LIZ JONES: Don't condemn humiliated Geri for playing the Stepford Wife... this is why she hasn't lost her girl power

It started with a kiss, but has it just ended with a kiss?

On Saturday I watched – along with a near-hysterical female WhatsApp group – as Geri Halliwell arrived at the Formula 1 circuit in Bahrain to support her beleaguered husband, Christian Horner, the Red Bull team’s principal.

Cue flurry of outraged messages. ‘No, don’t hold his hand!’

‘She looks as though she’s been crying!’

‘Love the vintage Gucci dress, the Hermes bag!’

And then, as Horner, 50, placed a hand firmly on the small of his allegedly wronged 51-year-old wife’s back, guiding her into the hospitality section, another WhatsApp pings: ‘He’s no gentleman!’

But the final straw came when he leaned in to plant a great big smackeroo (‘Ew! Grey stubble!’), and we all wailed, ‘Noooooo! Geri, sock him one!’

She then turned knowingly to the camera, with a look that either said, ‘I’m doing what my crisis management team told me to do’ or ‘Yup, I’m now a Stepford Wife. Girl Power be damned!’

Christian Horner and Geri Halliwell hold hands in a public display of unity at the Bahrain Grand Prix on Saturday

For us, the final straw came when he leaned in to plant a great big smackeroo (‘Ew! Grey stubble!’), and we all wailed, ‘Noooooo! Geri, sock him one!’

Not one of us on the WhatsApp group had ever watched or remotely understood F1 before, but we were now glued to the screen, suddenly experts. The scene in the paddock is seductive, glamorous: an easy environment in which a head can be turned, no matter what the sport’s code of conduct dictates.

Horner is, after all, an adrenaline junkie, graduating from go-karts as a boy, to Formula 3000 before realising that he didn’t have what it takes to drive F1 and moving into managing his own team: ‘It was always about pushing boundaries… taking risks.’ Hmmm.

And this testosterone-fuelled 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, doesn’t it?

Someone’s husband in our WhatsApp group intervened, saying that ‘the drivers need to concentrate, they deal 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, irreverent spirit – who else would don a Union Jack tea towel at the Brits? – and struggles with her weight over the years have mirrored our own.

We thought she had finally found her happy ending, having married Horner in 2015, what with his estimated £8million-a-year salary and all. She had at last escaped serial singledom – a fling 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, a property 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 learned last month that her husband was accused of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ by a female colleague – we all wailed ‘Nooooooo!’ Then last week he was cleared after a Red Bull inquiry and we cheered – only for that flurry of ‘flirty’ messages (reportedly sent by him and many of them allegedly a lot more than flirty) to be leaked while Geri was on a private jet to join him in Bahrain for the first F1 race of the season. My God, I bet the fasten seatbelts sign was switched on smartish.

On Saturday, as rumours about the contents of the messages circulated, we enjoyed eviscerating him, as all feminists should:

‘Posh t***, why is he wearing a boiler suit? He must wish he were Steve McQueen.’

And, ‘What a weaselly, smug face’.

Strangely, though, much of the media has had little sympathy for Geri. Which is out of line, as this scandal is something she really, really does not want or deserve.

I once came across emails between my husband and his secret lover and I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. The opening of each tiny envelope was like a bomb going off in my gut.

The wrenching pain, the disbelief, the shame. The realisation that everything you had built together was a mirage.

Geri, we’re told, had ‘the meltdown to end all meltdowns’ when she read the texts. Just to show up on Saturday in front of a global audience took immense courage.

But then again, they have a seven-year-old son together. A family. Not something to throw away lightly.

Last time Geri left a family, it was the one with the other three Spice Girls, back in 1998.

In the documentary made about their split, the most enduring image is of Geri sitting on the stairs of her mansion, looking afraid and alone, apart from the presence of Harry, her shih tzu.

She looked so small, so unsure of what would happen next. And now? I for one want to give her a great big hug.

Yet the way Geri, a woman in pain, is being treated beggars belief.

Horner left his wife for Geri when his child was six months old, her critics chide.

Um, HE was the one already in a relationship! 

‘She is a has-been,’ wrote one female commentator. Geri’s had several No1 singles! She’s one of the most successful singer/songwriters we’ve produced.

Marriages crumble, people fall out of love. 

Geri’s reputation will be ‘tainted’ if she stands by him, say some. But, so often, women are put between a rock and a hard place when it comes to their men behaving badly.

She and Horner aren’t just dating; they have a life together. It must have been a hard, hard decision for Geri to make, to turn up supporting him at the weekend, and the scandal is still fresh. But it’s always the women who get it in the neck. 

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, has become completely at ease mixing with real royals.

Famously, she once pinched then prince Charles on the bum. Now she mixes in his circles with ease and almost as an equal.

Pulling herself up by her fingernails, the former shop assistant in the Watford branch of Next 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 wellies.

Geri is not a stay-at-home trophy wife, though she has enough money of her own to never work again.

As Michelle Stephenson, a brief and early band member known as 'the sixth Spice Girl', recalled of Geri when they were starting out: ‘She was the most driven, first up for crack-of-dawn jogs. While the others ate pizza, Geri ate beansprouts.’

Yet, despite the riches and fame, the Geri I knew was wracked with self-doubt.

Now this latest debacle and possible betrayal (nothing has been proven – Christian Horner was cleared of misconduct by his bosses and he denies everything – will make her question herself).

She then turned knowingly to the camera, with a look that either said, ‘I’m doing what my crisis management team told me to do’ 

Geri has a son (now seven) with Christian Horner, a daughters Bluebell (left) and Olivia from a previous relationship. Pictured: The family together at the Bahrain F1 Grand Prix in 2017

It always seems to have this effect on women.

I first met Geri on a cover shoot in Los Angeles in 2001. She was in the midst of her super Ashtanga yoga-fied period (remember the front page photo of her performing a head stand on the beach? She doesn’t even relax on holiday!).

She suffered from bulimia for many years and became addicted to exercise.

Nearly a decade later, in 2010, I went to her house in Highgate, north London. It was all Astroturf and hard surfaces, though Geri had softened.

Bluebell, then nearly five, was playing in the next room. Her boyfriend at this time was the property heir, Henry.

Geri’s a fantastic mum. Talking about Bluebell, she told me she wants ‘to instil good values: for her to always be polite, have self-discipline’.

She seemed more at ease with her body, and with ageing.

Promoting her own range of swimwear for Next, she 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 is so much more in the world to be thinking about than the way I look. I just wanted to be free of it…Being forgiving about my own imperfections, allowing messiness.’

Geri’s father died when she was 21, just when they had mended their relationship after her parents’ divorce.

The breakdown of that relationship, she told me, is what drove her quest for security, to be looked after.

Her older brother, Max, died suddenly at the age of 54 in 2021, meaning she has clung to Horner like a life raft.

‘It was a shocking realisation that people can love you and then leave you,’ she said. ‘[Because] my parents were divorced, I felt very distrusting of relationships and depending on anybody so I tried to become very self-dependent, which is a bit lonely.

‘So, I was never present or available for relationships, not even one with myself. I was just consistently working all the time. I’m always looking for a daddy.’

She likes a man to be a man.

‘But for me the most important thing is integrity, loyalty and spirit, the kindness of the person. The character of the man. Completely fundamental.’

We can only hope her faith in Horner is not misplaced.

I understand, now, why she allowed her husband to plant that kiss for all the world to see.

Geri has no one left to lean on if yet another man has let her down.