The Ormond family feud has obvious parallels to the Beckhams saga. And while I know this generation are oversharers, here's why deeply personal fights like these should not be made a spectator sport...

Not since Brooklyn Beckham’s scathing disentanglement from his famous family sent a ripple through social media has a fallout of relatives caused quite such a stir – well, in Ireland, anyway.

We don’t have the Beckhams, but we do have the Ormonds, and Pippa O’Connor and her husband Brian have built an extraordinarily successful business along with a glossy public life that has inevitably made people think they know them.

However, as their multi-million business POCO Beauty recently made its British debut, launching at luxury department store Selfridges, another family story was unfolding online.

Pippa gathered London’s beauty editors and influencers in the spectacular private dining area of Mayfair institution Bacchanalia to celebrate, with POCO products displayed on silver platters and even the ice cubes in the cocktails bearing the brand’s name.  

But it seemed that Brian’s 26-year-old daughter Chloe, from his previous relationship with Natara Byrne, did not share the same sense of occasion.

Her Instagram stories were a stark contrast to Pippa’s glamorous content. Imagery was left to the readers’ imagination, as white lettering against an almost funereal black background painted the tone.

She claimed that for most of her adult life she has felt excluded and removed from the life that her dad shares with her stepmother and their children; feeling like ‘an inconvenience in my own father’s life,’ she alleged, in an extraordinary public airing of something deeply private.

Chloe described how the situation had made her feel, saying that it looked to her like ‘repeatedly excluding a child until she understands that she is not wanted’.

The timing was particularly brutal, and whether it was deliberate or not, the result was inevitable: a glittering business milestone intertwined with painful family conflict.

Of course, what Chloe shared on a public platform was her experience of events, rather than established facts. 

As published in the Mail on Sunday last Sunday, Pippa claimed through lawyers that Chloe’s allegations were ‘untrue’ and capable of ‘encouraging others to form an adverse view of her’.  

(Her solicitors were contacted again ahead of publication of this column and invited to respond to matters raised, but no further response has been received.)

Indeed, while I found Chloe’s words genuinely painful to read, I also felt uncomfortable about the way they were delivered.

But there was one line in Chloe’s posts that really struck me – ‘Family is not a brand aesthetic’ – and it’s impossible not to draw parallels here with Brooklyn Beckham’s shocking Instagram statement earlier this year, in which he claimed that ‘Brand Beckham comes first’, and described a version of his famous family that was very different from the united one presented to the public.

Both situations raise a peculiarly modern dilemma.

If family life has become part of a public image, does that make it fair game when somebody says the reality is different? I’m not sure it does.

Because once you tell more than 100,000 followers about a private family dispute, you are no longer simply asking your family to listen.

You have invited strangers into something that is complex and nuanced, a dynamic which includes young children and huge emotional heft.

And strangers do what strangers on social media do: pick sides. 

There’s been commentary on Pippa, with people all too ready to dust off the wicked stepmother trope and decide the beautiful, successful woman at the centre of an aspirational lifestyle must secretly be Cinderella’s nemesis.

That’s neither fair nor something Chloe can really control once the allegations are public.

Likewise, a father’s relationship with his eldest daughter is now being dissected by people who have never met either of them. Therein lies the danger of taking family conflict online.

Yet I can’t just dismiss Chloe as being reactive and accuse her of airing dirty laundry either, because clearly she feels deep hurt at what she has shared.

In another statement, Chloe insisted she hadn’t spoken publicly for attention or sympathy, but because she felt she had tried to communicate privately and wasn’t being heard.

If that is how she genuinely feels, I can understand the desperation behind her posts – and let’s face it, hers is a generation of oversharers who frequently cry on social media.

Families are messy. As a separated mother who co-parents two daughters, I know this only too well. 

Adding new partners and half-siblings and blending families of course brings more complexity.

As Chloe shared messages from loved ones celebrating her 26th birthday this week, the one greeting she possibly wanted most of all she claims was absent.

A simple acknowledgment of pain can actually be the most healing thing – when people are desperate to be heard, there is usually still something they want to save.

Ultimately though, I hope the next chapter of this story happens somewhere none of us can see it – because family may not be a brand aesthetic, but nor should it be a spectator sport.