AMANDA PLATELL: Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz made a fool of David with affectionate celebration for billionaire Nelson

At the weekend Nicola Peltz lovingly celebrated her adored billionaire-father Nelson’s 83rd birthday. She threw Daddy a lavish party at the family’s huge New York mansion which was festooned with colourful balloons, and she gushed on Instagram over the ‘magic’ day.

Alongside a huge ‘Happy Birthday Nelson’ balloon, Nicola and hubby Brooklyn Beckham posed for a photo in silhouette holding aloft their entwined hands and making a heart sign. In a post, the image was accompanied by multiple heart emojis with the title post ‘Dad’s birthday’.

Ouch! How it must have hurt Brooklyn’s own dad, David.

There Nicola was showing the world how much trouble she went to planning her father’s perfect birthday party, when she and Brooklyn pointedly shunned David’s 50th, failing to turn up to even one of the five family gatherings surrounding it.

The post seems to me a calculated poke in David’s eye by Nicola. How unutterably cruel for her and Brooklyn to shun his parties yet splash her own dad’s all over the internet.

I’m increasingly concerned that Nicola may not be a very nice person. She now comes over as a cross between a Mean Girl and Kathy Bates in the 1990 movie Misery, who imprisons the man she says she adores.

For some bewildering reason she also posted on the same day a picture of Brookyln semi-naked – thankfully he was wearing a towel to cover his privates.

Perhaps it was to prove, rather like the craven Gollum in Lord of the Rings, that ‘he’s mine, mine, all mine’.

Maybe flaunting the party and Brooklyn was a way of rubbing David and Victoria’s noses in the fact that she has now laid complete claim to their estranged son.

He bizarrely changed his name when they married to Brooklyn Peltz Beckham, saying in an interview that taking Nicola’s last name was a way of honouring her.

He said at the time, ‘Not many guys take their wives names, so I was just like, “Why Not?” It fit really cool together.’ So whose idea was that Brooks, yours or your fiercely ambitious wife’s?

Even if she is a pampered billionaire’s daughter, no one had ever heard of Nicola over here before Brooklyn came along.

The bonus of marrying a Beckham for a struggling actress can’t be ignored.

But did she also sow the seeds of his estrangement from his family by suggesting they were dysfunctional and she was the refuge in the storm?

Nicola’s got some experience herself of ‘complicated’ families. Her father has married three times, and she’s the product of his third marriage to glamorous former fashion model Claudia Heffner, 13 years his junior. Nicola has one sister and six brothers. – and two more half siblings.

It’s a sharp contrast to the Beckhams – David and Victoria, despite their trials, have been together for 25 years and are still going strong.

He’s one of the most celebrated footballers in the world, while she’s a former member of what was once the world’s most famous girl band the Spice Girls is now a successful fashion designer with her own brand.

Yes it might have been love at first sight for Nic and Brooks, but I can’t help wondering if there was something calculating in the way nobody Nicola hooked up with a Beckham, one of the most famous names in the world.

Few doubt that if Brooklyn hadn’t met Nicola, he would still be in the loving arms of his stable family. Not estranged from his father and mother, not alienated from his brothers Cruz and Romeo, and would instead be openly celebrating his dad’s birthday and knighthood.

Will he break ranks with Nicola to post a message to his once-adored younger sister Harper who turns 14 this month? Who knows.

But it brings us to the biggest question of all. Why does Brooklyn’s love for Nicola mean he’s had to sacrifice his entire family? What hold does she have over him?

Was the plan always to boost her profile, to lovebomb the not-very-bright Brooklyn then milk the family’s stardom?

If so, it hasn’t much shifted the dial on her Instagram account, where she has 3.1million followers, meagre in celebrity terms, compared with Brooklyn’s with 16.2million, David‘s 88.2million and Victoria’s 32.9million.

Whatever, it must be heartbreaking for David and Victoria and their other children to see their first-born so estranged, or should I say ensnared. To see him half-naked celebrating Nicola’s father’s birthday when the couple couldn’t spare a moment from their busy diary (doing what exactly? Promoting his hot sauce?) for Brooklyn’s own dad David.

And doesn’t it remind you of another terrifyingly ambitious, and beautiful but unknown, young woman who bewitched the son of a famous family – leading him he claim his own flesh and blood were dysfunctional. Yes I am thinking of you, Meghan Markle.