In late May and early June, the Middleton family’s business, Party Pieces, collapsed into insolvency, leaving a trail of financial destruction and £2.6 million worth of debt in its wake. What remained of Party Pieces was sold off to James Sinclair under a court-approved deal in which Sinclair did not have to take on any of the Middletons’ debt. Instead, all of those vendors, small businesses and banks will simply never recoup their losses, even though Carole Middleton personally asked for lines of credit, which she was given because she’s the mother of the “future queen.” As it turned out, the Middletons lied for years and they never had the kind of wealth they claimed, and Party Pieces was never as successful as they claimed either. Well, here’s a fascinating update courtesy of the Mail: “Who could have saved the Middletons’ Party Pieces from disaster? A well-placed insider claimed one ‘hard headed’ member of the family would have taken the company into ‘new dimensions’.” While this is a repeat of some passages in a Robert Lacey book (published several years ago), the Mail repackaged it with some pretty interesting details about Carole.

Still reeling from the failure of their Party Pieces mail order business, which collapsed into administration with debts of £2.6 million earlier this year, these are trying times for Michael and Carole Middleton. The creditors were understandably upset. The firm’s landlord was owed more than £57,000, according to official papers while HMRC was owed £600,000. Then the Middletons were targeted by a malicious poster campaign complaining about the collapse. Leaflets and messages appeared on lamp posts and trees around the couple’s home village of Bucklebury in Berkshire, where they have lived for several decades.

Quite what went wrong with Party Pieces, a business most assumed to be in fine fettle, remains unclear, although the effect of the Covid shut down and the sharp inflation that followed have been cited as factors. But the Middletons could perhaps be forgiven for wondering what might have been had circumstances been different – and a little less regal.

Because according to Robert Lacey’s best-selling Battle of Brothers, eldest child Catherine had ‘shrewd eye for profit and a very hard head on her shoulders’ that could have taken the firm into ‘another dimension’. The author writes that all three of the Middleton children, Catherine, Pippa and James, were involved with the company from its kitchen counter days, modelling for pictures in the pamphlets their parents were sending out. Catherine, in particular, seemed to understand how it all worked and what was needed.

‘As Kate grew older, she styled images and helped to develop the business, showing a head for negotiation to match her mother. “Catherine had all the makings of a fantastic trader,” says a business person who has… seen her operate at first hand. ‘”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.”‘

This, as we now know, was not to be.

The book cites a notably tart description of Carole Middleton’s hard-headed trading style, which might make the collapse of her company seem all the more surprising.

‘After a year or so, Mike left his job at British Airways in order to help grow the business,’ writes Lacey. ‘Carole Middleton’s haggling skills became legendary in the direct-mail business. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth most of the time, but she was a ferocious negotiator,” recalls one of her suppliers. “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.”

[From The Daily Mail]

I genuinely think this is incorrect – Kate would have been terrible as the head of a mail-order business. Pippa would have been the more natural fit, although it’s clear (now) that the family business was always the grift, and that’s why Carole never made it a priority to groom one of her kids to take over Party Pieces. The whole purpose of Party Pieces was to provide cover for the family as Carole – like a mother from a Jane Austen novel – threw her daughters into the path of eligible, titled and wealthy men. Portraying Kate as some business-minded person is kind of hilarious too, considering Kate needed her mummy to come and manage her home and her life throughout her 20s and 30s.

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Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.