What’s behind the sudden froideur between Posh and her new daughter in law?
Before billionaire’s daughter Nicola Peltz married Brooklyn Beckham, she and Victoria fawned over each other’s pictures online. But now there’s been virtual silence for months...
Family name’s when he married, with both he and Nicola changing their names to Peltz-Beckham.
Nicola’s timing in sharing the somewhat possessive ‘Peltz’ image has further fuelled rumours of a cooling with her in-laws. Yet it all started so well. Despite the generation gap, they had much in common. Fashionistas with huge social media followings and experiences of stardom, it looked like they were destined to be best buddies.
Both of them are in Vogue, both literally and metaphorically. Nicola, for instance, went to the Met Gala last year for the first time at the invitation of Vogue supremo Anna Wintour, who went on to put Nicola on the magazine’s cover — her first — as a bride.
Former Spice Girl Victoria has been on 29 Vogue covers and counting, and trotted up the red carpet at the Met at the invitation of Wintour five times, starting in 2003 when she showed up in a Dolce and Gabbana dress and those trademark ‘torpedo bazookas’.
At her most recent appearance, in 2014, she was a vision of restrained elegance in one of her own designs. She and Wintour are friends, and Wintour has long supported Victoria’s fashion label.
Nicola and Victoria are also close to Vogue UK editor Edward Enninful, and other leading figures like Dior’s Kim Jones.
And of course, they are linked by Victoria’s son Brooklyn Beckham, a good-natured 23-year-old who is just finding his feet as a foodie, aspiring chef and food influencer.
Brooklyn and Nicola started dating in October 2019. They made their public debut with a date in Los Angeles in January 2020. Both have said that their bond was immediate and intense, and they started discussing marriage almost from the first meeting.
She was the guest of honour at a £115,000 party in the Cotswolds to celebrate Brooklyn’s 21st birthday and was filmed grooving to Gloria Gaynor’s hit I Will Survive with Victoria Beckham. When the engagement was announced in 2020, all the signs were that both families were approaching the union with excitement.
Nicola posed in a billowing canary yellow Victoria Beckham dress, and Victoria wrote on Instagram: ‘The MOST exciting news!! We could not be happier.
‘Wishing you so much love and a lifetime of happiness. We all love you both so much x.’
Friends said Victoria believed Nicola was good for her son and had helped him to grow up after some years of meandering, partying and drama. She credited her with ‘calming down’ Brooklyn. She and David had feared that their young man was getting a reputation as ‘the next Calum Best’ due to his prolific womanising. Having tried a football career, like his father, and a modelling career, like his mother, and then grown tired of a career as a photographer, which was being aided by his mother’s contacts, could it be a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’ as Victoria and David watch their son being taken under the wing of the powerful Peltz family? In his wedding speech, Nicola’s brother Brad, who was her ‘man of honour’, told guests that from this moment on Brooklyn would be expected to put his wife first. ‘Rule number one: Happy wife, happy life,’ he said. ‘Rule number two: Don’t f*** up rule number one,’ he said, again driving home the ‘Peltzs first’ rhetoric.
DAVID Beckham made a long speech on the eve of the wedding, chiefly about how much the family adore their son Brooklyn. Apparently he was quite tearful — he’s sweetly sentimental where family are concerned.
Meanwhile, Nicola’s father Nelson made a dry-eyed speech on the wedding day and spoke about his pride in the young couple’s philanthropic ambitions.
His wife Claudia is a titanium blonde who has had eight children and runs his own charitable foundation, in which Peltz takes pride.
He also gave Brooklyn a splashy ‘watch chain’ of diamonds which the youngster wore with his tuxedo. The influence of business titan Nelson Peltz is considerable, and Nicola told Tatler magazine that Brooklyn now loves to take career advice from her father.
‘Brooklyn is getting into very exciting things with his shows and also business things and it’s really sweet. I watch him call my dad and say, “What do you think about this?” I love watching him learn from my dad,’ she said.
Brooklyn, whose career has got off to a slightly meandering start, surely has much to learn from Nelson Peltz. He is a self-made man with a fearsome reputation as a tough-minded corporate raider.
Worth £1.3billion (comfortably dwarfing David and Victoria’s £370 million fortune) he is a university dropout who built his family’s frozen food business in Brooklyn into the largest distributor in the North East.
From there he assembled the biggest packaging company in the world, Triangle Industries, which was sold in 1989 — netting him around $840 million.
He has, in his time, bought the iced tea brand Snapple and the burger chain Wendy’s, ducked out of a deal to buy Dunkin Donuts, and made inroads into the megalith Heinz.
It’s surely significant that Brooklyn’s one suggestion for the wedding was an elegant nod to his new father in law — he suggested that the guests should enjoy a late night feast from a Wendy’s van on the night — perhaps the best business decision of his career so far.
