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The art of etiquette: A bluffer's guide to being posh
from The Independent (UK)

Mixing with royals is a tricky business, as Kate Middleton's mother discovered. So how should one behave in the company of the upper classes? Andy McSmith finds out.

Published: 17 April 2007

If Kate Middleton was feeling miserable yesterday, it is nothing to what her poor mother must have been going through. Carole Middleton once had a future as the nation's top mother-in-law. Now, she is being reviled as number one embarrassing mum.

Mrs Middleton, a descendant of generations of Durham coal miners, is a former airline stewardess who carved out a social position for herself through the old middle-class values of hard work and self-reliance, combined with a modern use of the internet. Her husband was a former pilot. Their mail order business, selling props for children's parties, allowed them to live in a five-bedroom detached house in Newbury and send their children to Marlborough, one of England's most expensive schools.

But no one taught Carole Middleton how to behave in the presence of people too posh ever to have needed to work. She did not hit it off with the young aristocrats who hang out with Prince William. "She is pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle class," a "royal insider" was quoted as saying in yesterday's Daily Mirror.

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