Geri Horner has arranged to meet me in the restaurant at the National Gallery in London but she is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if this is something to do with a television show that came out two days earlier.
In February last year it emerged that her husband, Christian Horner, the well-remunerated and highly successful head of the Red Bull Formula 1 team, had been accused of inappropriate behaviour towards a female Red Bull employee. The employee was reportedly subsequently suspended on full pay.
However, it has been more than a year since Horner was cleared of any wrongdoing by an internal Red Bull investigation conducted by an independent barrister. An appeal filed by the employee against that decision, concluded in August 2024, was rejected. And then the noise died down.
But earlier this month came the seventh series of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the testosterone-fuelled Netflix show that shadows the racing season. Its first episode is an unsparing retelling of the scandal, including the moment screenshots of alleged WhatsApp messages between Horner and the female employee were anonymously dropped to senior F1 staff members and the press the day after the result of Red Bull’s investigation was announced. Most of the details — when and how many were said to have been sent and what they contained — are not confirmed.
Geri is not spared the limelight. In the first scene, captioned End of Last Season, we see her and Horner climbing into a black Range Rover on their sprawling estate in Oxfordshire. They chat about the 2023 F1 season as they drive down a country lane. Horner starts enumerating all the team’s wins and turns to his wife and says: “You know what competition’s like. Ruthless.” She looks at him with a grin. “Ruthless,” she says. Then adds: “The truth is you never know what life’s going to bring.”
Cut to March 2024 and the Bahrain Grand Prix. Geri, now post-message scandal, is shown walking through the trackside paddock holding hands with Horner as cameras flash around them. She smiles with a rictus awkwardness but walks on, ignoring the noise around her. Towards the end, after Red Bull wins the race, we see her again congratulating first the team, then her husband. He hugs her and then kisses her on the lips and mouths: “You OK?” She nods.
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It’s understandable in the week that the series hit our screens why Geri might want to lie low for a while. Fearing the worst, I text her publicist. “Meet us in the Annenberg Court,” she replies. “Geri is going to take you to see her favourite painting.”
Soon enough, Geri is swishing past me, accompanied by a member of the museum’s staff. Her mid-length strawberry-blonde hair is blow-dried, her face barely made up and she’s dressed in her now regular uniform: white tailored trousers, a white poloneck and a white coat. Why all white? “I have been wearing it since I was a toddler! It keeps things simple.” The 52-year-old looks more like a politician than a former pop powerhouse.
She greets me like an overexcited teen. “I love your cheekbones,” she says in her squeaky Watford twang, the first salvo in what feels like a charm offensive.
Spending time in Geri’s company is like being in the eye of a hurricane. She talks incessantly, hoots with laughter — and is an expert at changing the subject.
She grabs a book off a nearby gift shop shelf and heads towards the cash desk. “This is for you,” she says, handing me a carrier bag that contains The National Gallery Companion Guide (£22).
A small crowd of gallery-goers starts to swirl around us. Resistance is futile as she gallops towards a painting from 1833, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by the French artist Paul Delaroche, which was not a stop I was expecting during an interview with Ginger Spice. With the blindfolded 17-year-old queen kneeling behind her, Geri opens the guidebook and starts reading. The blurb ends with an extract from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, published in 1563: “‘Let this worthy lady pass for a saint: and let all great ladies which bear her name imitate her virtues’,” she reads. “It’s my absolute favourite painting,” she concludes.
There is a point to the show and tell, which is to make it plain that instead of talking about her husband and what he gets up to on his phone she would of course much rather be talking about her new novel for teenagers, Rosie Frost: Ice on Fire — in which Lady Jane Grey makes an appearance.
I eventually coax her to the gallery’s restaurant. Geri points to a table, not one off to the side but smack bang in the middle. She settles down, orders a coffee and starts talking, her expressive hands moving like a windmill. I clock her surprisingly small diamond engagement ring.
Was she aware that everyone was staring at her in the museum? “I don’t think about it, I don’t see it,” she says. “I learnt from George Michael how to deal with all that.” The name-dropping will be a feature of our time together. “He was an angel to me. He protected me from the minute we met. He’d lost his mother, I’d lost my father.” Her dad, Laurence, died in 1993, when Geri was 21. “And he was someone I could talk to openly about grief. We lived together twice and I’d play my music to him and he told me when I could do better. I tried flirting with him once and it didn’t work, and I was like, ‘What?’ ” She laughs, rolling her grey-blue eyes.
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I try to soften her up with an easy one: does she have a writing routine? “I write for three hours a day. Writing is a discipline.” Another name-drop: “Dawn French taught me that. I leave my phone out of the room. Sometimes I’ll wake up at 2am with an idea. Christian’s snoring and I’ll get out of bed and write.” (So he’s not in the spare room.) Does she give them to him to read? “He was reading Ice on Fire on the plane to Australia. He loves them.”
Seeing as she brought him up: how did she meet Horner? “There’s a picture of Christian and me on a racetrack many years before we started dating,” she says. “I was there because of Bernie Ecclestone [the former F1 boss], he invited me.” She checks herself and makes a conversational hairpin turn. “The most famous producer in Hollywood has bought the rights to Rosie Frost.” Back to the books. She mouths the name. I’m sworn to secrecy for a few more weeks, but she’s not exaggerating.
Later, on a follow-up Zoom call, I have more luck on the subject of Horner, whom she married in 2015. She is sitting at a table in her London home in a crewneck jumper (white). A painting of an elephant hangs behind her. “I love animals,” she says as she swings her laptop around to show me a painting of a lioness. She says she can’t talk about the specifics of what went on in Red Bull’s pitlane but she grabs a piece of paper. “I’ve made some notes,” she says. “So these are the fun things we do — we walk the dogs together, we like walking. I bought him a goldendoodle for his birthday. I hid the puppy in a phone box and handed it to him. We’re very much old-school and family focused. He loves doing barbecues — it’s a real man thing. He’s very tidy. I might leave things around, which makes him a bit cross.”
