Creditors hit out at Carole Middleton after her party business collapsed with ... trends now

The Middleton family finances have always been shrouded in mystery. 

How, observers have often wondered, did Carole, a former air hostess who grew up in a council house, and Michael, a mid-ranking BA flight dispatcher, manage such a spectacular ascent up the financial ladder?

The couple had relatively humble beginnings. Carole is the granddaughter of a coal miner. Michael is one of four children of an RAF-turned-commercial pilot from Leeds. 

Yet they have somehow been able to send their three children to top public schools, while simultaneously building a property portfolio that at various points included a Chelsea flat, plus a £4.7 million Grade II listed Georgian mansion in Berkshire.

Completing this heart-warming tale of (apparent) rags to riches has been an epic social rise, spearheaded by eldest daughter Catherine.

She, of course, married our future King and is now Princess of Wales. Her sister, Pippa, bagged wealthy hedge fund tycoon James Matthews for a husband, while youngest child James fell for French financial analyst Alizee Thevenet.

Today, the entire clan moves in glamorous and ultra-wealthy circles.

So what fuelled this remarkable journey? Well, while Michael undoubtedly benefited from some family loot — his grandmother Olive Lupton was from a well-to-do line of Yorkshire clothmakers — it has for years been widely assumed that the Middletons owed the lion’s share of their prosperity to Carole’s entrepreneurial flair.

Specifically, the family’s wealth was thought to derive almost entirely from the success of Party Pieces, a mail order company that its now 68-year-old matriarch decided to start way back in 1987, shortly after giving birth to James.

Founded at the family’s kitchen table and inspired by the various child birthday parties she was then attending (Pippa was four and Kate five), it supplied everything one might need to help special occasions go with a bang, from fancy dress costumes to paper plates and balloons.

Having begun life as a sort of catalogue firm, its business model seemed to be transformed by the internet revolution of the late 1990s, which allowed Party Pieces to become one of the most visible operators in the online field.

Its website began selling thousands of different product lines to customers across the country and even expanded overseas.

In other words, it looked every inch a huge success.

How else, one might ask, could Carole and Michael afford to take family holidays in Mustique? Buy prime land? (In 2005, they paid £295,000 in cash for several acres near their home). 

Own racehorses? (For a time they had a share of a handy sprinter named Sohraab). And employ somewhere in the region of 30 staff at the converted barn headquarters of Party Pieces in rural Berkshire?

What no one ever really knew, however, was the exact amount of money the family business was making. Run for years as a privately owned partnership, it never had to file full accounts at Companies House. 

That made it impossible for anyone to work out how much cash was passing through, or what sort of dividends were being paid to the family.

Since profit margins in the online sales business are notoriously slim, a handful of cynics have sometimes wondered if Party Pieces was quite the success story we were being led to believe.

This week, they got their answer. On Wednesday it emerged that, after 36 years in business, the Middleton family firm has gone under, leaving debts of £2.6million. 

The news came a fortnight after it emerged that the company had been sold to a Scottish businessman named James Sinclair, having collapsed into administration.

It’s a development that has left many stunned, not least an army of small suppliers who are now left badly out of pocket.

Many had prided themselves on dealing with the Middletons and were perhaps entitled to believe, given their royal connections, that outstanding debts would eventually be taken care of.

Take, for example, Sultani Gas, a Kent-based company that supplied Party Pieces with helium for its balloons. It’s currently owed £20,430, according to the administrator’s report. 

A spokesman said this week that they felt ‘betrayed’ by Mrs Middleton. ‘What hurt me the most was that I trusted her as the mother-in-law of the future King and she just betrayed me,’ the representative said. ‘It is absolutely unacceptable.’

Take also the firm’s landlord, Lord Iliffe, on whose Yattendon estate the company has been based for many years. 

The estate is out of pocket to the tune of £57,480 and James Hole, the agent for Iliffe, said it now faces ‘severe financial consequences’, adding: ‘They have been long-term tenants. We were astonished about the amount of money owed to others.’

Others left counting the cost include, I am sad to report, us taxpayers. 

For in what may come as a surprise, considering the Middletons’ seemingly ample family fortune, it has emerged that Party Pieces took out a £219,000 Covid loan from RBS, a bank still propped up by taxpayers. 

Loans like these are underwritten by the public purse and were intended to help hard-pressed entrepreneurs struggling during the pandemic.

Another major creditor, HMRC, is owed a separate sum of more than £600,000. It remains to be seen how much of that sum the Exchequer will ever see.

Because Party Pieces is now a limited company (the aforementioned partnership structure was dismantled a few years back), Carole and Michael Middleton have no personal responsibility, legally speaking, to repay any of these debts.

That in turn leaves ordinary working Britons on the hook for a business failure presided over by the mother-in-law of the future King. 

Perhaps aware of myriad PR problems posed by this fact, Carole is said to be ‘upset and deeply disappointed’ at this week’s turn of events.

A friend said she has tried hard to find a solution that

read more from dailymail.....