Exclusive: Carole Middleton's first interview: 'Life is really normal - most of the time'

‘Two things you need to know. Carole’s very, very nervous, and she doesn’t do sofas,’ the Telegraph’s team on the shoot warned me the night before I went down to Bucklebury in west Berkshire to interview her. ‘When we asked her to perch on one,’ they continued, ‘Carole’s response was, “Who sits around on a sofa?”’

Sure enough, a couple of days after the shoot, when Carole, clutching a soya latte (she’s recently gone vegan/flexitarian) and slightly late, sweeps into the boardroom at the HQ of Party Pieces, the business she set up in 1988, she doesn’t sit down but immediately takes me on a tour of her empire. Just like that.  I don’t quite know what I expected – not trumpets, but perhaps some sense of ceremony – but then I don’t think she knew what to expect either. She’s never done an interview before. 

The tour goes on so long that at one stage I wonder whether she’s planning to do the entire interview on the hoof as part of a cunning ruse to get it all over and done with before I’ve had time to press record. It does, however, give me time to adjust my retinas to the life-size Carole, inevitably smaller, but also more youthful, than the version the world has become accustomed to. This, lest we forget, is the future British king’s grandmother – arguably the second most famous granny on the globe. 

In one sense, empire, as Carole Middleton would be the first to point out, is far too pompous a word for the collection of brick sheds and barns that Party Pieces has, over the years, colonised on a country estate in Berkshire, a 15-minute drive from the Middleton family home. There are a couple of large warehouses with radios blaring pop music and shelves of pre-filled party bags, fancy-dress costumes, table runners, Let’s Be Mermaids garlands, rose-gold team bride plates and much, much more. ‘And this is just a small part of it,’ says Carole.

There are around 7,000 products in total on the Party Pieces website. She’s seen the cactus, llama and fern trends come and, in some cases, go. But there will always be dinosaurs and princesses. The largest part of the business – at least half – remains children’s party accoutrements, but now there are also accessories for baby showers, 30th and 50th birthdays.

The subtext of all this is that Party Pieces is a serious business that was successfully operating a long time before what Carole later refers to as Catherine’s ‘impact’. It’s a private company and they won’t release figures, but during their  busiest periods, they dispatch around 4,000 orders a week.

The beamed open-plan office is where most of her 30-strong admin team (none of whom seems given to hat-doffing in her presence) sit. As does Carole. ‘It’s better to be with everyone so you can see what’s going on,’ she notes. ‘They say it’s a bit like a hurricane arriving when I come in.’

The many Americans who order from Party Pieces would be charmed to know that chickens ran through central HQ until the Middletons moved in. But the décor is more Ryman than Soho Farmhouse. The beige carpets are worn, with several threadbare patches, and there are MDF desks and swivel chairs. The walls in the small boardroom are banana yellow.

Carole herself, however, is a vision in a khaki Ralph Lauren blazer and black T-shirt, black skinny M&S trousers (her legs are phenomenal) tucked into Russell & Bromley riding boots, and minimal jewellery – small drop earrings, a couple of gold rings and a thin gold chain with which she constantly toys. It is classic Middleton style, although Carole tells me she far prefers dresses (‘not ones that are tight round the middle though, my shape’s changing’). Maybe it’s the hair. She gets it done locally and it’s shorter and glossier than in recent pictures. The fact that it seems slightly darker emphasises how alike she and her daughter Catherine, the future Queen of England, look. Perhaps it’s the golden tan or the light-touch make-up – the kind where you can’t see the edges. But whereas Catherine and her sister Pippa look much the same on camera as off, Carole, all flashing, watchful hazel eyes and fluttery, girlish nerves is, at 63, far more striking, delicately boned and simultaneously softer-looking in real life than in pictures.

But the voice is what everyone wants to know about. Is it stewardessy (in her early 20s she worked for British Airways)? Elocutioned? Lynda Snell? None of the above. The best description is probably modern posh – not affected, not mockney. If we’re on a scale of BBC presenters, I’d say Mishal Husain. In terms of warmth… maybe Martha Kearney. 

