Inside David's 'Project K' and the relentless 12-year campaign to get Becks the only prize he ever really wanted - a knighthood: PART THREE of ALISON BOSHOFF's bombshell new book

Of all his many trophies, garlands and achievements, one means more to David Beckham than any other: his knighthood. A lifelong royalist – and a man who has long had ambitions to be right at the heart of the establishment – his investiture on November 4, 2025, was, without doubt, his proudest moment. He was effusive on that day, saying: ‘I’ve been very obviously lucky in my career to have won what I’ve won and done what I’ve done, but to receive an honour like this, of a knight, is beyond anything that I ever thought I would receive.’ Having once been sneered at by snobs for sitting on a throne at his own wedding, David had secured the one thing money can’t buy. No longer a mere celebrity, he was now a bona fide gentleman. But how had this heavily-tattooed former footballer achieved such a startling social transformation, not just knighted by King Charles out of duty to the honours committee’s advice – but seemingly, as I have been told, out of some personal desire, too? A royal source told me that, while the King is ‘the fount of all honour’, the appointment system really is little to do with him. ‘It’s not the King saying he’s a decent chap, let’s give him a knighthood,’ the source added. ‘That said, there is a personal relationship between the two of them.’ In this instance, King Charles wanted to knight Sir David himself. Of all David Beckham's achievements, his knighthood certainly means the most. It transformed Sir David from a mere celebrity into a bona fide gentleman  Football star David wearing a sarong on a night out with pop star Victoria in 1998 David and the King warmly greeting each other at the Chelsea Flower Show this year A source said: ‘The King can decide which honours investiture ceremonies he undertakes, and he wanted to do David’s investiture at Windsor because the dates suited and he knows him personally.’ The reality is that David’s ‘Project K’ had had several false turns over the decades – more of which later – but crucial to its eventual success was one woman: Nicola Howson, once the feared head of publicity at ITV. From 2018 – after the departure of former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller from David’s team – Howson became an integral part of David’s management. Before ITV, she had been a force to be reckoned with, holding senior positions at Freuds – a blue-chip PR firm – and the Old Vic Theatre. Also an ambassador at the WWF charity and a trustee of the National Youth Theatre, what she had, which Fuller did not, was experience of connecting clients with leadership at a higher level, like the World Economic Forum in Davos, which David now regularly attends. She understood that if he was going to get that knighthood, he needed to be seen as more than a celebrity; he needed gravitas. Brand Beckham by Alison Boshoff, to be published by Century on August 13, priced £22. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to August 23; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.  In short, this cultural chameleon needed to rebrand yet again – only this time as a campaigner and change-maker. Her impact was soon apparent. By 2019, David was fluently addressing the United Nations of behalf of Unicef. Make no mistake, this was quite a turnaround. For David’s public presentation wasn’t always so polished – something ruthlessly mocked by his best man, fellow footballer Gary Neville, at his 1999 wedding to Victoria. After the groom’s speech, in which David promised ‘I will always love and look after Victoria and treat her like a princess, which she always wants to be treated like’, Neville – who had by now changed into a Beckham-style sarong – started his speech by saying: ‘He speaks well, that Julian Clary, doesn’t he?’ Fellow footballer Gary Neville mocked David at his 1999 wedding to Victoria for speaking so well, 'like Julian Clary'. It’s thought David has had several professional voice coaches since The reference to David’s then infamously squeaky voice brought the house down. Since then, however, it’s alleged that David has had multiple professional voice coaches. And before his big United Nations address, this training went into turbo-drive. He practised his speech over and over, learning how to read an autocue and even renting the Electric Cinema in London’s Notting Hill, and filling it with friends and employees, so that he could have the experience of a large audience. A friend of his tells me: ‘He’s a naturally shy person and grew up with some almost brutal father figures in Sir Alex Ferguson and Ted Beckham, but he learned to be a quick study. You only have to tell him once, and he will keep on and on practising until he gets it right.’ Howson’s impact was apparent in other areas, too. In 2021, David agreed to make a major Netflix documentary, Beckham, about his life, with Howson as an executive producer and with the show made by his own TV company, Studio 99. The documentary – released in 2023 – had been explicitly conceived as a tool to rehabilitate his image, and so it proved. Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Howson said that David’s trust in her and in his best friend Neville had been crucial. She said: ‘David wouldn’t have gone there without the trust factor of somebody he knew had his back, in the sense of helping him unlock the memories. It was incredibly difficult. He needed two things: me and Gary Neville. ‘He blocked so many of the memories, and he shot them down, as sports people do to keep going. And I’ve learned this. They put it in a box and move on. David would tell a story to Fisher [Stevens, the narrator and director], and then Gaz would see it, and Gary would say: “That’s not how it happened,” and he would challenge him.’ In the documentary, David comes across as modest, likeable and candid. He even came close to an admission about Rebecca Loos, speaking of his regret over the peril the marriage had been in during the Real Madrid period. And viewers enjoyed the way he teased Victoria about having been driven to school in a Rolls-Royce while she was explaining her working-class roots. It was a huge global hit. As Howson observed, Americans didn’t know his origin story, and had virtually assumed his life began in 2007, when he moved to play for LA Galaxy. Nicola Howson, former head of publicity at ITV, became a central part of David's management team and integral to securing his knighthood The Beckhams' Netflix documentary, which Howson helped to produce, was a huge hit and made him appear as 'verging on saintly', says Alison Boshoff After Howson had put them in the picture about the brutalities and rejections of his childhood at the hands of his disciplinarian father and his professional life at Manchester United, he appeared as verging on saintly. David was now firmly in the era in which he would not put a foot wrong. The transformation was, frankly, breathtaking. Indeed, just six years prior, in February 2017, a tranche of humiliating emails between David and his team had been leaked. In these, he was shown to discuss angrily why he had not yet received a knighthood – which he apparently felt was his due. The idea of a lesser honour was dismissed. ‘If it’s not a knighthood, f*** off’, he wrote. The honours committee were described as ‘unappreciative c***s’. These so-called Beckileaks emails threatened to derail an ambition he had begun to foster ever since his annual pilgrimages as a child to watch Trooping the Colour with his grandparents. David desperately wanted the royal stamp of approval. Only a select number of former football players had ever been knighted, among them Stanley Matthews, Bobby Charlton and Pelé – and David’s sights were set on becoming the next. The emails had been published despite David’s legal team obtaining an injunction against The Sunday Times in 2016. Dating from 2013, they showed David raging at being denied a knighthood because of questions over his tax affairs. He had indeed been put forward to the honours committee for a ‘K’ by Lord Coe, after his work on the London 2012 Olympic bid, and the committee agreed that the nomination was ‘merited’. As is standard, information was sought on the candidate from the police, security services and the taxman. The taxman, it seems, raised a red flag. A source close to the committee said: ‘HMRC gives us a flag – it’s red, amber or green. David was a red. His taxes were the problem.’ David, in common with virtually all high-earners, had always been, shall we say, financially efficient when it came to his taxes. For example, his final few months of professional football were played at the Qatari-backed club Paris Saint-Germain in 2013. During this time, he lived in the Hotel Bristol in Paris, in a suite costing £14,000 a night. He donated his entire income to a French children’s charity. The Press raved about his big heart, but there were advantages to the arrangement: it meant that he could keep his ‘non-dom’ status for tax purposes until the start of the new financial year in April 2013. He also avoided France’s swingeing 75 per cent tax rate. But what HMRC was objecting to was the fact that he was one of dozens of wealthy celebrities who had invested in the controversial Ingenious Media scheme to fund movies and reduce investors’ personal tax liability. HMRC labelled the scheme a tax-avoidance vehicle. It is understood that the honours committee then entered into an extraordinary dialogue with Team