some of the journalists because it's a sort of VIP area where you could write the reviews and all the rest of it.

38:23look they were all the children the parents weren't there the children were there I think with a nanny seemed to be impeccably behaved everyone that's encountered this family do say that these children are very well brought up and let's be honest they could have been thoroughly spoiled because of the riches of their parents and the associations that that comes with and also I think it's very hard for the children of celebrities to try and eclipse them not least David Beckham how do you eclipse one of the children has played football and all that but you know you're never going to get another golden ball.

38:53This is the parallel with Harry. Yes, of course. When you are the spare, you're not going to be the king in the same way that you, Brooklyn, are never going to be the footballer. What do you do with the rest of your life? Because if you're Brooklyn Beckham, you probably can't really just go and get an ordinary job somewhere with ordinary people. The problem for David of Victoria now is that their own son is suggesting that a lot of this has been stage managed. So let's look to the whole quest for Beckham to get that knighthood. You know, he lobbied for the knighthood because it would be good for him from a PR perspective.

39:25And he was awarded with it in recent months, OK, by the king. Greatest day of his life. There was also a huge amount of scepticism, not least in this newsroom, about him queuing in his flat cap and tweeds for the queen. Do you remember? Queuing with all of the punters to see the queen at the time when Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby had been lambasted for skipping the queue. Greatest punters in history. Indeed. I did that too back then. Did you skip the queue? I skipped the queue. Not a pleb. So what we're seeing here is it's not a media commentator or a PR expert saying, is this really what it seems?

40:02Yes. An actual member of the Beckham family is saying to the public, no, it isn't all what it seems. And I suppose the public's response can be, well, shock horror. Nobody lives in kitchens that clean. Nobody has this marriage that is always kisses and dances and perfection. No. Of course not. But then I'm always so suspicious of people who curate a life like that on social media. Yes. Almost as soon as... But it's unhealthy. I think what they're doing is actually insidious and awful. I think it is pernicious because I think it's selling something that we all know not to be true. It's dishonest.

40:37I mean, we all know what parenting is really like. Yeah. It's about rows like this before weddings. Yeah. It's about the email I received earlier about, you know, my youngest child being persistently late to netball squad. and can I please have a word with her? And it's about, you know, men going off and living in Spain for a while and maybe their head being turned and trying to cope with it. Yes. It isn't perfection. Life isn't perfection. Family isn't perfection. And the public might benefit from some honesty, actually. Yeah, could you just be honest? Because a story of things weren't great and here's how we fixed it is much more useful to us than one of everything's perfect.

41:13Yeah, Victoria, spill some pasta pesto down your silk shirt for once. Yeah. The other side of this, and I don't want to go all Navarra Media, is this is a story of late capitalism. It is succession. It is White Lotus. And the point of those dramas is that life is horrible for the poor in the 21st century, but it's also actually rotten for the rich because they're not living a real life anymore. And it's deeply emotionally unsatisfying. And that's partly a consequence of too much money. Would you rather have fallen out of your family and be rich than have fallen out with your family and be poor?

41:43I think if it ends in isolation or in a lot of rich people's cases, You think of the Bidens, drug addiction. Yeah. I don't think there's much difference, actually. No. Either way, they're not living wholesome, happy, honest lives. What kind of... Who lobbies for a knighthood? I know. I've hit the age where I just find all of this stuff really odd. It's weird. Yeah. And society shouldn't be putting it in magazines and promoting it. They should be looking at it and laughing. Yeah. So forgive me for laughing at the Beckhams, because I think it's about time someone did. Kennedys, Windsors, Bidens, Beckhams, Colby's, Ewing's.

42:20It's dynasty, isn't it? Dynasties. It's dynasty. Doom to failure. Yeah. Hopefully the Stanleys and the Tomenys will never aspire to anything greater than this podcast did. And with that, we'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

42:42Thank you.