Although she hardly ever looks me in the eye, she is very cosy once she gets going: smart and interested. On the shoot, she asked everyone about themselves and dispensed breastfeeding tips to the make-up artist. I don’t think the solicitude towards others is forced, though it does take her a while to warm up (not in terms of temperature, she’s obviously got terrific circulation as there’s a bracing chill in that boardroom). But she does seem like a lot of fun.

You can see why the Middletons remain such a close family (Catherine texted her on the shoot to wish her luck) and why they all, spouses in tow, gravitate towards Granny Middleton. ‘I do love a good party,’ she says later. ‘I’m definitely a night owl and a real chatterbox. My children look at me sometimes…’

Obviously we’re not here to discuss the children, and certainly not their spouses (Pippa is married to James Matthews, a former racing-car driver, hedge-fund manager and heir to the Scottish feudal title Laird of Glen Affric; James, after an on-off relationship with TV presenter Donna Air, is currently single; their oldest daughter, we know about). Carole and her husband Michael have been commendably discreet during the 13 or so years since Catherine began dating the Duke of Cambridge. As Carole says, ‘Over the years, it’s proved wise not to say anything.’ 

But Party Pieces, her one-stop-solves-all business, has been going for more than 30 years, ‘and I just thought I should celebrate a little’. And it is a good story, part Catherine Cookson, part careers manual for would-be entrepreneurs, as well as being a business that, says Carole, has been flagrantly copied. Her own role model she says, was Laura Tenison, founder of kidswear brand JoJo Maman Bébé, whom she went to watch at a few conferences in the early days of her own company.

Carole Goldsmith, as she was, seems to have had a strong work ethic from the start. Her father Ron was a painter and decorator. Her mother Dorothy, aka The Duchess (because she always looked so impeccable), was a character.  ‘Everyone adored my mother,’ she says when I relate how the taxi driver who picked me up from a local train station and drove me to the Party Pieces HQ, told me she’d been a close friend of The Duchess.

Ron and Dorothy moved to Berkshire from west London 10 years after Carole and Michael. Carole’s own closeness to her children and grandchildren is an echo of the relationship she had with her own family, which was ‘small but tight’. Her younger brother, ‘Uncle Gary’ of Maison de Bang Bang fame (at the time of Catherine and William’s wedding, the press had a joyful time detailing Gary Goldsmith’s party reputation), is also an entrepreneur.

Carole spent her first six months in a council flat in Ealing. She initially left school at 16, got a job with the Prudential in Holborn and hated it. ‘It was one of those massive offices with rows and rows of desks.’ So far, so early 1970s. But Carole knew she could achieve more and asked Ron if she could return to school to do her A levels. She got four: art, economics, English literature and geography, which she wanted to teach. ‘But my parents couldn’t afford to put me through college, so I thought I’d see if I could get a bit of money together and fund myself.’

While she’s recounting this, she suddenly remembers she got a job – she can’t remember the year – on the John Lewis  A level trainee scheme. This has always been considered the gold standard in retail and was extremely hard to get on to. Carole is bemused by her own memory lapse: ‘Gosh… how did I forget? I can’t even remember when it was. I’ll have to check with Mike.’

This is a woman who clearly spends even less time navel-gazing than she does lounging on sofas. Too busy cooking. She adores cooking. ‘I probably have more cookery books than anything.’ At the moment her favourites are Mary Berry (‘she does use a lot of cream, though’) and Amelia Freer. The combination of the nation’s favourite baker and the fashionable nutritional therapist, who helped singer Sam Smith lose 3½st, seems very Carole.

The John Lewis gig was a dream, particularly her stint in china and glass at Peter Jones, which is where she realised how interested she was in finding out what kind of merchandise sold. But then they told her she had to do a spell on the shop floor as a sales assistant. ‘I thought, blow that. I’m not doing that for six months – it was really boring.’ So she got a secretarial job (she can still do Pitman shorthand) at BEA (before it merged with BOAC to become British Airways in 1974), but didn’t think much of secretarial work, either, so brushed up her French and got a job as ground staff.

