How Girl Power Geri went from Ginger Spice to the ultimate ‘surrendered wife’
The sight of the former pop star standing by her partner after humiliating allegations of his ‘coercive behaviour’ towards a female colleague and a sexting scandal has been too much for many fans. But those who know her say Geri has a long history of reinvention and she is just doubling down in her latest ‘role’. Polly Dunbar reports
The timing couldn’t have been more unfortunate. It was the day of the Brits, the awards show for which, back in 1997, Geri Halliwell sewed a Union Jack tea towel onto a black micro-mini dress, creating an image that would remain lodged in the national consciousness forever.
That Geri, the one with her knickers on display and blonde streaks in her flame-red hair, was cheeky, fun, supremely confident: the embodiment of the Girl Power message the Spice Girls promoted everywhere they went. Men were nice, they declared, but women didn’t need them to make their dreams come true. They could achieve that all by themselves – or, better still, in union with their female friends.
Fast forward 27 years, and Geri – now Halliwell-Horner, and aged 51 – has seemingly undergone a transformation so radical she’s barely recognisable as Ginger Spice. In fact, the phrase which more readily springs to mind is “surrendered wife”.
Last Saturday, as a new generation of female pop stars she inspired, including Dua Lipa, got ready to perform at this year’s Brits, Geri was at the Bahrain Grand Prix in a public display of support for her husband, Christian Horner.
The Red Bull F1 boss had been cleared of inappropriate behaviour after allegations of harassment by a female employee, but as Geri was en route to the Gulf state, the reprieve was overshadowed by the leaking of a slew of messages, many of a sexual nature, allegedly sent by Horner and the employee.
Horner strongly denied the “inappropriate behaviour” claim made against him by a female colleague and maintained it is “absolutely business as normal” for the team.
For anyone who once admired Geri’s irrepressible chutzpah, her humiliating appearance in Bahrain was truly dispiriting. Wearing a demure shift dress in her now-customary white, she allowed him to manoeuvre her around with a hand gripping hers tightly, or positioned almost proprietorially at the small of her back.
Previously so outspoken, on this occasion, she appeared quietly accepting of the situation and when Horner’s team won, she planted a dutiful kiss on his lips – just as the couple’s PR advisers must surely have instructed her to do. It was, said more than one online commentator, like watching the withering of Girl Power in real time.
As the innocent party in the unfolding sordid affair, the reaction to her from fans came a place of concern more than anything. Many took to social media to express their sense of sadness at what had become of their feisty heroine, and those who’ve known her a long time struggled to recognise her. “The old Geri had attitude in abundance,” says one close to her inner circle. “It was so sad to watch.”
Since Geri and Horner share a seven-year-old son, Monty, it’s perhaps understandable she would want to fight for her marriage. And, of course, the scandal that Horner finds himself caught up in isn’t of her making.
But, the curious thing is that while she is clearly devastated by the accusations about him, those who know her say they wonder if she truly doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong.
“If feels that she is committed to him and their life together with every fibre of her being,” says the insider. “The other Spice Girls have reached out with supportive messages, but she’s gone dark. If feels like she doesn’t want to hear what the people who really know her would say.”
Could standing by him in this way be a sign she is choosing him over her own legacy? Maybe, but in truth, her friends also understand that this new, surrendered iteration of Geri might just be the latest.
She has a long history of constant reinvention, donning new personas like they’re outfits: from topless model to pop star to boho yoga bunny to “serious” children’s author, and her most recent, chatelaine of a vast country estate. “To keep becoming different people, who are always taking her further from who she started out as, has always required a degree of self-delusion,” says one person who knows her.
That she was a spirited chancer was a crucial part of her charm when she first burst onto the scene, like a cartoon pin-up in platform boots. Just going for it was what fuelled her dream of being a star during her tough childhood on a Watford council estate, with a Spanish cleaner mother and much older father, who hit her with a belt and had explosive fights with her mother before leaving them.
