Carol Midgley
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Victoria Beckham is just an ordinary girl. We know this because she keeps telling us. There she was again this week, chatting to AP news agency in her soon-to-be new home, Los Angeles, about just how unstarry she is. “I’m just a normal girl from London,” she said, adding without irony: “There are people who are much more famous in LA than David and myself.”
Neither is she interested in the high life. Oh, no. Recently she confided to OK! magazine how much she envies workaday folk going about their little lives. Sometimes, she said, she sees a couple finishing work: “She has her Barclays bank badge on, he has his Dixons badge on and they’re going home for dinner. Sometimes that looks so nice to me – but we all want something we don’t have.” So true. Like a $22 million (£11 million) villa in Beverly Hills and a combined fortune, with husband David, of £130 million.
Cruelly, there always seem to be cynics waiting to knock down this working mother-of-three. Some have even suggested that her comments were contrived to drum up publicity ahead of the Beckhams’ move to America, the launch of her TV show there, her Brand Beckham fashion and perfume business and the Spice Girls reunion. They should be ashamed. As Victoria told AP: “We’re going to be quite low-key.”
Even so, there does seem to be a slight reinvention going on here. When the Spice Girls launched in the 1990s, Victoria, now 33, was marketed as Posh Spice. Much was made of her theatre-school upbringing and the fact that her wealthy father drove her to school in a Rolls-Royce. When she fell in love with David, then a gifted footballer with Manchester United, they became an Alist couple who began showering each other with blingy gifts, married in an OK!-orchestrated wedding and had three boys, Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz. She became the most famously skinny woman in Britain.
Now she seems to be playing all this down.
Still, stories abound about how, for the reunited Spice Girls world tour, there will be five private jets available should old tensions resurface.
For Victoria, though, whose career has been eclipsed by her husband’s godlike status lately, the reunion must be a godsend – not least because it will remind David, whose eye has been known to wander, of the woman he first met. “I want my kids to see Mummy on the stage doing what I used to do, and I want David to see it again,” says our shrinking violet.
On this, at least, most women will understand where she is coming from.
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