WHEN David Beckham went on Australian television to declare his marriage to Victoria was hard work and difficult, his harsh words shocked many.
But probably not the tight-knit team who have worked for the troubled stars for close to two decades.
As David and Victoria’s marriage has become more fraught, so too has the relationship between the two public relations executives tasked with maintaining the reputation and public image of their clients.
While the public might assume the £500million Brand Beckham is run by a united team, the truth is that their staff are now at war behind the scenes, illustrating just how dysfunctional the most talked-about marriage in showbiz has become.
Becks’ public image is managed by businessman Simon Oliveira, his long-time publicist and confidante via his firm Doyen Global.
Married Simon, 45, works closely with football agent Dave Gardner — Liv Tyler’s partner — who does not get on with Victoria.
Meanwhile, Victoria, 44, is represented by glamorous Jo Milloy, one of the most sought after publicists in British entertainment, who also counts Pippa Middleton, David Gandy and Gordon Ramsay as clients.
As well as Victoria’s personal PR, the 47-year-old is also responsible for Beckham family media management, which includes their four children.
Jo, real name Ruth, is assisted by “strategy and brand consultant” Natalie Lewis, who has worked with Victoria on her “personal fashion profile” for 12 years.
Publicity powerhouses Oliveira and Milloy were previously colleagues and friends. However, reflecting the difficult marital relations of their paymasters, the pair are now privately hostile as they compete to get the best for David, 43, or Victoria.
While both Oliveira and Milloy are highly regarded in the PR industry, over the past few weeks the acrimony between Team David and Team Victoria has started to spill out into the public domain.
There was the couple’s disastrous Vogue magazine cover shoot, the Beckileaks emails and David’s decision to dodge a speeding fine, and negative headlines over Victoria’s financially failing fashion business.
However, it was David’s awkward Aussie interview that prompted an emotional meltdown from Victoria.
This was followed by David releasing CCTV of a raid on their house in the Cotswolds.
Victoria was furious and had no idea her husband was going to publish the footage showing details of the couple’s family home, sources close to them revealed.
Police investigating the raid in Great Tew, Oxon, also didn’t know Becks was going to give the tape to a news website.
The PR battle between Posh and Becks was prompted by The Sun’s revelations three years ago that the marriage faced serious troubles.
We revealed how the couple were living increasingly separate lives amid hectic work commitments.
Victoria’s growing jealousy over David’s female friends, including Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Charlize Theron and Alexa Chung, even prompted her to miss Guy Ritchie’s A-list wedding.
Our front page story sparked a rare crisis meeting between Victoria, David and Simon Fuller, the super manager and TV executive who made the Spice Girls household names and created Pop Idol.
He now oversees both of their careers through Beckham Brand Holdings, which is owned equally by Victoria, David and Fuller’s XIX Entertainment.
The trio decided they were going to start using the vast power of the Beckhams’ social media accounts to deflect from our reporting of a strained marriage.
So that’s why over the past three years we have seen every intimate detail of the Beckhams’ family life, right down to the £4,950 Louis Vuitton wine carrier six-year-old Harper bought for her dad’s birthday this year.
As the Beckhams’ Instagram reality show began in full force, growing doubts regarding the state of their relationship did not go away.
Last summer, when Victoria flew into Glastonbury Festival to join her husband, the pair had a huge row over David’s partying. It was one of the few occasions they dropped the façade in public.
Then this January tensions bubbled over when David confirmed his plans to move to Miami to launch his US football franchise — a decision he made despite stark opposition from Victoria.
In public and on social media, Victoria remained gushing, while her husband only wanted to talk about her business acumen.
The move coincided with a suggestion David no longer wanted to continue to bankroll Victoria’s fashion business after it posted an £8.4million loss in 2016. By contrast, David’s DB Ventures Limited made a £24.9million profit after tax.
Instead, she received £30million of private equity from Neo Investment Partners earlier this year, ruling her out of the Spice Girls reunion.
When the investment was announced, David said: “I am so proud of Victoria’s success and all the hard work that has gone into building the business over the past ten years. I am sure the next decade will be even more exciting.”
But while publicly the couple were singing each other’s praises, their teams were not always singing from the same hymn sheet.
David’s side were keen for stories surrounding their finances, to stress that he was the main breadwinner and helping to prop up Victoria’s clothing empire.
