How Carole Middleton Defied Critics with Kitchen Disco Dancing to Become Kate and William’s Supportive Grandmother at 70

Of all the absurd portrayals in Netflix’s multi-million- pound series The Crown, Carole Middleton’s must be up there with the silliest and cruellest.

On the phone, she sternly instructs her daughter to wear heels, not flats, as they prepare for the renowned St Andrews University fashion show in 2002. This is the event where Kate allegedly captivated her future husband with her appearance on the runway in a transparent dress.

‘You still want to show off those legs. It’s our duty to make use of the assets God has given us.’

In the final series unveiled in 2023, Carole is depicted as a relentless, conniving, and ambitious social climber. She is portrayed as someone who continuously attempted to orchestrate encounters between her eldest daughter and Prince William since their early years.

The portrayal of Carole in the series is exaggerated to the point of resembling a caricature villain, almost bordering on comedic. Nonetheless, the real Carole Middleton is no novice to facing criticism and dealing with attacks on her character.

Almost 21 years ago, her daughter and Prince William were photographed for the first time together while skiing in the Swiss resort of Klosters, which sparked frenzied interest not just in Kate, but her family, too.

Who was this ‘middle-class’ girl who’d seemingly captured the heart of a prince? How had she done that? 

And – in a narrative cut straight from an old-fashioned fairy tale – was it perhaps all due to her socially ambitious mother?

‘She’s pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle class,’ one particularly snotty source said of Carole at the time. ‘She uses words such as ‘pleased to meet you’, ‘toilet’ and ‘pardon’.’

Carole was sniggered at for growing up in a council house, becoming a British Airways air hostess and reportedly chewing nicotine gum at Prince William’s Sandhurst passing-out ceremony in 2006. 

Not even the Middletons’ driveway in Bucklebury, Berks, seemed safe from the snobs, who noted that it was Tarmac-ed instead of gravelled. Dead common. Well, well, well. What a difference 20 (odd) years make.

Looking back now, on Carole Middleton’s 70th birthday, the flak that was thrown her way seems almost unbelievable given how admired she has become as the Middleton matriarch, especially after Kate’s cancer diagnosis, and the solid and unwavering role she’s played, particularly in the past year.

When Kate was first spotted in public two months after her surgery last January, it was sitting beside her mother in the car.

In Kate’s personal Instagram video, released last September after her chemotherapy finished, there were scenes of the children on the swings at home in Norfolk, her and William lying on a blanket on the nearby beach, but notably also Kate’s parents – Carole and Michael – playing card games around the table. 

This appearance of the Middleton parents was very ‘telling’, a source reveals, adding that Carole was the family linchpin who often did the school run during this period, driving the children – and her daughter – there and back so that Kate could still be part of their daily routine.

In December, at Kate’s annual ‘Together at Christmas’ carol service, six-year-old Prince Louis clutched a poignant little label for the ‘kindness’ tree which read, in wobbly handwriting: ‘Thank you Granny and Grandpa because they have played games with me.’ 

It hasn’t been an easy journey, as Carole herself once remarked. ‘I feel very vulnerable about everything,’ she told the Mail’s diarist Richard Eden in 2008 when the brickbats about Tarmac drives and saying ‘toilet’ were still flying. 

‘I’m not a celebrity and I don’t want to be one . . . I haven’t asked for all this.’

At the same time, she remarked that she had three children, ‘not just Catherine’. Ever the watchful mother.

But after that, she seems to have adopted a phrase followed by another matriarch, the late Queen: never complain, never explain. 

Which was just as well because Carole has always, perhaps unfairly, been the focus of more attention than her husband.

As royal author Tina Brown waspishly noted in her most recent book about the Royal Family, The Palace Papers, Carole is the ‘dynamo’ in the family, whereas Michael Middleton would prefer to be mowing the lawn (as he was famously photographed doing days after that wedding).

And yet, ironically, in these times of class warfare when being born posh may not be quite as helpful as it once was, Carole’s family background has made her the perfect mother for a future queen.

She’s descended, as the snobs liked to point out, from Durham coal mining stock. Nothing wrong with that. Hard workers, presumably.

Carole’s paternal grandmother, Granny Edith, also sounds like a terrifically practical, sleeves-up kind of woman, who not only did the family’s washing in the boiler at their terrace house in Southall, West London, but cooked the Christmas pudding in there, too. Resourceful.

Edith’s son Ron left school and started his own building firm in Southall aged just 14. 

He married an 18-year-old shop assistant called Dorothy when he was 22, and along came their daughter, Carole, in 1955.

The family lived in a pebble-dashed terrace in Southall (her brother Gary arrived a decade later), where Dorothy became nicknamed ‘the Duchess’, because she supposedly had social ambitions and wanted the family to better itself. 

The fact that she used to wheel Carole in a large new Silver Cross pram is often trotted out as evidence of her upwardly mobile aspirations.

Carole inherited the family drive. After achieving four A-levels, she wanted to become a teacher, but her parents couldn’t afford the college fees, so she decided to get a job to be able to fund it herself.

Initially she landed a place on John Lewis’s trainee scheme, then moved to a secretarial job at what became British Airways, where she realised she wanted to become an air hostess instead of a teacher. 

She was so determined to be good at her job that she would record her on-board announcements and play them back to herself.

Soon, the smiley, pretty, determined young woman caught the eye of a BA flight dispatcher called Michael from Leeds, whose family had aristocratic ties, and the pair fell in love. 

