Their social standing ended up framing the tabloids’ incessant coverage of the family. Their main target was often Carole, a former flight attendant who launched a successful party supplies company, Party Pieces. They published classist stories that William’s friends made “doors to manual” jokes about Kate’s mother. They also criticized her for chewing gum at Prince Wililam’s Sandhurst passing out parade. “She is pushy, rather twee, and incredibly middle-class. She uses words such as pleased to meet you, toilet, and pardon,” an anonymous source jeered to the Daily Mail in 2007.
The papers also painted Carole as an advantageous social climber. “Was Kate’s mum too pushy for the royals?” read a Daily Mail headline in April 2007, after the couple briefly split. “Mrs. Middleton has acquired a reputation for being pushy and it has been suggested she maneuvered her daughter into William’s orbit and then tried to engineer a match,” the story began. “According to Clarence House sources, her overweening ambitions for her daughter grated on Prince William’s friends and courtiers, especially since the former air stewardess’s aspirations clashed with her own humble origins.”
That was just one of the pieces laced with snobbery. Another claimed that she had tried—and failed—to get her daughter on the throne. “To Carole Middleton, it had, no doubt, all seemed perfectly possible—her plans agonizingly close to fruition,” the Daily Mail continued. “But if she thought herself a latter-day Livia, the power behind the throne in ancient Rome, then she flattered herself. How, after all, could a former air stewardess from Berkshire ever hope to take on the House of Windsor and win?”
(In a 2011 article for Vanity Fair, reporter Katie Nicholl found both William and Kate were hurt by the characterizations: “Kate and William were equally mortified by the attacks on her family, to whom she is exceptionally close and of whom she is fiercely protective,” she wrote.)
The Crown is a piece of historical fiction, and in the case of Carole Middleton, it seems her depiction was inspired by sensational pages of the British tabloids. At the end of the day—a character is just a character.
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