Romeo Beckham Fined for Using Phone While Driving

Romeo Beckham has been fined after police caught him scrolling on his phone at the wheel of his Porsche 911 Carrera in central London.

The 23-year-old, son of former England captain David Beckham, was pulled over in Westminster last September when an officer spotted him at a red light with both hands on his phone instead of the steering wheel.

A woman sat in the passenger seat was also looking at her phone, with an “unrestrained” dog on her lap, according to court papers.

Pc Luke Short, who stopped the car on Victoria Street just before 11.20am on 16 September, said Beckham was clearly distracted.

“I looked across at the driver. I saw that he ... 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,” his statement read.

At Westminster magistrates’ court last Thursday, Beckham was convicted of being a driver not in a position to have proper control of the vehicle. He was fined £440 and handed three penalty points on his licence.

Magistrate Phillip Jordan also ordered him to pay £130 in costs and a £176 victim surcharge.

The officer chose not to pursue action over the loose dog, opting instead to give “words of advice concerning the insecure load, namely the dog”. Under Rule 57 of the Highway Code, animals in vehicles must be “suitably restrained”, and failure to do so can lead to prosecutions for driving without proper control or careless driving.

Police said Beckham had been offered the chance to take a driver-awareness course and pay a fixed penalty to avoid criminal proceedings, but he did not respond.

The case inevitably echoes his father’s brush with the law. Almost seven years earlier, David Beckham received a six-month driving ban for using his phone at the wheel in slow-moving traffic in the West End in 2019. He admitted the offence and told the court he would miss driving his children – Romeo, then 16, Cruz, then 14, and Harper, then 7 – to school during the ban.

Romeo’s latest incident came just days after he unveiled a new platinum-blond buzzcut at a New York Fashion Week event, a reminder that in the spotlight he now shares with his father, every misstep on and off the road is there to be seen.