Battle of Brothers

bought their first home, a Victorian semi-detached cottage in a village near Bucklebury in Berkshire – whence they moved after three years with their baby daughters Catherine and Pippa to Amman in Jordan, where Michael had been transferred. As an expat mum there was not much for Carole to do in Amman except to stage and attend parties – and this may have helped to inspire what came next. On their return to the UK in 1987, Carole, by now thirty-two, was pregnant with their third child James.

Oooh, she recalled thinking. Bills to pay!

Within months of James’s birth she had created her own trading company, Party Pieces.

It was a simple idea – a one-stop, mail-order destination from which you could order anything you needed for a children’s party. Fancy dress, candles, going-home party bags, balloons, a dinosaur table piece – Carole could source it all. She went to the Spring Fair at Birmingham in 1987, hooked up with some suppliers of paper plates and cups, stuck up a self-designed flyer at Catherine’s playgroup in Bucklebury – and began stuffing colourful party bags on her kitchen table.

There were lots of trips to the local post office in the months that followed, and business was slow to start with. These were pre-Internet days. But then Carole had the idea of advertising with a children’s book club she had subscribed to. She paid to send out ten thousand flyers, then later a hundred thousand – and orders took off. She soon had to transfer from the kitchen table to the garden shed – and then to an office space in nearby Yattendon, where her husband built the packing benches. After a year or so Mike left his job at British Airways in order to help grow the business.

‘We were pretty much the only ones doing this sort of thing when we started,’ Carole told the Telegraph in a 2018 article celebrating thirty years of successful trading. ‘It was really clear almost from the start that this was going to work … Running a business is really very simple: you buy things and sell them for a profit.’

Moderate as always, the Middletons never took major risks. Happy to bide their time, they funded their growth from revenue – and they never allowed commerce to get in the way of their parenting.

‘It was my business,’ recalled Carole, ‘so I could work around the holiday … Mike and I often talked about work in the evenings or on holiday, but we enjoyed it. I never really felt I was a working mother, although I was – and the children didn’t either. They grew up with it.’

Catherine, Pippa and James were involved from the start, often modelling for the increasingly elaborate brochures that their parents were sending out. Catherine/Kate was on the cover of one of the early Party Pieces catalogues, blowing out the candles – an image that will surely be much reproduced when she becomes Queen Catherine. As Kate grew older she styled pictures and helped to develop the business, showing a head for negotiation to match that of her mother.

‘Catherine had all the makings of a fantastic trader,’ says a business person who has dealt with Party Pieces and seen her operate at first hand. ‘Everybody thinks of her now as a mother and future queen – whatever that means. But she’s got a shrewd eye for profit and a very hard head on her shoulders. After university she worked with Party Pieces, and I am quite sure she would have taken the business into a new dimension if she had stayed – very much in her mother’s style.’

Carole Middleton’s haggling skills are legendary in the direct mail business. The family who developed today’s successful Party Pieces empire are not quite the gypsy pedlars depicted in Channel 4’s satirical TV series The Windsors, but the clan are certainly neither noble nor royal. They are a tribe of Internet stallholders at the end of the day – with a keen nose for profit.

‘Carole ran a very strong business and she ran it very well,’ says one of her suppliers. ‘But you did not want to get on the wrong side of her when it came to the pennies. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth most of the time, but she was a ferocious negotiator – and if the haggling wasn’t going her way, then the decibel level rose. I remember her almost screaming down the phone on one occasion when I refused to drop my price on something. People could hear her on the other side of the office – and that was in my office with her voice coming through the phone from Bucklebury, or wherever.’

Taxed on her negotiating style, Carole has ruefully acknowledged that her nickname with some is ‘Hurricane’ – but she undoubtedly got results. Within a few years Party Pieces was turning a handsome profit.

‘No one seems to have picked up on the fact that both my sister and I were millionaires before we turned thirty,’ said her younger brother, and only sibling, Gary, himself the developer of a successful UK IT recruitment enterprise. ‘She with her Party Pieces business, and me with my company.’

In fact, Carole Middleton was already thirty-two when she founded Party Pieces, but she was clearly generating a healthy cash flow by her mid-thirties. Set up as a private partnership, with related family trusts, Party Pieces has never released figures, so it is impossible to say when the family attained the millionaire status that they enjoyed by the time Kate found herself at St Andrews University with Prince William in the early 2000s. Since Kate became royal in 2011, financial analysts have had a field day probing the family company’s value – placing a £40 million estimate on the enterprise for 2020.

In August 2000 Carole is said to have forcefully negotiated the key decision that transformed her daughter’s destiny – and, indeed, the life of all the Middletons. On the seventeenth of the month, Kate’s A-level