This Adam Peaty (or to give him his full name now, Adam Ramsay Peaty) saga is fascinating – and not just because it’s such a juicy celebrity feud.
There’s something universal about the complicated class and family dynamics being played out, something that goes beyond merely the individuals involved.
Boy-made-good marries Daddy’s little princess, turns his back on his family, pulls the social ladder up behind him and sails off into the celebrity sunset, leaving his ’umble dear old mum and dad crying into their builder’s.
It’s Dickensian, Hogarthian, a timeless tale of class, aspiration and the price of success. It’s also a scenario that will, to a greater or lesser extent, be familiar to countless other families.
To recap: Adam Peaty, Olympic swimmer, has married Holly, daughter of chef Gordon Ramsay. The wedding itself took place in Bath Abbey and was attended by a host of familiar faces, including the Beckham clan, minus their eldest, Brooklyn (of whom more later).
If any union ever merited the title of ‘My Big Naff Celebrity Wedding’, this was it: a triumph of money over taste. Even the Beckhams’ notorious affair, back in 1999 – at which they both wore purple and sat on golden thrones – was classier.
The bridesmaids (the couple’s respective sisters) wore tight, garish red satin more suited to a nightclub than a church; the bride’s dress was covered by a bizarre lace-edged white satin shroud which might have been designed to make her look romantic and whimsical but which, thanks to the windy weather, just made her look like she’d got tangled up in a bedsheet.
Her arrival at the church was chaotic, hampered by a phalanx of security guards whose presence lent the occasion all the sophistication of Wetherspoon at chucking-out time on Saturday night.
Boy-made-good marries Daddy’s little princess, turns his back on his family and sails off into the celebrity sunset, leaving his ’umble dear old mum and dad (pictured with their son as he was awarded an OBE) crying into their builder’s, writes Sarah Vine
Victoria Beckham alighted, amid much pouting, in one of her own dresses, a skintight ballgown look with a slit up the front which she posted on her Instagram page. ‘It’s so flattering,’ she gushed, doing that annoying thing that ‘influencers’ do where they film themselves posing back and forth in front of the mirror (I call it the Insta-sway).
Yes, Lady B, flattering if you have the proportions of a prepubescent boy. On any normal woman – such as, for example, Peaty’s dear old mum Caroline – it would look like a giant condom.
Speaking of which, Ma Peaty and her husband Mark were conspicuous by their absence, their invitation having been rescinded after Adam’s aunt Louise tore a strip or two off him and the Ramsays for failing to invite Caroline to the bride’s glamorous hen-night at Soho Farmhouse – which was attended by Holly’s mother, Tana.
And there were reports of other slights, including the stipulation that if Mark, Adam’s dad, were to attend, he would have to sit at the back of the church, presumably so as not to later sully the Ramsay family ’gram with his un-manscaped face, poor fellow.
Adam’s brothers, James and Richard, were also ostracised. The upshot: the Peatys remain excluded from their son’s new family, and his mother is ‘heartbroken’. Quite honestly, given how rude and ungrateful Adam has been towards them, if I were her, I wouldn’t waste the energy.
The question is, I suppose, how much of this is Adam’s own doing, and how much is it just an emotionally inept young man being led by the short and curlies by an over-bearing fiancee, now wife, and her family?
Holly Ramsay with her father, Gordon. Her dress was covered by a bizarre lace-edged white satin shroud which, thanks to the wind, made her look like she’d got tangled up in a bedsheet
The bride’s arrival at the church was chaotic, hampered by a phalanx of security guards whose presence lent the occasion all the sophistication of Wetherspoon at chucking-out time
There are obvious parallels here with the Beckhams’ own son, Brooklyn, who has also done the dirty on his mum and dad, and whose own siblings, like Adam’s, are none too impressed by his behaviour – although unlike Adam, Brooklyn is the spoiled son of privilege, so he doesn’t even have the excuse that he’s out of his social depth.
I’m sure there’s an element of that. It’s often the way in families where one person becomes rich and/or famous while the others get left behind. Ramsay had it himself with his brother, Ronnie, who even as Gordon was accumulating Michelin stars remained hamstrung by the brothers’ tough, poverty-stricken upbringing.
