Romeo Beckham had a run-in with the police after he was caught scrolling on his phone at the wheel of his Porsche 911, with a dog loose in the car. The 23-year-old model was pulled over in Westminster last September after a police officer spotted him with both hands on his phone instead of the steering wheel while at a red light.
A woman was in the passenger seat also looking at her phone and with an “unrestrained” dog in her lap, court papers reveal. In a statement, the officer said Beckham was “distracted” and did not have proper control of the supercar.
At Westminster Magistrates’ Court last Thursday, Beckham was convicted of being a driver not in a position to have proper control, and issued with a £440 fine with three penalty points for his licence. He was also ordered by magistrate Phillip Jordan to pay £130 in costs and a £176 victim surcharge.
The court case comes almost exactly seven years since his father, Sir David Beckham, was banned from driving for six months for using his mobile phone at the wheel. In that 2019 case, the former footballer admitted being on his phone in slow moving traffic in the West End, and told a court he would miss driving his children – Romeo, then 16, Cruz, then 14, and Harper, then seven – to school while serving the ban.
Romeo Beckham, the second son of David and Victoria Beckham, was caught out by Metropolitan Police Pc Luke Short on September 16 last year, while waiting at a red traffic light in Victoria Street, Westminster, just before 11.20am. The officer said he passed the Porsche 911 Carrera and assessed the driver as being “distracted” due to the scene inside.
“As I passed the vehicle on its nearside, I looked down to my right and noted that there was an unrestrained dog sitting on the female passenger’s lap,” he wrote in his statement. “The female had her head down and was holding a mobile phone. I looked across at the driver. I saw that he too had his head tilted down and appeared to be looking down at a mobile phone he was holding low in his lap, near the base of the steering wheel. I could see that he was scrolling on the device with his thumbs.”
The officer pulled Beckham over and confronted him, and said he decided to use his discretion to offer the driver “words of advice concerning the insecure load, namely the dog”. Rule 57 of the Highway Code sets out that dogs must be “suitably restrained” in a vehicle, and the driver can be prosecuted for driving without proper control or careless driving if it is assessed the animal is causing a distraction or affecting the quality of the driving.
Beckham’s brush with the law came days after he had debuted a new platinum blonde buzzcut at a New York Fashion Week event. Two days after the incident, Beckham made his runway debut at London Fashion Week at the H&M show.
Police say he was given the chance to pay a fine and go on a driver awareness course to avoid criminal proceedings over using his phone in the car, but he did not respond to the offer. Beckham was then prosecuted through the single justice procedure, which handles driving offences in private hearings. The court said Beckham did not enter a plea to the charge when written to at his luxury south-west London apartment, and he was convicted on the basis of the police evidence on Thursday last week.
