To think there is nothing wrong with Carole Middleton's background

[arabesque]

There was a pretty sneery article in the Sunday Times last Sunday by Camilla Long, which seemed to be very critical of the fact that Carole Middleton's parents and grandparents were working class people who made their living in shops and factories. There was also some comment on the lines of 'oh yeah, well William might find TV suppers and family games a novelty now but I'm sure he'll soon get sick of it'.
AIBU to think 'fair play' to her for building up a business from nothing and giving her kids advantages she and her parents could never have dreamed of? From what I can see Kate has a far more stable and supportive family than Princess Di ever had (bitter divorce, very public custody dispute, no decent advice when she was just 19 years old and about to make an enormous mistake with her life etc.) Yet a lot of people seem to think there's something preferable about a fragmented and dysfunctional family because they're upper class; while a middle/working class background with a strong work ethic is just not suitable for the future queen.

[hollyisalovelyname]

Camilla Long was particularly sneery about how Carole Middleton looked at the Royal wedding. I thought her outfit was absolutely gorgeous. A beautiful colour that suited her.

[Mimishimi]

What is Ms Long's family background anyway? Is she from the landed gentry herself? In life, I've often found the snottiest people have a coal miner or some such as a relatively recent ancestor themselves ... The real aristos couldn't give a toss..

[bikinihedgetrimmers]

Article:

Last summer, I went to a friend’s wedding in Henley, and arrived early to find four Middletons — James, Kate, Pippa and Carole — sitting in the empty church, like beetles wrapped in silk. The first thing I thought was, they seem so excited. And the next thing I thought was, they’re really excited. Not so much excited as fizzing with hysteria, giggling and gasping and whispering. Going to a friend’s wedding was not only the highlight of their lives, but an object of frothing fetish, like a home-team match at home, just what you do if you are a Middleton and it’s a Saturday.

I found myself fantasising about how many weddings they might attend, perhaps 20 a year, two in winter, 18 in the summer, how they must have a whole wing devoted to wedding clothes back at their manor in Bucklebury, ranks of fascinators and bags, pumps, jackets, skirts and tights, tights, tights. Just like the bat cave, but with chiffon. Were the clothes clamped onto their bodies? Do they store them upright, like armour? Do they incinerate them afterwards?

On the 60th anniversary of the coronation, the monarchy is set to become more middle class than ever
Their world is weddings; their business is weddings; they are the best in the world at weddings, as demonstrated two years ago when Kate married Prince William. Now that they are expecting a child, there is no reason to think that the next 60 years won’t be one big wedding, or at least a savagely well-planned four-year-old’s birthday party, an endless, trivial Narnia, complete with balloons and kazoos.

The person responsible for all this will be Kate’s mother, Carole, a former air hostess and one-woman social revolution, who has gone from council flat to castle in mere decades. She is a self-made millionaire who started out as a shop girl; a sharp wit and shrewd manipulator, who has made an estimated £30m out of party hats and piñatas.

She is a whippety, attractive woman with dense, groomed features; her skin suggests tanning, her eyebrows suggest tattooing. She is the silken overlord of the Middleton look, a terminator wasp who rigidly choreographs all life events, right down to the moment they exited the Goring hotel in knife-sharp blazers, pumps and chinos the day after the wedding: the four most art-directed seconds in history, not counting the death of Nelson.

If you want to know what the monarchy will look like over the next 60 years, it will look like this: Ralph Lauren done by Topshop. On the 60th anniversary of the coronation, the monarchy is set to become more middle class than ever. The baby will be more commoner than king, and might even be born in Reading, the Norwich of the south. There are rumours that Kate will go back to her parents’ £4.85m manor house near Bucklebury just after the birth; Middleton ground zero has been kitted out with a kitchen and a “nursery-style room” (tabloid for “a nursery”).

