Is Kate Middleton’s Family Really in Debt?
Princess Kate’s parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, are reportedly in debt after selling their children’s-party-planning-and-supplies business.
This week, The Times U.K. reported that Kate Middleton’s parents, Carole and Michael Middleton, are hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt stemming from the sale of their children’s-party-supplies company, Party Pieces. The news comes less than a month after the Princess of Wales shared in a video that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing preventive chemotherapy — and, now, tabloids say her mother is trying to shield her from the family’s financial stress. Here’s what we know about the situation.
Wait, is Kate Middleton a children’s-party-planning heiress?
Middleton’s parents both worked at British Airways when they got married, but for the past few decades, they’ve been running a party-planning and decor business that they founded in 1987, inspired by Kate’s fifth-birthday party. Carole launched it as a mail-order business that she ran from her kitchen table, and a few years later, Michael quit his flight-dispatcher job to get onboard. Over the years, the couple built a 12-employee team and ran the company out of their home in Berkshire. The profits from Party Pieces are said to have paid for a bigger family home, plus school for Kate and her two siblings. Before she married Prince William, Kate reportedly worked for Party Pieces as a project manager.
What happened to the business?
In 2019, Carole Middleton reportedly sold her 49 percent stake and handed control of Party Pieces over to investors (tabloids later said she was stepping away from work and moving toward retirement). Over the next few years, the business started to go downhill, taking hits from rocky pandemic sales and an expensive U.S. rollout. In March 2023, Party Pieces hired an insolvency firm called Interpath Advisory and declared the U.K.’s equivalent of bankruptcy (the process is known there as “administration”). Under Interpath’s guidance, the couple sold some of Party Pieces to James Sinclair, a millionaire businessman who the Daily Mail described as a “children’s party entrepreneur,” in May 2023 for £180,000. By that point the company was in pretty poor shape — it was reportedly £2.6 million in debt from unpaid taxes, bank loans, a coronavirus business loan, and outstanding payments to suppliers, including a helium-gas business. A report from Interpath suggested that, even with the profits from the Hail Mary sale, Party Pieces would probably not be able to pay everyone back.
It’s a little unclear if anyone is going to be saddled with those debts — under U.K. law, a lot of outstanding payments are dropped when a company goes into administration — but so far Party Pieces seems to be holding up under Sinclair’s ownership. At the very least, its website (and Instagram account) are functional and up-to-date. Its recovery is still being overseen by Interpath, which will apparently release another report on the company’s status in May.
So why are Carole and Michael Middleton in debt?
While Carole and Michael no longer owe their creditors millions, they do still owe Interpath, whose fees for overseeing the company’s sale have reportedly put the couple in a slightly more shallow pool of debt. On Monday, The Times U.K. reported that the Middletons have £260,000 outstanding with Interpath for overseeing their company’s insolvency. A December progress report from Interpath stated that the agency’s fees ended up being higher than it initially expected because its employees had to devote extra hours to navigating the logistics of the sale, but that the firm does “not intend to draw our fees in full.” In other words, it doesn’t seem like the Middletons are under too much pressure to repay their debts at the moment.
Naturally, a family financial crisis is not the kind of news a woman going through chemo needs to hear, and Us claims Carole is “desperately trying to keep Catherine fully focused on her recovery.” One source told the magazine that Kate’s parents are “not looking for any assistance from their children and don’t want them to worry.” As if this family didn’t already have enough to deal with.