It started with a kiss, but did it just end with a kiss?
On Saturday I watched – along with an almost hysterical female WhatsApp group – as Geri Halliwell arrived at the Formula 1 circuit in Bahrain to support her beleaguered husband, Christian Horner, the director of the Red Bull team.
A stream of indignant messages. ‘Nodon’t hold his hand!’
“She looks like she’s been crying!”
“I love the vintage Gucci dress, the Hermes bag!”
And then, as Horner, 50, placed a hand firmly on the back of his allegedly wronged 51-year-old wife and led her to the catering department, another WhatsApp pinged: “He’s not a gentleman!”
But the final straw came when he bent over to plant a very large smackeroo (“Ew! Gray stubble!”), and we all wailed, “Nooooo!” Geri, give him one!’
Then she turned consciously to the camera, with a look that said, “I’m doing what my crisis management team told me to do” or “Yes, I’m a Stepford woman now.” Girl Power be damned!’
Christian Horner and Geri Halliwell hold hands in a public show of unity at the Bahrain Grand Prix on Saturday
For us, the last straw came when he bent over to plant a very large smackeroo (“Ew! Gray stubble!”), and we all whimpered, “Nooooo!” Geri, give him one!’
None of us in the WhatsApp group had ever seen or remotely understood F1 before, but we were now glued to the screen, suddenly experts. The scene in the paddock is seductive and glamorous: a friendly environment where heads can be turned, regardless of what the sport’s code of conduct dictates.
After all, Horner is an adrenaline junkie, who moved from karting to Formula 3000 as a boy before realizing he didn’t have what it takes to drive F1 and lead his own team: ‘It was always about pushing boundaries… risks to take.’ Hmmm.
And this testosterone-fueled environment attracts beautiful women like cats to an open can of tuna. But still – Geri is a Spice Girl! That trumps supermodel, heiress, younger subordinate, right?
Someone’s husband from our WhatsApp group intervened and said that ‘the drivers need to concentrate, they act in hundredths of a second’ – a typical male response. (Horner’s team won despite the distraction of Geri’s presence).
But our loyalty was only to Geri, whose messy love life and irreverent spirit – who else would don a Union Jack tea towel with the British? – and her struggles with her weight over the years mirror ours.
We thought she’d finally found her happy ending, after marrying Horner in 2015, what with his estimated £8million-a-year salary and all. She had finally escaped serial singledom – an affair with Robbie Williams, a brief relationship with Sacha Gervasi, a screenwriter with whom she has a daughter, Bluebell, 17. A two-year relationship with Henry Beckwith, an heir eight years her junior .
Christian and Geri Horner after the Red Bull team won the Bahrain Grand Prix
Christian and Geri Horner after the Red Bull team won the Bahrain Grand Prix on Saturday
When we first heard last month that her husband had been accused of “inappropriate behavior” by a female colleague, we all shouted “Nooooo!” Last week he was cleared following a Red Bull investigation and we cheered – only because that stream of ‘flirty’ messages (allegedly sent by him and many of which were reportedly way more than flirty) leaked while Geri was on a private jet to meet him in Bahrain for the first F1 race of the season. My God, I bet the “fasten seat belt” sign was smartly turned on.
On Saturday, as rumors swirled about the content of the messages, we had fun eviscerating him, as all feminists should:
‘Posh t***, why is he wearing overalls? He must have wished he was Steve McQueen.”
And: ‘What a bland, smug face’.
But strangely enough, much of the media has little sympathy for Geri. That’s inconsistent because this scandal is something she really doesn’t want or deserve.
I once came across emails between my husband and his secret lover and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Opening each little envelope was like a bomb going off in my stomach.
The wrenching pain, the disbelief, the shame. The realization that everything you had built together was a mirage.
Geri, we’re told, had “the meltdown to end all meltdowns” when she read the lyrics. Just to appear in front of a global audience on Saturday took enormous courage.
But yes, they have a seven-year-old son together. A family. Not something to just throw away.
The last time Geri left a family was with the other three Spice Girls, in 1998.
In the documentary about their breakup, the most lasting image is of Geri sitting on the steps of her mansion, looking scared and alone except for the presence of Harry, her shih tzu.