The question is, what will William ultimately make of the Middleton putsch? Up until now he has been charmed by his surrogate family, keeping his own place on the sofa and sometimes calling Carole’s husband, Mike, “Dad”. They are the family he never had, but there may come a point where he feels swamped by party games and TV suppers. He could go from slave to furious hostage. “That family is all about women,” a friend warns. “James and Mike could go for a tennis match and no one will notice.” The women wear each other’s clothes, swap bags, sit gossiping and inhaling magazines. Carole and Pippa are Kate’s “rescue response unit”; Carole’s most important task now is making sure William doesn’t feel left out, while looking after Kate and her child. She will be at the centre of the baby’s life, the only blood grandmother and the only person to fill the chasm left by Diana.

And yet, who is she? Who is Carole with an e? What will she do? What will she coo into the Bugaboo that may or may not be blue (royals must not officially commit to colours)? Is she a mastermind in a mid-height heel, or actually quite “cosy”? Is she the breeder of the world’s highest-performing King Charles spaniels — Pippa, James and Kate — or the social-climbing Sherpa Tenzing of Berkshire, all teeth and Gucci crampons?

No one seems to be able to describe the flinty 58-year-old in any depth. According to the Duchess’s biographer, Claudia Joseph, she is “natural” and “unassuming”. According to friends, she is “confident”, “driven” and “pushy”. Camilla famously said she was “very lively”, which is posh for “grew up in a council flat” and “talks about diets”. It’s true that Carole talks about diets — one of her only quotes is something along the lines of “go on, have a sausage”, during an interview with Pippa, in which she confessed to being a fan of the Dukan diet, a regime that only lets you eat prawns. She is a typical granorexic; she is “spirited” and “sexy” — Prince Philip loves her — but also famished and “frosty”, micro-managing plastic cups on photoshoots (pink or blue? See above about colours). Mothers still tell horror stories about perfect Middleton nametapes and immaculate sports kits.

[bikinihedgetrimmers]

Long has said any furious comments about the piece have made her 'LOL'. 'LOL. Literally weeping with laughter at furious comments.'

So is it link bait ala Daily Fail? How fucking sad that to be a female columnist you have to be a caricature - either be a bitch or mad or both. Camilla will grow up one day, look back and be ashamed of how she played up to her role.

I'm surprised the article isn't even more bitchy.

[Mimishimi]

Well, actually having read the whole article now (don't have a subscription as we don't live in the UK), I quite enjoyed it . I didn't get the feeling of class snottiness towards Carole (with an e - that made me chuckle), just that she is fair game to be made a little fun of - as are we all. Not quite sure what the point of it was though...

[bikinihedgetrimmers]

Mimi - it's pretty tame isn't it?

It's crap and pointless.

[HollaAtMeBaby]

That isn't the whole article, there were more pages but I can't c&p as on phone.

I don't think it's THAT bad - sneery and bitchy at times but it acknowledges CM'S strengths too. tbh Im surprised by the venom directed towards the writer! Journalists mainly write what their editors tell them to, and make a living from doing that - i wonder what justification some of the posters on this thread have for their snobby and bitchy posts.

[Southeastdweller]

She gets worse.

Just looked at her Twitter and she says in reply to someone:

@camillalong: @SallyFin I think the Middletons are a really empty set of role models for young women. That's why I write about them

Because what you do, Cammy, is so much better - your overwritten, Polly Filla/Glenda Slagg crap?

[Southeastdweller]

bikini posted page 1. Here's page 2:

FIVE YEARS AGO Carole claimed she felt ?vulnerable?. ?I?m not a celebrity and don?t want to be one,? she told a diarist at the Hennessy Gold Cup. ?I don?t want a PR person and wouldn?t want to have to pay to employ one. I haven?t asked for any of this.? But the truth is that she is now as unassailable as Simon Cowell circa 2008. She is focused, disciplined, driven; a triumph of hairspray over meteorology. She has serious monster-in-law potential: six days before the wedding, she had a catfight with the designer Lindka Cierach over problems with her outfit.