While Victoria’s team were insistent her fashion business was going from strength-to-strength. In reality, the couple were now running independent businesses on either side of the Atlantic, with a growing gulf between their friendship groups.
The first real PR battle between the couple’s teams would come with Victoria’s appearance with her children on the cover of Vogue to mark the ten-year anniversary of her fashion label.
Initially Victoria was meant to appear solo, until there was a swirl of rumours that she would use the issue to announce her divorce from David.
She lobbied him to appear in the photoshoot, which he eventually agreed to do on the condition he would not take part in the interview and would not appear on the cover.
Marital tensions have never been far from the surface with the Beckhams.
In 2004, David was accused of having an affair with ex-assistant Rebecca Loos, 41, while he was playing for Real Madrid in Spain.
The night before the Royal Wedding in May he had been caught buying shots with glamorous events producer Kara Keble-White as she celebrated her 25th birthday in Oxfordshire.
Rumours spiralled again in June that he was linked with another woman, who was not named for legal reasons, but her father blasted the claims, insisting they had “never even met”.
And in the same month talk of a divorce leaked out on social media, prompting a string of expletive-filled denials from Oliveira and Milloy.
But the release of the Vogue interview would become an even bigger unintended disaster. The shoot was set up by Lewis, who focusses on Victoria’s fashion business, rather than Milloy.
Magazine sources tell me David and Victoria’s teams could not agree on which pictures or bits of interview to release to the media.
Her team pushed for an image of Victoria alone and another with her children to be released to the Press, alongside her weird description of the marriage where she tellingly didn’t use the word love.
She said in the interview: “We both realise that we are stronger together than as individuals. Would either of us be in the position that we are in now had we not met and been together all those years ago? It’s all about the family unit.”
The next day the Beckhams insisted on releasing an alternative cover featuring a black and white image of the couple and quotes about their marriage missing. But the damage was done — and things were only about to get worse.
Last month, Victoria’s team was privately scathing of the way David’s side managed his decision to avoid a speeding fine by using notorious celebrity lawyer Nick Freeman, known as Mr Loophole.
It mirrored the revelations in the Beckileaks emails last year, which showed the footballer’s anger over his lack of a knighthood.
David’s PR team decided to go ahead with an interview with Australian presenter Lisa Wilkinson, famed for her sympathetic but probing questions.
While the interview aired just as the couple arrived in Sydney for Prince Harry’s Invictus Games, it was in fact part of his commitment to AIA Life Insurance, for which he is paid a multi-million pound fee.
In a teaser clip, the marriage bomb went off as David said: “To have been married for the amount of time, it’s always hard work. It becomes a little more complicated.”
It only got worse in the full interview, where David admitted the couple struggled because they didn’t spend much time together because of work.
To sources close to the couple, his comments appeared a very public distancing of himself from his marriage and reflected what The Sun has been saying for the past three years. But Victoria was devastated, breaking down in tears over the comments and insisting her team investigate.
In damage limitation mode, attempts were made, say sources, to get the TV company to pull the more damaging quotes, but it refused, insisting it was too late.
On Saturday night, as tense David and Victoria were flying to Australia, an opportunity presented itself to Oliveira. A group of masked apparent burglars attempted to gain access to the couple’s Oxfordshire mansion, which incidentally Victoria views as her husband’s project and where she doesn’t love spending any time.
David bought the £6million property in his own name.
To deflect from the growing car-crash headlines about David’s interview and Victoria’s upset, Beckham’s team decided to leak the footage from the couple’s CCTV to a favoured website before they had provided it to investigating police.
In an extraordinary development that is said to have infuriated Victoria, the site reported that the robbery took place on Friday night, even though police told The Sun it happened at 8pm on Saturday.
David and his PR team appeared to want to tell the world that Victoria had been upset and miserable over the raid, rather than what many had seen as his deeply hurtful interview.
most read in tv and showbiz
Just as David and Victoria argued privately, so too did Oliveira and Milloy. In fact, the relationship between the pair has now been described as “poisonous” by sources close to them because of the interview and CCTV leak.
The out-and-out PR war raises one important question: If we are to believe the Beckhams’ social media posts that paint the picture of a perfect family, then why would Victoria and David continue to hire PRs who consistently try to do down the side of the couple they don’t represent?
Whether Oliveira and Milloy both remain in their positions and how they work together in future may very well determine the future of Brand Beckham.