She looked so small, so unsure of what would happen next. And now? In any case, I want to give her a big hug.
But the way Geri, a woman in pain, is treated is unbelievable.
Horner left his wife for Geri when his child was six months old, her critics accuse.
Um, HE was the one who was already in a relationship!
“She’s been one,” one female commenter wrote. Geri’s had several number 1 singles! She is one of the most successful singer/songwriters we have produced.
Marriages crumble, people lose their love.
Some say Geri’s reputation will be ‘tainted’ if she continues to support him. But so often women are put between a rock and a hard place when it comes to bad behavior from their men.
She and Horner aren’t just dating; they have a to live together. It must have been a difficult decision for Geri to come and support him this weekend, and the scandal is still fresh. But it’s always the women who get the brunt.
And it’s a shame. While fellow Spice Girl Victoria Beckham is fashion royalty, Geri, the working-class daughter of a Spanish mother who worked as a cleaner, feels completely at ease interacting with real royals.
It is known that she once pinched Prince Charles’s bum. Now she blends into his circles with ease and almost as an equal.
Pulling herself up by her fingernails, the former shop assistant at Next’s Watford branch has transformed herself into – her word – a ‘posho’.
She owns racehorses at her country home in Oxfordshire. That tea towel has been replaced by Barbour jackets and Hunter boots.
Geri is not a stay-at-home trophy wife, even though she has enough money of her own to never work again.
As Michelle Stephenson, a short and early band member known as “the sixth Spice Girl,” remembered of Geri when they started: “She was the most driven, the first one ready for a jog at dawn. While the others ate pizza, Geri ate bean sprouts.’
But despite the wealth and fame, the Geri I knew was haunted by self-doubt.
Now this latest debacle and possible betrayal (nothing has been proven – Christian Horner was cleared of wrongdoing by his bosses and he denies everything – will cast doubt on her very self).
Then she turned consciously to the camera, with a look that said, “I’m doing what my crisis management team told me to do.”
Geri has a son (now seven) with Christian Horner, daughters Bluebell (left) and Olivia from a previous relationship. Pictured: the family together during the 2017 Bahrain F1 Grand Prix
It always seems to have this effect on women.
I first met Geri at a cover shoot in Los Angeles in 2001. She was in the middle of her super Ashtanga yoga period (remember the front cover photo of her doing a headstand on the beach? She doesn’t even relax on holidays!).
She suffered from bulimia for years and became addicted to exercise.
Almost ten years later, in 2010, I went to her house in Highgate, North London. It was all artificial grass and hard surfaces, although Geri had softened up.
Bluebell, then almost five, was playing in the next room. Her boyfriend at the time was the heir to the property, Henry.
Geri is a fantastic mother. Speaking of Bluebell, she told me that she wants to “instill good values: to always be polite and have self-discipline.”
She seemed to become more comfortable with her body and with aging.
She promoted her own range of swimwear for Next and banned the brand from airbrushing her.
I asked her how she got over the feeling that she will never be good enough?
“It comes with time and maturity,” she replied.
‘There’s so much more to the world to think about than what I look like. I just wanted to be free of it…Being forgiving of my own imperfections, allowing for messes.”
Geri’s father died when she was 21, just as they mended their relationship after her parents’ divorce.
The breakdown of that relationship, she told me, was the driving force behind her search for safety, to be cared for.
Her older brother Max died suddenly in 2021 at the age of 54, so she clung to Horner like a life raft.
“It was a shocking realization that people can love you and then leave you,” she said. ‘(Because) my parents were divorced, I felt very distrustful of relationships and dependent on anyone, so I tried to become very self-dependent, which is a bit lonely.
“So I was never present or available for relationships, not even for a relationship with myself. I was just working consistently all the time. I’m always looking for a daddy.’
She likes a man to be a man.
‘But for me, integrity, loyalty and spirit, the kindness of the person is the most important thing. The character of the man. Completely fundamental.’
We can only hope that her confidence in Horner is not misplaced.
I now understand why she allowed her husband to plant that kiss for the whole world to see.
Geri has no one left to lean on when yet another man has abandoned her.