?She was very grand about the whole thing,? sniffed a source. ?It was all done very abruptly, and, frankly, rudely. Mrs Middleton can be very charming, but she can also turn in a flash.? Cierach was cast from heaven ? Carole wore Catherine Walker instead, a sliver of duck-egg blue that was as nice as it was forgettable.

The power of the Middleton look is in this nothingness. It is tasteful, bland and dull, an inoffensive mulligatawny of tweed, cream and rusk. It?s almost as if party-planner Carole has carried out a health-and-safety assessment on all options, and chosen the looks based on minimum risk. There are no creases or folds, no sweat patches, loose buttons or wild hemlines; the Middletons don?t do fashion, so much as shopping. All Kate needs to do is make sure her hair stays straight. The only time this has not happened was in the South Seas last summer, when the humidity made her blow-dry go frizzy.

This hardly mattered, as nobody can ever remember anything Kate has ever worn. I can?t even remember what she was wearing at the wedding, sitting two rows behind her. Paparazzi shots tell me she was wearing a blue-grey shift dress and white hat, that Pippa wore caramel and that Carole had a cream suit and a wide-brimmed hat; I can only recall a characterless fuzz, which is perfect for Kate, the first entirely visual royal. The only thing she ever has to do is pick the right shoes. She may never have to express an opinion again.

Carole?s younger brother, Gary Goldsmith, boasted that he?d called Prince William a ?f**?
The odd thing is that her mother is surely more exciting than this. Carole?s younger brother, Gary Goldsmith, is a millionaire who has been married four times. In 2008 he was filmed by the News of the World taking cocaine and promising prostitutes and drugs at his house in Ibiza, La Maison de Bang Bang. He boasted that he?d called Prince William a ?f**? and that he had secured a ?speaking role? at the wedding. He claimed he would be given a title, the Duke of Slough, and that he was the first person Camilla wanted to meet at the wedding. He is now trying to become a media personality, giving interviews and tweeting as @garygoldsmith65.

Like all the Middletons, he is permanently on a diet, or as he puts it, ?starvation?. Sometimes he is sick after tennis lessons. He spends the rest of his time drinking cocktails, shopping at Selfridges, buying sunglasses, having mani-pedis, losing his sunglasses because he is ?starving? and confused, moaning about his baldness and obesity, needily tweeting Jeremy Clarkson and posting pictures of his chihuahua, and Rolls-Royces. He finds Pizza Hut difficult, because he doesn?t ?have a clue how to order nor eat?. This is at odds with his upbringing: ?Apparently you can take Hounslow out of the man,? he moans. Alongside a picture of Windsor castle (?SL14 at its finest ? still Slough though?), he has posted the street where he and Carole grew up in Southall, a crummy flight-path No Man?s Land.

Their parents were Ron, a lorry driver, and Dorothy, an assistant at Dorothy Perkins. Dorothy Harrison was born in Sunderland, where she came from a long line of consumptives and cannon fodder. Her mother was a fallen woman and her father was a coal miner ? until they moved to the outskirts of London in search of work. In Kate: The Making of a Princess, Claudia Joseph reports that Dorothy was ?a bit of a snob? and was nicknamed ?Lady Dorothy? by the family. The Goldsmiths, by contrast, were rough, tough and possibly criminal; at least one ended up in jail. Ron?s father, Charlie, a car mechanic, died when he was six; his mother, Edith, was left with six children. She was tiny, hot-tempered and ?domineering?; she smoked 20 Woodbines a day. She sent her daughters to the pub in the evenings for booze and fags. The similarities with the Queen Mother end there, however ? Edith worked on the production line at a mincemeat factory; after the war, she moved on to jam. According to her daughter, Alice, she would get so angry that she would throw her shoes and ?take the odd swipe?. ?She liked a drink and smoked, but who could blame her with what she had to put up with?? she said. ?In those days, everyone was hard up.?