In her autobiography If Only, she described winning a place at Watford Grammar School for Girls: “I was the token poor kid from the rough end of town – a fact I was never allowed to forget.”
Escaping into a fantasy world got her through. From the earliest age, she said, “I suffered from a cuckoo mentality. I imagined that I’d somehow been swapped at birth and placed with the wrong family.”
Wealth and fame, she imagined, would “fill a void inside me”; she pursued it via every route possible, including Spanish game shows and nude modelling. She couldn’t sing or dance, but when she met the other Spice Girls, she was the one pushing hardest for their break. Nobody wanted it more.
She left the group midway through a world tour in 1998 and immediately morphed into someone new, even staging a funeral for her Ginger persona in the video to her first solo single, “Look At Me”.
She went blonde, lost a lot of weight and became obsessed with yoga. Her personal life was turbulent: she suffered bulimia at times and flings with the likes of Robbie Williams fizzled out. In 2006, she gave birth to Bluebell Madonna, her daughter with screenwriter Sacha Gervasi, with whom she had a brief relationship, later admitting that raising her alone was lonely.
To keep becoming different people, who are always taking her further from who she started out as, has always required a degree of self-delusion
When she began dating Christian Horner in 2014, she saw it as her chance for the happy ending which had eluded her, despite her fame. The former racing driver split up from his long-term partner Beverley Allen six months after the birth of their daughter; eight months later, Geri and Horner announced their engagement in The Times. They married in 2015 at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, with Geri wearing a beautiful, understated white Phillipa Lepley dress.
Her “loving relationship” with Horner brought with it a sprawling family estate near Banbury, Oxfordshire, complete with donkeys, horses, goats and boating on the duck pond.
Together, they share a reported £80m fortune, and their home is filled with signs of their devotion to one another, including scatter cushions featuring phrases such as “Mr & Mrs Horner, est 2015.”
At 44, she gave birth to their son, Monty, and since then, she has poured her considerable energies into writing children’s books. With her latest, Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen, “She wants nothing less than JK Rowling levels of success,” according to a source. “She also talks about wanting to study English at Oxford University.”
Her transformation into lady-of-the-manor Geri means dressing all in white, cream and ecru, and eschewing most media barring upmarket magazines such as Country and Town House. She even appears to be known as Geraldine nowadays, judging by the documentary F1: Drive to Survive, which showed her husband to be quite the limelight-hogger.
The door to the past firmly shut, questions about Bluebell’s father are off-limits to journalists and when Mel B seemed to confirm that her and Geri’s relationship had once gone beyond platonic when they were in their pop era, she released a statement saying, huffily, that it had been “hurtful to her family”.
Now, the current scandal, none of it her making, threatens to ruin all the hard work she’s poured into crafting the perfect life, perhaps even exposing it as all surface. Her instinct, say those who know her, is to simply deny it’s happening and just hope it goes away. In 2022, she switched her PR team, leaving Alan Edwards, with whom she’d worked since her Spice Girls days, for Pippa Beng at Premier Management.
“She wouldn’t have gone to Bahrain if her old team had still been looking after her,” claims an insider. “They’d been there from the start so they’d know how at odds fawning over Christian would seem with the Geri the public loved.”
She also joined her husband in Saudi Arabia the following weekend, despite previous reports that she wouldn’t attend as she had “other commitments in the diary”. One source told The Sun: “It’s been tough but Geri has been a rock for Christian through all this and he has spoken out about how much that means to him.
“There was no question of her staying away from Saudi - that would have sent entirely the wrong message.”
Not how different this is from her reactions in the past like the robust way the Spice Girls sacked Simon Fuller as their manager, or when Geri quit the band at the height of their fame, only to go straight to No 1 with her first solo single. That would show the world that the old Geri is still there.
Instead, we are still left with humiliating images of her standing by her man, with all evidence of Girl Power Geri fading like a polaroid in an old scrapbook. Let’s hope a new Geri era isn’t too far away.
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