Initially it was said that David felt that, at 23, Brooklyn was too young to get married, but that Victoria was all for a match and thought that Nicola had ‘been the making’ of her son.
But the question now is: have they come to regret it?
Nicola laughed off suggestions that her wedding might resemble David and Victoria’s
THE year is 1993 and, even though no one knew it at the time, an extraordinary story is unfolding at Heathrow Airport. Standing patiently in the crowd on the public side of the ‘green channel’, waiting to welcome his family to Britain from the war-torn Horn of Africa, is Somali refugee Mukhtar Farah.
In a few moments, he will be reunited with them — and his much-loved nine-year-old son Mohamed. Or so he believes. As the youngster draws closer towards him, however, Mr Farah’s joy turns to surprise, then shock. Something has gone terribly wrong. The little boy with his wife he now realises is not Mohamed.
‘Where’s Mohamed,’ he cries in his native tongue. ‘Where is he?’
The boy who took Mohamed’s seat on the plane — and whose identity he assumed — was the future four-times Olympic champion Mo Farah.
The athlete recalled this emotionally charged encounter at Heathrow at the start of the BBC documentary, The Real Mo Farah, when he recounted how he was smuggled — ‘trafficked’ is the word he actually uses — into Britain on visa documents bearing his own photograph but Mohamed’s name.
After arriving, he said, he spent years in domestic servitude being treated as little more than a skivvy by the woman who brought him here.
Sir Mo, who, for entirely understandable reasons, had built a totally false narrative to hide his background, has been widely praised for bravely admitting the painful truth about his journey to the UK and his miserable childhood.
Yet the programme, as powerful and moving as it was, left a number of important questions unanswered.
Perhaps the most fundamental is why the ‘real’ Mohamed Farah — the son of Mukhtar Farah, who was waiting for him at Heathrow all those years ago — was left in Somalia?
It’s at the very heart of this saga, in fact. And today, following extensive inquiries in Somalia, Djibouti, and Turkey, the Mail can exclusively reveal the unreported chain of events behind Mo Farah’s arrival in London: the reason he was on the flight that day.
After all, had Sir Mo, 39, who was knighted in 2017, not replaced Mohamed on that fateful flight, he might never have made his home in Britain, as wretched as his early years turned out to be, he might never have fulfilled his athletic potential, and, of course, he might never have achieved a golden double — in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres — at the 2012 Games in London, a feat he repeated in Rio in 2016.
The course of sporting history would have been changed, in other words.
So why did he end up on that plane? On the documentary, Sir Mo admitted he still did not know.
The truth, we have discovered, lies in the complicated love life of Mukhtar Farah, the man left distraught when Mo, who he had never set eyes on before, walked through the arrivals hall at Heathrow Airport nearly 30 years ago in the place of his son.
His colourful romantic past (Mr Farah is understood to have been married four times) is something we shall elaborate on in a moment.
But the story really starts long before that in the village of Iranka Deriyanka, not much more than a homestead, in the desert of Somaliland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, between the capital, Hargeisa, and the Ethiopian border.
Here, there are no roads or schools. The women have to walk miles every day to fetch water from wells. The men sell their livestock in a nearby town each market day.
It is here, in one of the most perilous corners on earth, that Sir Mo was born Hussein Abdi Kahin, one of farmer Abdi Kahin and his wife Aisha’s nine children.
They lived in a traditional ‘aqal’ — circular huts fashioned from branches — which are covered at this time of year with multi-coloured plastic sheeting to keep out the torrential rain.
‘I knew Hussein [Sir Mo] would be a runner like his father,’ said his cousin Sawda Ali Fahiye,’ when we visited the village. ‘Abdi [his father] had heart, strength and there was no one who ran more than him.’
Tragically, their time together was cut brutally short when Abdi became a victim of the deadly civil war in Somalia.
‘As he was walking with the camels a rocket hit him from behind,’ recalled a close friend. ‘Abdi died on the spot with another villager.’
Fearing for her family’s safety, and worried she would be unable to provide for her children, Aisha was forced to make the heartbreaking decision to part with her twin sons Hussein (Mo) and Hassan, who went to stay with their uncle and great-aunt in neighbouring Djibouti.
Over several years the twins lost contact with their mother.
Enter a woman called Nimco Akar.
Nimco lived near to the boys at their new home in Djibouti and had recently married the aforementioned Mukhtar Farah, who had managed to claim asylum in Britain. He asked Nimco to join him. Trafficking is an emotive word, one which was used in the hour-long BBC documentary and was repeated in the newspaper and TV coverage.
Few can doubt Sir Mo was badly treated but, according to our investigation in Somaliland, his plight, as wretched as it was, is not entirely comparable to the victims of organised smuggling gangs who make vast profits out of their human cargo.