‘It’s not like it is now,’ she explains, coming over momentarily a touch Mrs Bennet. ‘You had to be able to speak another language. It was almost like being at university.’ I think from all this we can conclude that Carole Goldsmith was pretty clear she wasn’t going to be fobbed off with also-ran situations.

The newly formed BA had trained too many pilots, so it was redeploying them on the ground and Carole found herself working alongside them as well as other senior staff. 

Enter Michael Middleton, six years her senior, ‘rather shy’ but very handsome… A year after they married,  she had Catherine; 18 months after that Pippa and then the Middletons moved to Jordan for three years, where Michael worked as a aero manager for an international air station (he was never a pilot). Jordan life sounds comfortable. There was a lot of socialising at the British Embassy, some help at home and the girls were in nursery school. But, says Carole, ‘I wasn’t convinced I wanted to be an expat mum and Mike’s job there was coming to an end.’

By the time they returned to the UK in 1987, Catherine was four and a half, Pippa 18 months younger and Carole, now 32, was pregnant with their third child, James. ‘I thought, “Oooh, bills to pay.” But I also had this strong feeling that I hadn’t achieved anything. I got married at 25, had Catherine at 26…’ 

Party Pieces launched the same year her son was born, in 1987, with a simple idea about a one-stop place where you could get everything you need for a children’s party. Carole visited the Birmingham Spring Fair, where she sourced some suppliers of paper plates and cups, stuck up a self-designed flyer at Catherine’s local playgroup in Bucklebury, and began stuffing bags from her kitchen table.

Business was steady if unspectacular – this was pre-internet, so responses weren’t always immediate. But then she had the brainwave of advertising with The Red House, a children’s book club she’d subscribed to once her brood began to read: 10,000 flyers to begin with and then 100,000. That’s when Party Pieces really took off.

She moved from her kitchen to a small business unit in nearby Hungerford – Mike built the packing benches. ‘That’s when Michael gave up his job at BA and came in. My mother thought that was big, because at that stage he probably wouldn’t have got employment again, but we could see this was a business that could scale up.’ 

When I ask about struggles or disasters she more or less shrugs off the notion. ‘We were pretty much the only ones doing this sort of thing when we started. It was really clear almost from the start that this was going to work. I got help from other mums – paperwork and that kind of thing… I think it’s easier to start a business when you’re young. You’re less aware of the pitfalls and maybe you have less of a lifestyle to lose.’

Listening to Carole talk about those early years, what comes across is her resourcefulness and stoicism. She feels they were lucky. ‘Running a business is really very simple: you buy things and sell them for a profit.’ Mike’s decision to quit his job was, she says, their wild card. She is very clear that the business was her idea. ‘And it was a good idea or it wouldn’t have taken off.’ Were there no sleepless nights over the financing? ‘We never took really huge risks. We had to fund our own growth,’ she replies. She doesn’t get stressed, she says, although she was clearly anxious about this interview. Maybe that British Airways training ingrained the necessity of appearing serene while paddling furiously below the surface.

When I ask about juggling a fledgling business with three small children, particularly when working mothers were not as common as they are now, she responds instantly. ‘It was my business, so I could work around the holidays.’ She makes it sound straightforward. She understands the tussle, though, but in the end, she’s a boss. ‘In this office, I see the challenge of working mothers – but if I need them here…’ 

There was spillage into their home life, ‘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.’

The girls were at school till 6pm. That’s a long day: someone who observed them from a distance says Catherine and Pippa were always hard workers at school and encouraged by Carole to hone accomplishments that would serve beyond academia, such as skiing. ‘James would get picked up – very occasionally by someone else – and come back to the office and be here with me,’ continues Carole. ‘I was often finished by 6pm and I didn’t have a long train journey. I think it’s really good to work. It was part of the children’s lives – it still is – and they’d come and help. They did a lot of modelling. Catherine was on the cover of one of the catalogues, blowing out candles. Later on, she did some styling and set up the First Birthday side of the business. Pippa did the blog. I still value their ideas and opinions.’