They moved into an apartment in Slough, close to Heathrow, and were married in 1980.

The first child, Catherine, was born two years later, followed by siblings Pippa and James. But a little thing like motherhood wasn’t going to slow Carole down.

In 1987 she launched a party business, Party Pieces, after being able to find only one type of paper plate (with clowns on) for Kate’s fifth birthday. 

Its success transformed Carole into a self-made millionaire within a few years, and Michael left his job at BA to pitch in.

The family moved from a two-bedroom cottage to a five-bedroom house a few miles away in Berkshire, and the three children went to private school.

Kate subsequently went on to St Andrews University to study History of Art, her own decision, despite the makers of The Crown suggesting that she was merely Carole’s puppet. The rest, as they say, is history.

While celebration of the supportive and unobtrusive role they have played would probably be more suitable, sneering about the Middleton family’s trajectory persisted throughout the years that Kate and William were dating, right up until their wedding in 2011, when some coverage queried whether Carole would ‘let the side down’ by wearing fake tan or arriving at Westminster Abbey in bare legs.

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I wonder what her critics would have preferred: that William had married a Sloaney blonde whose mother spent most of her time looking after the Labradors and arranging flowers at church?

Carole hasn’t just been a vitally important source of support to Catherine and her siblings, either, but also to Prince William.

He was a 21-year-old university student when she came into his life, and having lost his own mother, Diana, when he was just 15, he was instantly grateful for a warm, maternal figure who provided a cosy, more normal family environment than he’d ever known. 

Weekends in Berkshire with the Middletons were a high point for him, where they ate supper at the kitchen table.

The pair are now said to be ‘exceptionally close’, and it’s notable that William has previously broken royal protocol to spend Christmas with the Middletons in Bucklebury rather than at Sandringham. 

A huge relief, one imagines, not having to dress up in black tie on Christmas Eve.

In 2022, when Kate and William shifted their day-to-day base from Kensington Palace to Adelaide Cottage in the grounds of Windsor Castle, closer to Berkshire, Carole was able to see more of her grandchildren – carting them to farm parks and surreptitiously feeding them chips in the way only doting grandmothers can.

In 2012, the success of Party Pieces (it’s since been sold, after hitting tougher times during the pandemic) enabled Carole and Michael to move into a £4.7 million Grade-II Berkshire manor house, Bucklebury Manor, which has seven bedrooms (and a gravel drive) and enough space for plenty of grandchildren.

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The house is a haven from royal life, and from that base, as her grandchildren grow up, Carole will offer the ‘normal’ stability that she did for her own children – and William. 

Kitchen discos, because Carole likes a dance after dinner; bike rides; almost certainly the odd game of tennis, given the Middleton family’s competitiveness. Oh, all right, and the odd family holiday to the slopes or Mustique.

One friend of mine staying on the same Caribbean island a couple of years ago talked of seeing Carole, in her role as Mary Poppins, trying to cajole a small Prince Louis out of the sea. ‘Go away,’ he cheekily responded, ‘you’re old!’

A mite unfair, I’d say, because without wishing to lower the tone, she looks phenomenal at 70.

Carole is aways immaculately turned out, whether it’s a royal occasion (in Catherine Walker or Goat) or just nipping to the shops (in Jaeger, Boden or M&S), with subtle, golden highlights courtesy of Chelsea hairdresser Richard Ward, and impressively slim. No Ozempic here.

Several years ago, ahead of the royal wedding, Carole talked of adopting the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet devised by French nutritionist Dr Pierre Dukan; in 2018, in one of her rare interviews, she mentioned becoming vegetarian, almost vegan.

More recently she’s said to have flirted with the Sirtfood diet, which sounds like something Gwyneth Paltrow might follow.

You eat foods such as kale, walnuts, blueberries and dates (and drink the odd glass of red wine), because they’re believed to activate ‘sirtuins’, proteins in the body which supposedly encourage the metabolism. Hmmm.

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It probably helps that Carole is active, playing tennis and swimming several times a week at home, as well as walking nearby.

The only question now is whether the Middletons will be granted a title – as grandparents of a future king, and to reward them for their unstinting loyalty and discretion over the past two decades.

Middleton family friend and business tycoon Sir John Madejski has previously called for this. ‘They should be the Earl and Countess of Bucklebury,’ he said in 2014. ‘They deserve it. They are great people and really good role models.’

They’re certainly more visible in-laws than some whose children have previously married into the Royal Family.

‘It’s as though we don’t exist. We never get invited to anything!’ grumbled poor old Anne Phillips many years ago, whose son Mark married Princess Anne. But times have changed and the Middletons are often spotted at royal ceremonies and events such as Ascot.

When Prince George was born in 2013, there were rumours of tension between the-then Prince Charles and the Middletons over who saw the new baby first. Classic grandparent stuff.

But in recent years, the King is said simply to be grateful for the support they’ve shown his son, so perhaps an earldom is somewhere down the line, although insiders say this is more likely to happen when William becomes king.

I can’t imagine it would change anything other than Carole’s notepaper, because she understands all too well that her role is to be the soft power behind the throne.

In these choppy times for the Royal Family, if the future of the monarchy depends on the vibrance and mega-watt glamour of the Waleses, then really we should be thanking the woman who’s supported them so steadfastly throughout.

Happy birthday, Mrs Middleton.