Beckham to ‘sort out’ the issue, suggesting that high-profile individuals can be told what they need to do to get a knighthood. But David does not appear to have appreciated this attempt to help him. The leaked emails reveal that, when he found out he had been passed over in 2013, the former England captain had denounced the committee members as ‘a bunch of c***s’ who were ‘unappreciative’ of his national treasure status. He also branded the honours system ‘a f***ing joke’. His view was that, after helping to get the Olympics, trying to get the World Cup and being a Unicef goodwill ambassador since 2005, he was entitled to a knighthood. ‘It’s a disgrace to be honest and if I was an American I would of [sic] got something like this 10 years ago,’ he wrote. He lashed out at other celebs who had got honours, including, infamously, the opera singer Katherine Jenkins. ‘Katherine Jenkins OBE for what?’ he fumed. ‘Singing at the rugby and going to see the troops plus taking coke. F***ing joke.’ Beckham’s team said the emails had been ‘doctored’ and ‘taken out of context’ by hackers, but they were still damaging. His PR, Simon Oliveira, advised him in an email: ‘You aim for the highest honour, you should not give up so quickly. This gives us even more reason to work for Unicef, the armed forces, other charity commitments etc this year.’ David’s work for Unicef, though, was to bring yet more embarrassment. The organisation’s relations manager, Chloe Edwards, had set up a deal in which Beckham became the lead sponsor of his own ‘7 Fund’, dedicated to help children at risk of violence, abuse or disease. Beckham had said in a release that it was his ‘number one priority’. But, embarrassingly, the leaked emails painted a different picture of his commitment to good causes. He donated his entire income to a French children's charity, while playing for his the Qatari-backed club Paris Saint- Germain – but questions were raised about his taxes David’s work for Unicef was to bring yet more embarrassment, as emails revealed he'd said: 'I don’t want to put my personal money into this cause... The f***ing money is mine' He was asked to donate £1million to the fund and then to match the highest bidders at a charity auction in New York. He emailed Oliveira and his right-hand man Dave Gardner, saying: ‘Chloe asked me outright which I was p***** off about. I don’t want to do it and I won’t do it with my own money,’ he wrote. In February 2014, he made a two-day visit to the Philippines in the wake of a typhoon. His travel had been paid for by the hotel group Sands and the booze giants Diageo. Emails showed him apparently wanting Unicef to reimburse the £6,685 cost of his plane ticket. ‘There’s no way it should be costing me anything,’ he wrote. Further requests for donations annoyed him again. Unicef asked him to donate a million dollars (£800,000) for a prize-giving dinner in Shanghai, China. He wrote: ‘I don’t want to put my personal money into this cause. To pour this million into the fund is like putting my own money in. If there was no fund, the money would be for me. The f***ing money is mine.’ Again, in 2015, on a trip to Cambodia, Beckham was protective of his massive fortune. He had been flown to the country on H&M’s dime as he was opening a store in Macau, and wanted to stay at the Amansara hotel. Unicef had arranged for a stay at the cheaper Sofitel. He asked Unicef to pay what they would have for the Sofitel and he would make up the difference. Unicef sprang to his defence after the leaks. A statement from the organisation said: ‘David Beckham has been a Unicef goodwill ambassador since 2005, and as well as generously giving his time, energy and support to help raise awareness and funds for Unicef’s work for children, David has given significant funds personally . . . Our ambassadors support Unicef in a voluntary capacity, receiving no fee for their time and commitment. They contribute greatly to Unicef’s work for children.’ It was a crucial intervention, but embarrassment remained. There was much work to be done, then, to achieve his ‘K’. David – wisely as it turns out – has never put all his eggs in one royal basket. Instead he respectfully and quietly cultivated all the links he could with the different branches of the family. As he said in a later interview, he simply never turned down a chance to work with any of them. Wisely, he has never put all his eggs in one royal basket. Instead David respectfully and quietly cultivated all the links he could with the different branches of the family David and Victoria were invited to William and Kate's wedding in 2011, and today he is said to enjoy a 'texting' relationship with the prince, often teasing him about football  His friendship with Princes William and Harry – brewed in 2010 as they