There was never any doubt in the Middletons’ minds that they would base their family and business in Bucklebury. ‘Do you live in London?’ Carole asks me, looking sympathetic when I nod. Later, when she drives me to the train station, scooping a pile of papers and a plastic cup from the passenger seat of her Range Rover, to save me phoning for possibly non-existent taxis, she shows me the spot she and Michael first fell in love with.

She loves this tiny pocket of remoteness – the fact it’s only an hour from London, that she can take their four spaniels and one golden retriever (James, who lives with them when he’s not in London, shares two of the dogs) for a long walk straight from their house, and the solid, picturesque red-brick architecture. ‘We really fell on our feet moving to this area,’ she says. Their first home was ‘a very sweet semi-detached cottage. We stayed there until Catherine was 13, so the children spent a lot of their youth there.’

There were two more moves – Oak Acre, a detached house where Prince William famously landed his Chinook helicopter in 2008, and the more secluded, seven-bedroomed, Grade II- listed Bucklebury Manor. She’s good at nesting, she says. ‘If you choose your house wisely, you don’t have to do too much. We almost just replicated what we did before. Farrow & Ball Cord and Hay [both shades of beige] – you can’t go wrong.’

In photos, Bucklebury Manor is what estate agents would call impressive, a description that must set Carole all  ajangle. She’s on a mission to appear as unaffected and normal as possible. Later, when we’re discussing her love of Christmas trees and how she likes to have as many as possible in the house, including one in the grandchildren’s rooms, ‘so that they can decorate it themselves’, there is one of many long pauses, while she ponders the consequences of a seemingly innocuous exchange. ‘That makes me sound as though I live in a mansion, doesn’t it?’ Erm, you’re the future king’s grandmother, I think. Would a mansion be out of the question?

Maybe she’s right to be cautious. Over the years it has been she, rather than Michael, who has caught the full beam of the Middleton-focused attention, much of which fixes on the idea of her as a pushy arriviste. She stopped reading the stories about herself online over a year ago. I’m surprised it took her so long. ‘Well, I thought it was better to know what people thought. But it doesn’t make any difference. I’m not really sure how I’m perceived now,’ she says. ‘But the thing is… it is really normal – most of the time.’

When I ask her where she most likes to shop, there’s another pained pause. ‘How’s this going to make me sound?’ I half- expect her to confide that her secret vice is Harrods’ personal- shopping department, but only if she can get it closed to the public. But no. Peter Jones is her happy place. ‘The staff are lovely and they all know me.’ She also loves Burford Garden Company in the Cotswolds, where she and Pippa will happily spend the best part of a day.

More Middle England you cannot get. She even loves Michael McIntyre. She could be protesting too far when she later opines that Jigsaw is a bit pricey. She loves Samantha Sung’s shirt dresses and Goat, but likes to shop in the sale. She finds the music in Selfridges a bit overwhelming and she only very occasionally patronises Catherine Walker, but I suspect this is how the Middletons really are.

Carole is known to drive a hard bargain when she negotiates – she’s not a businesswoman for nothing. She seems genuinely concerned that if I take the train back to London from a different station, I’ll have to buy another ticket (all of £22). There are things they spend money on – property, children’s education, holidays – and things they consider to be a waste of money. Fashion is definitely a bit suspect. ‘Do you think it’s important?’ she asks me. When I say it’s a huge UK success story, that first impressions are clearly important and that style, rather than fashion, is worth cultivating, she nods. ‘Now you put it like that, I see what you mean.’

In some ways, there’s a touching naivety about Carole. I don’t think any of the family, with the possible exception of James (and this is based solely on pictures; I’ve never met him) give one iota about being cool. She’d rather be doing other things than clothes shopping. Party Pieces remains a full-time job for her.

‘I don’t see myself stopping [work]. If I did I’d have to have so many projects on. I’d have to redecorate the house. I’d love to travel, but then I’d miss the grandchildren. No,’ she ponders, as if just deciding this, retirement is not on the cards. ‘I’ve got a billion ideas I still want to do.’ 

Visit Party Pieces at partypieces.co.uk. See tomorrow’s Stella for Carole’s Christmas party tips