House of Beckham by Tom Bower review

With little fresh detail on show, this biography offers instead a masterclass in insinuation and class-coded curiosities

Say what you like about the biographer Tom Bower, he hits the ground running: from the opening bars of House of Beckham, an epic symphony of snide, you know exactly where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. So, it’s Glastonbury 2017, and Beckham is “in deep conversation with Mary Charteris, a 30-year-old married party girl, the ultimate cool Sloane Raver.” She is, we learn, famous for “being present at parties where others enjoyed cocaine”. Is she meant to be a cokehead by association? Can one catch cocaine? How do you get famous for that?

It doesn’t feel especially fair-minded, but the more blameless victim in this take-no-prisoners prose style is syntax. After Charteris’s wedding in 2012, “everyone latched on to her father’s excited reaction to the unusually revealing dress she wore and on to her stepmother known as ‘Lady Mindbender’.” What does it mean? Excited how? Who’s everyone? Latched on to the stepmother in what way? In the end, trying to tell a story with no better sources than contemporaneous tabloid accounts, skating the same line between insinuation and defamation, while trying to introduce notes of both moral and factual authority, well, it can be done, but only if you’re happy to sometimes not make sense.