The way 2026 has started, none of us wants to see the word “nuclear” in a headline, so on some level you have to feel glad that last night’s news alerts announcing in real time that someone “goes nuclear” and “launches nuclear attack” related to Brooklyn Peltz Beckham. At time of writing, the story about his Instagram broadside against his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, accusing them of treating him as a commercial prop all his life was by far, far and away the best read on the Guardian site, as well as the most deeply read. Again, I’m glad this blow-up wasn’t used as geopolitical cover, because if there was a time for Trump to invade Greenland largely unnoticed, maybe this was it.

Whoever wrote Brooklyn’s intercontinental ballistic Instagram – and it wasn’t the childlike authorial voice behind regular “I always choose you baby … me and you forever baby” posts to his wife – the sentiments will be his. Here’s a sample: “My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else. Brand Beckham comes first. Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media, or how quickly you drop everything to show up and pose for a family photo opp …”

Wow: elephants. Brooklyn Beckham can’t photograph them but he sure can address them when they’re in the room. If you watched Victoria Beckham’s lavishly produced Netflix documentary last October, you might have wondered why it didn’t even glance on the biggest elephant in Brand Beckham’s room: the clear and agonising no-contact rift with their eldest son that has been festering since last year and beyond. But most big documentaries these days aren’t documentaries any more in the way previous practitioners of the craft might have understood the word. As her husband’s was before it, Victoria’s doc was a self-commissioned advertorial on which the subject........

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