RACHEL JOHNSON: David Beckham may be Golden Balls - but his feet are definitely clay 

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A group called Football Leaks has released a shaming cache of David Beckham's private emails

We all know you should never meet your heroes, and most of us have not had the pleasure and honour of meeting David Beckham, OBE.

So if you don’t want to feel betrayed, disappointed and as sick as a parrot, definitely don’t read Becks’s private emails and – as they say on the News before Match of the Day – look away now.

A group called Football Leaks has revealed a shaming cache of them. 

I’m not crazy about a private person’s private emails being leaked, but they’re out there and be in no doubt: it’s a fusillade of own goals for the nation’s favourite blue-eyed boy, father of four, England’s 100-capped perfect son, Prince William’s wing-man for the Olympics.

While Beckham’s representatives say the emails have been doctored, they reveal something really depressing. 

They include the claim that the main reason he did so much for charity – flying off to dirty, boiling, war-torn, terrible places in khaki fatigues and battered but tight T-shirts – was in the desperate, needy hope of making Posh ’n’ Becks (who got married at ‘Beckingham Palace’ in purple robes and crowns on gilt thrones – maybe there were early signs we all missed) none other than grand, titled ‘Sir David and Lady B’.

On the Jonathan Ross Show in 2013, Beckham was asked if he was getting a knighthood in the New Years Honours List

He is also alleged to have asked for £6,685 to pay for a biz-class seat to fly to Asia for Unicef, for which he is an ambassador, even though his sponsors had laid on a private jet.

The emails suggest that Becks only backed the Stay campaign in the Scottish referendum to suck up to the Establishment in the hope of a gong. 

When he missed out on a K in 2013 but shapely Welsh songbird Katherine Jenkins was made an OBE, he is alleged to have fired off a furious, expletive-laden email to his PR: ‘Katherine Jenkins OBE for what? Singing at the rugby and going to see the troops plus taking coke. F***ing joke.’

When he missed out on a K in 2013 but shapely Welsh songbird Katherine Jenkins was made an OBE, he is alleged to have fired off a furious, expletive-laden email to his PR

He apparently refused to donate £1million to charity (he is worth £280million and anyone who does anything for charity knows part of the deal is you give your own money in return for the lustre of the association with their good works), saying: ‘It’s my f***ing money’.

And on and on it goes. Of course, a furious row has broken out – denials, claims and counterclaims are being issued faster than yellow cards in a rainy North London derby – but it’s too late. 

Sorry to mix metaphors, but the priceless Ming vase has tumbled to the floor, shattered, and nothing can put Humpty back together again.

All over the country, families who clustered round the wireless last Sunday to hear Beckham tell a starstruck Kirsty Young on a specially extended, 75th-birthday edition of Desert Island Discs, that the thing that mattered most to him – ‘more than anything’ – was ‘meeting children’ and ‘changing children’s lives’ in the course of his charity work will be feeling massively let down.

And so am I. There are not many things in life, as Nina Simone sang in Everything Must Change, that you can be sure of. Rain comes from the clouds. 

Sun lights up the sky. Hummingbirds fly.

Up until this weekend, Becks was one of the things in life you could be sure of.

Now it turns out it was all about Brand Beckham after all, and ‘Golden Balls’ has feet of clay.

I never thought football was a beautiful game. I prefer rugby, actually. And now I don’t think Becks is a beautiful man (not on the inside, ‘where it counts’, anyway).

A sad day not just for football, but for the country.

Teach your parents well and all that, but did Dundee schoolgirl Chelsea Cameron really have to school her parents quite so harshly? 

She penned an open letter ‘thanking’ her druggy mum and dad for being so rubbish that she had to make her own way in life – becoming head girl, winning an apprenticeship – without them by her side every step of the way. 

I thought it was one of the angriest pieces of writing I’d ever read. 

If anything made me feel sorry for the parents it was this bitter, pass-ag (passive aggressive) end-of-term report issued by their own daughter. Brutal.

Beyonce has announced that she is expecting twins with possibly the battiest photoshoot ever. She is naked. She breathes underwater. She is Nefertiti. She has three hearts

I posed for naked bump snaps, too - but no one loved them!

Beyonce has announced that she is expecting twins with possibly the battiest photoshoot ever. She is naked. She breathes underwater. She is Nefertiti. She has three hearts. 

The main picture is the most ‘liked’ image on Instagram ever. I had some pictures taken privately when I was moonily, hugely, pregnant with my first child aged 26 (I blame youth and hormones). 

I regret to say I was naked, too. In my case, the photos weren’t liked at all. They were so hideous I put them in a drawer and never looked at them again. 

A dinosaur in a tweed jacket...

Harriet Harman MP launched her door-stopping memoir of feminism, working motherhood and politics, A Woman's Work, last week

Harriet Harman MP, a married mother of three, launched her door-stopping memoir of feminism, working motherhood and politics, A Woman’s Work, last week. 

But it is Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, a married father of almost six, and our foremost tweedy young fogey, to whom we must turn for faster enlightenment as to why there aren’t many more Harpersons in the Commons and in public life. 

Last weekend, Rees-Mogg was inexplicably hailed as a national treasure for saying he has never boiled an egg, changed a nappy, ironed a shirt, Hoovered or unloaded the dishwasher, and still lives with his old nanny. 

‘I don’t cook or wash up,’ he boasted. The Somerset squire explains with terrible clarity why Ms Harman didn’t need to complete the title of her book (...Is Never Done). More MCP (Male Chauvinist Pig) than MP, Mr Rees-Mogg!