Wish the Spice Girls weren’t set for a comeback? #MeToo

THEY’RE back. The Spice Girls are embarking on a £50 million world tour and taking part in a TV talent show in China. But what they are really doing is grabbing the opportunity to earn more money. I did laugh when Victoria Beckham was initially said to have signed up on condition she doesn’t have to sing. But I guess the lure of a £10 million pay day helped change her mind.

I imagine the timing is all to do with the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements, jumping into the line of limos containing rich, famous women who are suddenly up in toned, hairless arms about their treatment by rich, famous men. After all, weren’t the Spice Girls the pioneers of girl power?

Er, hardly. They may have been girls (one was called ‘Baby’ and wore pigtails, for Christ’s sake) but they were hardly powerful.

The only black member was ‘Scary’, an epithet that surely wouldn’t wash with Generation Snowflake. Melanie Chisholm, or ‘Sporty’, talked to me at length one afternoon years after the Spice Girls disbanded about her eating disorder.

I couldn’t help but wonder: why are you telling me this now, when your fans have grown up? She also hasn’t seemed able to use her experience to persuade Victoria Beckham, now a fashion designer who underwent an ill-advised boob job in order to achieve the look of the week – ie rake thin with spherical breasts – not to use umbrella spokes on the catwalk.

The truth is, the Spice Girls had their strings pulled by powerful men, who doubtless pocketed far more than they did.

As for being role models, Geri Halliwell often seemed to be ‘lonely’. Melanie Brown’s personal life has been a car crash (she reportedly had to fork out £6.5million to her loathsome ex in a divorce mired in allegations of violence and sleaze).

Victoria was never a ‘girls’ girl’. When I couriered to her mansion an original black-andwhite portrait of her cradling her first baby, taken and signed by Patrick Demarchelier, I received nary a daffodil. She was bloody rude, too.

So why on earth were these young women considered feminists in their day? Their chief legacy was to give ordinary little girls the aspiration to marry a footballer and live in a WAG mansion.

A few years back, I wrote a piece wondering why so many female pop stars choose to dress like prostitutes: how could it be liberating for a young woman to look like Geri did at the Brits, in that Union Jack tea towel?

But then a friend pointed out the blindingly obvious: they dressed the way they did because not one was deemed beautiful enough by their male puppet-masters to wear something simple and comfortable.

ALL Saints, that other 1990s girl band, may have worn combats and Timberland boots but they were allegedly told to lose weight by management, and given a gym schedule in their contracts. Can you imagine Carole King putting up with that?

So ‘ordinary’ girls learned to over-compensate like their idols, with maxed-out lashes and mini dresses, and came to think that success is all about having money.

The Spice Girls never give us real power, which would be to tell women that it’s not all about your bank balance. It’s about taking other women to the top with you and shielding the ones coming along in your wake.