It’s about class, it’s about shame and social embarrassment, it’s about snobbery. The Ramsays, with their Soho House lifestyle and expensive taste, think they are better than the Peatys, even though Ramsay himself comes from a similar background to theirs.
He’s poshed up nicely: like Adam, he used his success to marry a nice middle-class girl, Tana, who grew up on a farm in Kent. But like so many people who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they don’t like to be reminded of it. Ramsay has built himself a new identity, and he doesn’t want anything – or anyone – spoiling the picture.
The Peatys just don’t measure up, in his mind. They don’t drive fancy cars or wear designer clothes, and they certainly don’t hang out in the kind of places where a cocktail costs £20.
If any union ever merited the title of ‘My Big Naff Celebrity Wedding’, this was it: a triumph of money over taste. The bridesmaids wore tight, garish red satin more suited to a nightclub than a church
They live in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, in the same house where Adam grew up. Mr Peaty has been a bricklayer and a supermarket caretaker, among other things, and Mrs Peaty was a nursery manager. It’s not clear what his brothers do, but they certainly aren’t hanging around Harvey Nichols taking selfies all day long. The family have a dog, but it is not a fashionable breed.
They are, in short, authentically working class and have remained so despite their son’s Olympic success and his social elevation.
But I suspect that their real crime, in the eyes of their new in-laws, is that they’ve dared to defy them. Worse still, they’ve acted as though their feelings were just as important as everyone else’s.
Can you imagine such presumption? Don’t they know their place? Don’t they know that if you are rich and famous you automatically matter more?
Not only that, they’ve also failed dismally on the sucking-up front, which all celebrities demand. No gushing in public about how wonderful or down-to-earth Tana and Gordon are, or what an amazing person lovely Holly is. Equally inexplicably, they don’t seem overly impressed or in awe of them just because they happen to have a bob or two.
This seems to have come as a bit of a shock to the Ramsays – and, by extension, the Beckhams – who are used to being treated with kid gloves.
Gordon Ramsay has poshed up nicely: he used his success to marry a nice middle-class girl, Tana (pictured). But like so many people who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they don’t like to be reminded of it
But perhaps the Peatys’ worst crime – in the eyes of the Insta-obsessed Ramsays – is their lack of polish. They would never say it outright, but my guess is that the Ramsays don’t want Adam’s mother and the Peaty men around because they don’t want them to lower the tone.
This is such a common experience when two families come together via marriage anyway; but it’s so much more so when the union crosses class barriers.
I’ve been to countless weddings where one party’s side of the family has been relegated to Outer Siberia for fear they’ll get carried away by the free bar and make inappropriate comments about the bride’s sister, or get into a fight with somebody’s uncle.
I remember one friend’s wedding where her mother, who had spent days micro-managing everyone’s outfits for the photographs, was mortified when the groom’s mother turned up in a frumpy tartan frock and matching hat and insisted on ‘ruining’ all the pictures.
At my own wedding, there were more than a few culture clashes. Indeed, arguably my dad cut a bit of a Ramsay-like figure, the self-made man married to a beautiful woman a fair few notches above him in the class stakes.
I think he was rather baffled by many of the assembled guests, which included David and Samantha Cameron, George Osborne and others in their circle – and they by him.
My ex parents-in-law, who lived a fairly sheltered existence in Aberdeen, were also, I think, a little stunned by it all, and especially my mother’s many outfit changes (each one more fabulous than the last), the exoticism of some of the guests and my father’s liberal use of the F-word during the speeches.
But the whole point of a wedding is that none of these differences matter, or at least they shouldn’t. It’s not important what people look like, or how they dress, or where they were born, or whether their dad was a scaffolder or a Goldman Sachs banker.
Two people have come together, hopefully for all the right reasons, and it’s just up to everyone else to put their prejudices/preconceptions aside and just get on with it.
If the Ramsays had a shred of real class, they would send Mrs P a big bunch of flowers and treat their new in-laws to a slap-up lunch at one of Gordon’s restaurants.
I won’t hold my breath.