Southall was dusty and dumpy, with flour factories and brick yards. Gary was 10 years younger than Carole; she was pretty and quiet, a ?country girl? who didn?t wear make-up, a kind of cut-price Felicity Kendal, until she discovered foundation and frills. Her first job was as a shop assistant in C&A. She left school at 16 and got a job as an air hostess with BOAC. She married Mike Middleton, a flight dispatcher, and moved into a flat in Slough. She started making party bags on her kitchen table when she was pregnant with Kate in 1981.

[Southeastdweller]

Third and last page:

The Middletons became a Norman Tebbit fantasy, working tirelessly to build their business and buy their children Laura Ashley clothes. They sent them to an expensive toff-barn boarding school, Marlborough. When they bought their flat in Chelsea, they bought it with cash. According to Gary, Margaret Thatcher was ?revolutionary? and ?GREAT?. Carole is not a Thatcherite herself exactly ? she is something more subtle, more potent. She is a Berkshire woman, the love child of Worcester woman and Essex man, a post-suburban battle-axe drenched in Boden and Jigsaw.

She combines the views and grooming habits of someone from Chigwell and the nuclear home-making skills of Mary Berry. Nothing focuses the mind better than living on the wrong three exits of the M4. Her equivalent in Gloucestershire used to be the Beaufort merc, a sexy social climber who hung around Beaufort polo club. The Beaufort merc was the cousin of the Mayfair merc, a brittle babe who prowled Mayfair ?looking for drunken toffs to marry?, says one royal junkie. ?Merc is short for mercenary. Camilla Parker Bowles was a Beaufort merc.? Carole is a Berkshire merc, but otherwise they are very different.

Their glamorous McPosh lifestyle reached its apotheosis in 2010, when Carole and Mike were invited to Balmoral
Just before the wedding, Camilla invited the Middletons to the Berkeley for a power hat-off over lunch. She choffed red wine as Carole talked about ?chipolatas? and everyone tried to forget that Camilla had called the Middletons ?Meet the Fockers? in reference to the film where Robert De Niro and Barbra Streisand play unusual in-laws. Not for Camilla any discussion of nappies or leaky boobs; that will be left to Carole and her circle, which includes Belle Robinson, co-founder of Jigsaw, and Jane Henman, mother of Tim. According to a report, Carole is on the phone ?all the time? to Jane, who is said to have told her to limit her media profile, after her ?natural instinct? as a flight attendant meant that she tried ?to please everyone?.

They are also friends with the former Conservative treasurer Michael Spencer, and the former Conservative MP William Benyon, who once invited the Middletons to dinner, ?and there was this moment when Mike picked up the place cards and put them in his pocket?, an acquaintance tells me. ?They both went round and had a look, and then he swiped them, as if they were going to bone up later.? The Middletons ?are the sort of people who might have splashed out on a villa in Spain?, he continues. In fact, they splashed out on a share in a racehorse, Sohraab, along with David Cameron?s mother, Mary. They also rent (hideous) castles in Scotland, and go on holiday in Mustique, where they ?hog the tennis courts?.

Their glamorous McPosh lifestyle reached its apotheosis in 2010, when Carole and Mike were invited to Balmoral, where the Queen?s ghillies taught them shooting and deerstalking. Carole was papped lying face down in the heather. It said everything about the new-look royals: bums?n?guns. The Middletons now entertain shooting parties at home in Berkshire. Last October, Prince Andrew was invited to join them for a pheasant shoot on the estate next door, owned by the banker and human labrador Willie Hartley Russell. Andrew is the ultimate 1980s royal; the Middletons are the ultimate 1980s non-royals; they are the perfect match, like Andrew and the Duchess of York, whom the Queen?s private secretary described as ?vulgar, vulgar, vulgar, and that is that?.