To understand what happened, you need to know a little more about the newly-married Mukhtar and Nimco. Though the couple had three children together, at least one was from a previous relationship — the ‘real’ Mo as he has come to be known, who was only Mukhtar’s.
Under our immigration system, those who have been granted refugee status — like Mukhtar — can, in certain circumstances, apply to have family members living abroad join them in the UK.
Mukhtar met the criteria and successfully applied for what is known as ‘family reunion’. The visas were sent to Djibouti. But there was a problem. Mohamed lived with his mother — Mukhtar’s ex-wife in Berbera — and when Nimco went to see her, she was told: ‘You took my husband from me and now you want to take my son. I won’t accept that.’
The source of all this is Mukhtar himself, who confided in a close
‘I knew he would be a runner like his father’
‘Who is this child? Where is my son?’
relative, as well as other family sources with an intimate knowledge of what happened.
As the visas had been issued, it has been suggested that, rightly or wrongly, Nimco feared border police would question where the third child was and not let them through.
So if she could not have Mohamed, Nimco decided she would take one of the two boys who lived near to her who were around the same age as him.
The boy who was chosen was Hussein Abdi Kahin — the future Sir Mo Farah. His picture was simply stuck on the visa instead of Mohamed’s.
His great-aunt is believed to have raised the money to cover the costs of the trip, though we were unable to find out the exact amount.
Nimco could not speak to Mukhtar
directly about the dramatic change of plan because she didn’t have a mobile phone and communication with the outside world was problematic.
Did Nimco have ulterior motives all along?
Given the allegations levelled against her by Sir Mo, who says he was forced to look after Nimco’s two younger sons at their council flat in Hounslow, West London — ‘to shower them, to cook for them, clean for them’ — many will believe she did, although she has denied mistreating him.
‘She just wanted to give him a better life,’ another relative insisted. ‘This was quite common among Somalis back then. They were doing anything they could to get children out of the country. It was not human trafficking.’
What we do know is that Mo boarded a train from Djibouti to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa with Nimco and her two sons.
From there they took a heavily delayed Sudan Airways flight to Heathrow in the middle of the night, where Mukhtar was waiting.
The family source who has spoken to Mukhtar takes up the story.
‘He almost fainted when he saw them. He was asking, “Who is this child? Where is my child?”
‘He told me he considered going to the Home Office the next morning and telling them what Nimco had done, but then he thought about this child [Mo] with no mother or father, and decided it would be better for him if he kept quiet.’
Mukhtar’s part in the controversy has inevitably been questioned, because he was married to Nimco.
But in the documentary, Sir Mo says: ‘When the man [Mukhtar] was around, I was treated very differently. But he was never there, or working or something, and often we wouldn’t see him for weeks.’ Not long after Nimco and the children moved here to join her husband, the couple divorced.
Sir Mo’s account — again for entirely understandable reasons — contrasts dramatically with the narrative in his autobiography, Twin Ambitions, published in the aftermath of his Olympic triumph, and his prime-time interviews with Jonathan Ross and Piers Morgan, which are filled with anecdotes about things that never happened and a father he never knew.
The trauma of his childhood and uncertain immigration status is never touched on.
In reality, he escaped from his predicament only after confiding in his PE teacher Alan Watkinson at Feltham Community College in South-West London.
Social services were alerted and he went to live with a schoolfriend’s mother, Kinsi, where, finally happy and cared for, he remained for seven years.
It was Mukhtar, say his family back in Somaliland, who helped Mo move after he split up with his wife. Kinsi, after all, is Mukhtar’s sister. There is no mention of his involvement, however, in the programme.
By then, Mo’s athletic talent was already beginning to be noticed — and from here, his story becomes the one we know.
As for Mukhtar, he remained in Britain for many years. At one point he was a bus driver and he also worked as a general assistant at Heathrow.
Before returning to Somaliland, he was reportedly living with his fourth wife in Manchester.
What became of his son Mohamed — the ‘real Mo’? While the documentary brought both ‘Mos’ together, we have been able to fill in more of the gaps in his life story.
His mother, we have learnt, moved to Nairobi in Kenya when he was little, where Mohamed attended a school for under-privileged children before going on to study at Kenyatta University.
Loving photos of his father he uploaded at the time are still on social media.
Father and son reconnected in 2019 when Mohamed, now 39 — the same age as Sir Mo — moved to Somaliland to live with him. He is now a mature student at Istanbul Aydin University.
At the end of the BBC documentary, Sir Mo, who has found contentment away from the track as a family man with wife Tania and their four children, gets to meet Mohamed over a video call.
They discover they have something in common: they are both Arsenal fans.
How would their lives have turned out if Mohamed, not Sir Mo, had been on the plane? But for a quirk of fate — and Mukhtar’s spurned ex-wife — he would have been.
It was a ‘sliding doors’ moment that not only altered the course of their lives, but the course of sporting history too.
‘She just wanted to give him a better life’