The portrait of prosaic domestic bliss continues. “We’ll find a TV series that we lock into. I’ll try my best not to watch it when he goes away. I waited for him before finishing Severance. We like playing games too. The other day, in the kitchen, we were playing 20 questions — you’ve got to guess what the object is. We’re quite silly.”
What about romantic dinners? “We prefer eating in — our daughter loves cooking.” That’s Bluebell, her 18-year-old daughter from her short-lived relationship with Sacha Gervasi, a journalist turned screenwriter and director. “The other two will clear the table for financial reward.” That’s their son, Monty, eight, and Horner’s daughter, Olivia, eleven, from his previous relationship with Beverley Allen, a former pub landlady.
Recent media reports speculated that Geri has recently legally changed her surname from Horner to Halliwell-Horner, interpreted as a sign that the marriage, despite appearances, may be on the rocks. “That’s a load of crap,” she says, holding up one of her books. “It’s my writing name. I haven’t legally changed anything — Horner is the name on my passport.”
“You know Bluebell is studying English literature,” she says of her eldest child, a first-year university student. “She’s brilliant at writing. I run things past her.” Does she get that from her writer dad? “Her biological father, yes. Christian formally adopted her. It’s public knowledge.” If it is, it’s certainly not on the internet.
Geri was born in Watford to Laurence, a car dealer, and her mother, Ana Maria Hidalgo, who was born in Huesca, Spain, and worked as a cleaner. Geri says she was bullied at school for being working class. (She went to Watford Grammar School for Girls, followed by Camden School for Girls.) She has been in the public consciousness since 1996, when she exploded onto our screens singing Wannabe. The extremely mini Union Jack dress she wore at the 1997 Brit awards broke the internet before most people had the internet. The Spice Girls went on to become the bestselling female band in history and had nine No 1 singles in the UK. “We love each other. I love them, I care about them, we want the best for each other,” she says. “We shared something so monumental. We’ve always believed in each other, had trust in each other, which is beautiful.”
But, girl power cemented in the national psyche, Geri abruptly left the group in 1998. The official announcement cited differences between band members; the report she was suffering from depression has made it to her Wikipedia page. While she has publicly commented on having an eating disorder (“I used to eat my feelings,” she tells me), she denies she ever had depression. “That’s not true. I never said that.” Her solo career peaked with a run of four UK No 1s between 1999 and 2001 (Mi Chico Latino, Lift Me Up, Bag It Up and It’s Raining Men).
Rumours endure that she and Melanie Brown, Scary Spice, do not see eye to eye, to put it politely. Do the five women have a group chat? “Yes, we do.” What’s it called? “I’m not going to say.” I mention the viral video of four of them (minus Mel B) dancing together at the celebration for Geri’s 50th in November 2022. Tight-lipped silence.
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The last time all five performed together was at the London Olympics closing ceremony in 2012. Surely it’s time? “My hope is we come back together as a collective. It’s more respectful to come as one.” As in all five? I can’t quite tell if she’s just eager to please or giving me the exclusive. “There will be something. We’ll come as one,” she says.
She picks up her phone and waves it at me. “I’m smiling because I got a text from Mel C just this morning. She’s doing her thing out in Australia.” Three days after we speak, Mel C — Melanie Chisholm, Sporty Spice — is photographed at the first grand prix of the new season, in Australia. She has her arm round Christian Horner.
The children’s author turn, as befalls many stars, came for Geri in May 2008, when she published the first of six Ugenia Lavender children’s novels. She was the bestselling female celebrity author that year. Both her Rosie Frost books are more than 450 pages long. I read them. I imagine teen girls gobbling them up, but she can write. She admits she had a bit of help, thanks to a chance encounter at Buckingham Palace in 2020. She is an ambassador to the Royal Commonwealth Society, which champions literacy and of which the Queen is vice-patron. Geri was standing in an anteroom about to meet her when she decided to introduce herself to the man standing next to her. “My name is William Boyd,” he replied. She had just read his novel Any Human Heart and pounced.
A few days later she sent him a draft of Rosie Frost & the Falcon Queen, the first in the series, and he agreed to be her mentor. “It was like giving Humpty Dumpty to Mozart or Beethoven,” she says. “I knew my characters were right, I believed in them, but I didn’t have the tools or the skills to go on. I was stuck. William gave me some life-changing advice because I’d written the book in the first person and the present tense. He said, ‘You have to rewrite the whole thing in the past tense and the third person.’ ”
For some technical advice on Ice on Fire, she turned to — another name-drop — the physicist Brian Cox. “We’ve become friends,” she says. “He taught me about time travel and the event horizon.” She looks around the gallery restaurant, suddenly lost in thought. “You know, writing is a bit like showing your underwear.”
So who is her hero? Lady Jane Grey? Delaroche? George Michael? For our shoot in Highgate Wood the following week she brings along a copy of War and Peace. Is Leo Tolstoy in the mix? Her answer is very Geri, unexpected and unconnected to what has come before: Sylvester Stallone. “You know when he wrote the screenplay for Rocky, he was living in his car. The movie studio told him they’d make the movie but not with him in it. He replied, ‘It’s only happening if I’m in it.’ He’s my absolute hero.” Geri Horner, Spice Girl, novelist, loyal F1 wife, rolling with the punches once again.
Rosie Frost: Ice on Fire by Geri Halliwell-Horner (Scholastic £7.99 pp464) is published on April 10. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