It is part of a courtier?s job description to be foul to outsiders, of course: as far back as 1464, the Earl of Warwick was so furious that his best friend and cousin Edward IV married the commoner Elizabeth Woodville that he defected to the Lancastrians. The Woodvilles were proto-Middletons: of their 16 children, the least successful was a bishop. They all ended up horribly dead or disowned ? two of Elizabeth?s children were the princes in the Tower ? and the same happened to the spivvy Boleyns, and arguably Anne Hyde, a commoner who married turbo-groper James II and was accused by Samuel Pepys as having ?undone the kingdom?. The upwardly mobile female is there to be taunted or topped, or in Kate Middleton?s case, endlessly called ?naff?. Carole was dismissed as a trolley dolly who said ?toilet? and ?pardon? after she chewed gum at Sandhurst; when the Duchess of Cambridge was photographed topless in the South of France, it only confirmed her tarty credentials. ?The girl who goes topless is the daughter of a woman who chews gum,? says a former member of Kate?s circle.

The irony is that Carole is quite capable of snobbery herself, or at least, was disappointed by St Andrews, where Kate studied history of art. Apart from Prince William, the next-poshest undergraduate was the great-grandson of an earl, ?which is basically scraping the barrel?, says someone who studied with Kate. By contrast, Edinburgh was packed with boys with titles. Carole approved of Pippa?s flatmates, Earl Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland, and Lord Ted Innes-Kerr, as ?two such nice boys?.

She is now facing serious second-album difficulties with Pippa, who is constantly pictured clopping to the far end of the country for more pew action, accompanied by a chinless Sir Honk-a-Lot, proving the eternal truth that if you live by the wedding, you can die by it, too. Carole has tried to stem the damage by transforming Pippa into a media personality, overseeing the sale of her compendium of stupid, Celebrate, for £400,000 last year. Celebrate unveiled a puzzling world of beautifully threaded conkers and power crostini ? a Middleton Manifesto featuring a series of glassy dolls in immaculate outfits and vacant poses, a deeply old-fashioned idea of womanhood that is the opposite of Carole?s own achievements as a hardworking business-woman and matriarch.

The sad thing is that Carole could have made such a brilliant feminist, driving the monarchy forwards as a fearsome, blow-dried, Kensington Palace chapter of Mumsnet. In reality she will probably drive it back to a time before sex and bad hair: a world of parties and hairpins and courtly occupations, where women are little more than brood mares with diamonds. Carole has become part of the fabric; she is the ultimate fan; she is someone who took the tour but will end up running the show. She may even get a title. Charles Mosley, former editor of Burke?s Peerage, says that Mike Middleton may be made the Earl of Bucklebury, and James Middleton could become Viscount Martineau, in recognition of an ancestor, the Unitarian philosopher James Martineau. Carole would be a countess: the ultimate triumph of Slough over South Kensington.

[DonDrapersAltrEgoBigglesDraper]

Gosh, it's nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. I bet Carole thinks it's a hoot.

[exoticfruits]

I bet she did- she has a lot to be proud of - it rather shows up Camilla Long.

[kungfupannda]

I don't get how people don't understand that any inherited social position is purely down to accidents of birth over the years.

Most families move up and down the social ladder over the centuries. Families who have had wealth and social standing for generations have generally done so because they are descended from an older son of an older son of an older son and so on.

The last few generations in my maternal family were firmly working class/lower middle class - ship builders, iron workers, merchant navy, dockside pub owner etc. Go back a couple more generations and we've got the daughter of a baronet who grew up in a vast estate with money coming out of her ears and pretty much every landed family in England in her ancestry, including the Plantaganet royals.

So its all bollocks, really. If she'd been a son and not a daughter I might have been swanning around in a stately home and rejecting royal marriage proposals.

[looks sadly around at piles of child-related detritus in front room]

[arabesque]

I can see, having heard the outrage and hype before reading the article, how it might come across as 'not so bad'. But when you're just flicking through the paper on a sunny Sunday afternoon and come across this unproked snide attack on Carole it really comes across as quite startling.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that Camilla Long is now simply sneering at anyone who disagrees with her rather than considering their points and seeing for herself what a nasty little piece of writing that article is.