unsuccessfully campaigned for England to host the 2018 World Cup – had been especially carefully cultivated, and had seen David and Victoria invited to William and Kate’s wedding in 2011. Today, he enjoys a ‘texting friendship’ with Prince William, the heir to the throne. Apparently, he likes to tease the prince, who is patron of the Football Association, about the performance of the team he supports, Aston Villa. And David has given much of his time for William’s projects: in 2020, they appeared in a video together to promote a ‘mentally healthy culture’ in football. David also attended William’s Earthshot Prize ceremonies in 2022 and 2024, and has supported his Air Ambulance appeal. In 2024, Victoria Shires, the head of PR for David’s DB Ventures, left to work for Prince William and Kate at the Royal Foundation. The links between the two are many and meaningful. By 2021, well-informed sources were able to place a story in the newspapers to the effect that HMRC no longer had any concerns about David’s tax affairs, so there was no longer any stumbling block to an honour. Then, after the death of the Queen in 2022 – for whose lying-in-state David queued for 13 hours, snacking on Pringles, chatting happily to other royal fans and generally appearing the ultimate ‘man of the people’ – David’s relationship with the new King Charles became a priority. In 2023, just a couple of days after the Coronation, at a fashion awards ceremony, he gifted the monarch a jar of his homegrown honey – explaining that, like him, he was a keen beekeeper at his country home in the Cotswolds. A delighted King promised he’d give him one of his own jars in return. David – now a self-styled country gent, fond of the environment and outdoor pursuits – was invited to Highgrove to discuss all things nature with the King. The pair of them spent an easy hour in conversation about gardening, bees, crafts, houses and the countryside. David had by then been shooting for a decade with his friend, the film director Guy Ritchie, who has an estate in Wiltshire, so they had that to talk about too. Friends say they found they had much in common and the King thought him ‘delightful’. The friendship led to an invitation to become an ambassador for the King’s Foundation, a role that was announced in June 2024. The King, bluntly, needed David’s star power to waft away some of the controversy that had swirled around some of the charity’s activities, most notably centring on actions taken by Michael Fawcett, his former personal aide. Fawcett, who became the foundation’s chief executive, had allegedly offered to help wealthy British and foreign donors to the charity secure honours and even British citizenship. Royal sources reveal that King Charles wanted to knight Sir David himself, as the two men had already established a personal relationship  David famously David queued for 13 hours to see the late Queen's lying-in-state, which turned him into the ultimate ‘man of the people’ How far David had made it inside the royal fold was indicated in December 2024, when he was among the guests at a state banquet at Buckingham Palace to mark the state visit of the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Friends said David was ‘humbled’ by his invitation and ‘very happy’ to be there. He had his white tie specially made, and Victoria took great pains to dress appropriately. Soon after, they were invited to a black-tie dinner at Highgrove to celebrate Anglo-Italian relations. The following month, Victoria was invited to Buckingham Palace for a Women of the World event hosted by Queen Camilla. Anyone who saw David and the King warmly greeting each other at the Chelsea Flower Show in May last year could be in no doubt about how the relationship had flourished. The King even made a remark that alluded to a birthday present he’d sent for David’s 50th. An even better gift was to follow – with his knighthood finally announced in the birthday honours list last June. Sources close to David reveal that his team were aware that an honour was in the pipeline, or could be, but had said nothing to David, seeing as he had been disappointed a number of times before. David is determined not to blot his royal copybook again. It was noted that, at a recent launch at St James’s Palace, David was attentive during the seminar and had the good manners to offer his seat to a female guest who didn’t have one. He has the discretion to know that he should not bring up the fact that both he and the King have estranged sons; it is an extraordinary coincidence which is not discussed. That David’s initial visit to Highgrove coincided with a moment when Prince Harry was in the country, and his father was too busy to see him, was just an unfortunate chance. Still, though – for the man once most famous for his sarong and alleged affair with his PA to take precedence over the King’s own son for a visit? It’s a happy ending that not even the ambitious David himself could have dreamt of. Click here to read part one of the Daily Mail's serialisation of Brand Beckham by Alison Boshoff, and here to read part two. Adapted from Brand Beckham by Alison Boshoff, to be published by Century on August 13, priced £22. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to August 23; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.  At the height of Girl Power, hysteria followed the Spice Girls wherever they went, yet Victoria could never shake off her crippling insecurity. At stage school, according to her mother, she had been told ‘you’re overweight – you’ll be in the back’. Now she worried she was too fat to be a Spice Girl. She was ‘helped’ to slim by fellow Spice Girl Geri Halliwell. ‘It started gradually. Geri would say things like don’t put sauces on food, that low-fat things were just as good and I could try just not eating quite so much,’ Victoria wrote in her autobiography, Learning to Fly. ‘It was Geri who introduced me to SlimFast, a milkshake drink that fills you up and stops you feeling hungry . . . ‘The trouble is when you start thinking like that it’s hard to stop, particularly if you’re an all or nothing person like I am . . . Soon, the fat content of food was as familiar as my two times table.’ By her own admission, Victoria became ‘obsessive’ about food – living on vegetables. ‘I used to chop up bowls of spinach and carrots and mangetout and steam them. Or I’d just eat peas, like a whole family pack at one sitting. But it never occurred to me for a moment that I might have an eating disorder because everybody knew people with eating disorders were thin, and I was still the same size I had always been. I was just eating healthily and getting into shape.’ The real turning point came when the Spice Girls went to Japan and she couldn’t find ‘normal’ vegetables. Victoria thought the offered food was ‘disgusting’. ‘So I just stopped eating. All of a sudden, I found I was losing weight. I was getting thinner and thinner every day. I was shrinking. And the excitement at getting thinner quite took away the hunger. Even the other girls started to notice, but they were easy to fob off. ‘Because when you have an eating disorder, you can fool people. Fooling people becomes part of the buzz.’ It took decades for her to come clean. She finally admitted that she had been controlling her weight in an ‘incredibly unhealthy’ way. ‘I really started to doubt myself and not like myself and really let it affect me. I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror – was I fat, was I thin? You lose all sense of reality. I was very critical of myself, I didn’t like what I saw. I had been everything, from “Porky Posh” to “Skinny Posh” . . . ‘I had no control over what’s being written about [or] pictures that were being taken. I suppose I wanted to control that . . . When you have an eating disorder you become very good at lying and I was never honest about it with my parents.’ On a podcast last year, she was evasive over whether she ever had a conversation with David about her disorder. She seemed to suggest that she hadn’t, saying that while he has ‘always known’ she is ‘very disciplined’ around food, she had managed to get her problems under control herself without intervention. Victoria’s torment over her body image led to her first cosmetic surgery, a breast enhancement, which took her from a 34A to a 34D in 1999. ‘I had very big boobs. And I would wear little, tiny hotpants or tiny, tiny short skirts. And I look at those pictures and I smile, because I think it’s been such a journey, but the truth is, that was me showing that I was actually really insecure, and that is how I stayed relevant.’ The Spice Girls had a reunion tour in 2007. It was the highest grossing tour of the period, with $107million (£80million) in ticket sales and merchandising, plus sponsorship and other deals taking the total to $200million (£148million). But behind the scenes there were issues. Emma Bunton had quickly shed all of her ‘baby weight’ thanks to a ‘no-white’ diet that forbade white pasta and so on. Victoria was subsisting chiefly on strawberries and edamame beans. Mel C, who had had depression when she shook her post-Spice eating disorder, had to try to ignore this unhealthy atmosphere. And Geri had shrunk to a minute size 6. As a fashion designer, Victoria has found a career in which she is successful and respected. But she hasn’t let go when it comes to food. One former employee at Victoria Beckham’s London atelier was recently heard to complain that no food is allowed through its doors, not even a sandwich: ‘The place runs on water and fruit.’