Back in January, Carole Middleton turned 70 years old and there were about a dozen major articles about her life and times. The British press praised her, but they also left enough room to let everyone know that Carole has manipulated, schemed and defrauded her way into the top echelons of society. One of the most interesting pieces was the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden “remembering” how he spoke to Carole once back in 2008 and he repeated what they discussed at the time. It was a curious admission that Carole had long briefed the press personally. Well, now Eden is remembering another incident, this time from 2007. He and then-Kate Middleton attended the same event and he chatted with her AND overheard her conversation.
Her impressive appearance this week made me think back many years to the first occasion I met Catherine – or Kate Middleton, as she was known by everyone then. It was at the launch party for Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography Young Stalin in 2007, when Catherine had briefly split from Prince William.
Catherine, then aged 25, attended the event with her sister, Pippa Middleton, and chatted to me in a group with Sebag Montefiore’s sister-in-law, the TV presenter Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who sadly died a decade later at the age of 45.Tara, the daughter of two of King Charles’s closest friends, Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, had known Prince William since he was a little boy and was not shy about speaking intimately about him to Catherine at the party at Asprey jewellers in Mayfair.
While I made small-talk to Catherine about Montefiore’s book and how she knew the author, Tara, typically, got straight down to what everyone really wanted to know about: Catherine’s break-up with William. The split had been a big story since it was disclosed a few months earlier.
‘How are you doing?’ Tara asked her.
Catherine replied, ‘Fine’, and started blushing.
‘It must be so hard…’ Tara persisted.
‘Really, it’s fine,’ Catherine replied, firmly, if uncomfortably.
She made clear with her body language that she didn’t wish to discuss the subject, and the conversation moved swiftly on to happier and less fraught matters. At that time, Catherine was seen as a party-loving girlfriend of William, but my first encounter with her taught me that she was a tough cookie who wasn’t going to be inveigled into saying something she didn’t want to say.
Indeed, she reminded me of members of the Royal Family, much older than herself, who have the uncanny ability to make small-talk with anyone (even tiresome social diarists) without giving anything anyway. They usually manage to turn the conversation around and force the questioner do the talking.
Fortunately for the future of the Royal Family, Catherine was reunited with William a couple of months after I met her. Although she has changed in many ways since our fleeting first encounter – becoming, for example, a confident public speaker – there was a hint of that inner steel which has stood her so well in the years since.
Just for some royal history and Waity history, when William dumped Kate in early 2007, she ran straight home to Carole and they worked out a “get him back” plan which ended up being pretty successful. The plan involved Kate stepping out constantly in London, attending every event she could get into, going clubbing with William’s friends and projecting a “I’m not heartbroken” vibe. Kate knew what she was doing by fending off “sympathetic” questions from a close associate of the Windsors – she knew that it would get back to William that she was unbothered and fine, and that she was out and about without a care in the world. Of course, I also believe Kate knew what she was doing by chatting with a Daily Mail reporter.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, WENN.