[EldritchCleavage]

Nasty and vacuous article, which is a bad combination. If you are going to be so snide about someone, do it over things that matter, show some insight.

[lovelychops]

I read this at the weekend and thought it was vile. Wondered if it was supposed to be tongue in cheek ? But think its just sneery. It seemed quite pointless especially with all the dubious quotes from 'family friends' didn't really expect it from The Times...

[arabesque]

It was also a bit pointless. It's not as if Carole Middleton has suddenly been in the news or something, and the Times decided to do a background article. It's just a swipe at her that seems to have come out of nowhere, for no particular reason. Has Camilla Long really got nothing better to do as a 'journalist'?

[arabesque]

Sorry Lovelychops. Typed that before I read your post.

[TheBigJessie]

That article reminds me of an upside down four-sided pyramid coated with razor-blades- there's a tiny base (she and family were at a wedding, and they looked happy to see their friends get married. It's extremely Un-MN to like weddings, but not a crime) and a extremely large conclusion is balanced upon it.

[LessMissAbs]

Apart from the third paragraph, it was quite funny. Especially this bit: It?s almost as if party-planner Carole has carried out a health-and-safety assessment on all options, and chosen the looks based on minimum risk

I kind of know what she is getting at. The Middletons are adept at social climbing stealthily through never putting a foot wrong, but not through excelling in any sphere. A bit like wisteria. At university, that lot will accept almost anyone into their social circle, but the Middletons seem to have rocked the boat by not being particularly open or honest, which makes them come across as possibly not quite genuine. It would be the same if they were the other way and thought that boasting about how much money they have let them into these social circles - people still like to believe their friends are genuine and like them for themselves, than who they can put them in contact with.

I think the telling thing about the Middletons (ie that they are more interested in social climbing than genuine achievement) is that not one of their three children has ever had proper paid employment, from a third party employer. ie a job. Behave like that, and yes you do leave yourself open to social commentary like the above. Marriage and social climbing and fitting in are seen as more important than anything else. Pippa actually seems quite talented at sport, but never seems permitted to do anything to a degree whereby a potential husband might be in danger of being outshone by her.

Generally the genuine aristocrats are much easier to deal with than the wannabe hangers on, the spoilt sons and daughters being sponsored by pushy parents to climb up the social ladder.

Did Camilla Long really drop the word McPosh into that article - tres amusing!

[Hamishbear]

There are also plenty of aristos who also have never had a regular job/paid third party employment. Many have trust funds or give up work on marriage.

[EldritchCleavage]

Although Kate got a job at Jigsaw (yes, I know through connections, but plenty of people do that) and was hounded out of it by the paparazzi attention. I know someone on the periphery of that situation and his account it was absolutely horrible. She gave up the job as she couldn't bear it and the whole thing became untenable anyway. It had uncomfortable overtones of Diana's sad end. I'm fairly sympathetic that she then gave up any idea of working.

Not that I disagree with those who say the Middleton daughters are not great role models, but who says they have to be, anyway? I do get a bit tired of thr role model malarkey. It's also very odd applied in the context of a monarchy, where people are there by birth not merit anyway.

[MissPB]

It is a sneery article - sneering at someone's background is awful. Are we supposed to think less of someone because their family were hard workers and earned good money?

As for the giggling in the church thing - I found this quite funny and know that when I get together with my mother and sisters we can be in hysterics laughing together for all sorts of reasons (not really because we are so supremely excited at being at a wedding!) because we are happy to see each other and know each other so well.

[Hamishbear]

There's this myth that genuine aristocrats don't care and just jolly along etc. This may be true but they will never accept the Middletons as one of them either, they'll be their friend but they will always be the outsider and the other in their eyes. At least IME.