In his new memoir, the Princess of Wales’s brother, James Middleton, reveals a close-knit unit who are quietly influencing the future of the monarchy. Photo / Composite / Getty Images
In his new memoir, the Princess of Wales’ brother reveals a close-knit unit quietly influencing the future of the monarchy.
When James Middleton disappeared for two days walking in the Lake District to clear his head in 2017, he came back into phone reception to find a barrage of messages from his worried family.
“The pings come thick and fast,” he writes in his new memoir. “‘Where are you, James?’ ‘We’re desperate to get hold of you.’ ‘OK, we’re really worried now.’”
He was fine – better than fine, he says; getting back to the simple life had been the “most formative trip of my life”.
His parents and sisters were relieved and concerned. The episode, told for the first time in his new autobiography, is revealing.
Within 48 hours, the Middleton family had rallied around together in support of the family member who was struggling.
Elsewhere in the book, the Princess of Wales (then the Duchess of Cambridge) attends therapy with her brother, acting as a bridge between the therapy-speak she has become an expert in during her public work, and their parents, who are struggling to understand this language.
Pippa, the middle sibling, tempts James with home-cooked lasagne, persuading him to stay with her family after she learns of his suicidal thoughts.
The adult Middleton offspring, we gather, have keys to come and go from their parents’ Bucklebury Manor house at will, sleeping over for home comforts and gathering for family walks ad hoc.
This may be a memoir starring members of the royal family, written by a younger brother and focusing on the life-changing importance of a wife who has grown up outside royal circles. But Spare it is not.
Extracts of Middleton’s book Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life, serialised in the Daily Mail before the book was published on September 26, paint the picture of a warm, close-knit family whose members are imperfect but do their best.
And with it, inadvertently, it reveals first-hand for the first time how they are quietly, in some ways, influencing the future of the British monarchy.
Their role in shaping the future King George and indeed King William has been transformative, balancing the formalities of the palace life of duty and service with cards at the kitchen table, hugs, and more hugs.
“They took him [Prince William] under their wing from the very beginning and provided the kind of family atmosphere he had never had and probably yearned for,” says Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of My Mother & I: The Inside Story of the King and Our Late Queen.
“Lots of laughs, lots of family games and sharing of outdoor pursuits as a family. Just being there for him when his own father was far too busy and unable to provide this.
“This has made him very ‘family conscious’, which was exactly what King Charles wanted for him as he never had it himself.”
The Princess has publicly credited her parents with instilling solid values and a stable childhood for her own life, and seeks to recreate their success with her own three children.
Her recent video shows the family at home in Norfolk, George, Charlotte and Louis nestled between their maternal grandparents for a noisy game of cards.
The Middletons cannot trump the Monarchy, but they have certainly had some influence on how its next generation will grow up.
“The royal side will always come out on top however influential your family is or has been,” says Seward. “William is very family-minded because of this but he can’t beat the system.”
The book also gives a new and unprecedented insight into the Waleses’ work, and what the Princess of Wales has been dealing with behind-the-scenes all these years.
James’ candid disclosures about his serious mental health challenges lay bare just how close William and Harry’s Heads Together project must have been to Catherine’s heart.
After he invites them to attend a therapy session with him, where his psychiatrist explains James’ suicidal thoughts, he writes that Catherine and Pippa “come on board, and they understand”.
“Catherine has already done a lot of work through her mental health initiative Heads Together, and she asks [the therapist] some pertinent questions. She understands so much. I’m overwhelmed.”
The Middleton parents, he suggests, are desperate to help but – from a different generation – struggle to understand.
Later receiving a diagnosis of depression and attention deficit disorder, James credits turning his life around not just to his ever-present family, but to his beloved dog, Ella.
Although the memoir is often challenging, the depths of James’ sadness and isolation still raw in the telling, it is also full of warm, fresh insight into the Middleton family life – and the way they weave into the royal family.
James and Pippa learn their sister is to marry into the royal family when she whispers it to them in their local pub.
“We make a quiet acknowledgement that we’ll always be there for each other, look out for one another, support each other,” James writes. “No matter how crazy things get.”
On the morning it is due to be announced by the palace, he adds: “Catherine rings to let me know.”
Later on in the book, the late Queen is shown as a kind host, deftly playing jigsaws with a nervous James and giving him socks for Christmas, somehow “filling a granny-sized void in my life”.
When he stumbled over his words after arriving late to Catherine’s Sandringham birthday party, calling the Queen and Prince Philip a combination which came out as “Your Royal Majesty,” she ignores the family giggling to smile and tell him: “Oh, how lovely to see you, James. You must be hungry. Make sure you have something to eat”.
His pride in his sisters’ achievements is palpable, even as they overshadowed his own – “Middleton Minor” – at school. “They would fuss over me like mother hens,” he said, even when he stayed with them in London during the noughties, and they were less than thrilled to have their “little brother disrupting their orderly, tidy existence”.
“Protective, they prefer me to be with them rather than on my own. They can keep an eye on me, make sure I’m getting up in the morning.”
When Prince William opts to take Ella for a walk rather than join the ultra-competitive Middleton card games, “My sisters and I would exchange a knowing glance: William, for all the competitive rigour of his military training, was happy to be a loser at cards”.
“I know, too, that Ella gave him a good excuse to escape the fiercely competitive nature of the Middleton family, which emerged every time we played our favourite fast-paced card game, Racing Demon.”
The family embraces James’ quirks. While Catherine and Pippa receive jewellery for their 18th birthdays, James is given the choice of a “second-hand Peugeot 206 or a dilapidated and ancient tractor” and opts for the tractor.
Michael drives him to Devon to collect it - a project to “do up”.
His parents come across as the definition of firm but fair. After he drops out of university, they close his account at the “Bank of Mum and Dad” to compel him to find his direction in life.
Perhaps the most revealing is an account of how James’ future wife and mother of his child, Alizee, met the future Queen Catherine.
Deciding on impulse to stay at Carole and Michael’s house after attending a wedding nearby, James wakes to find George and Charlotte giggling outside the bedroom door.
Leaving Alizee to sleep, he takes them downstairs to the kitchen to join the Prince and Princess of Wales and all three children for a cup of tea. Soon afterwards, his new girlfriend appears and being “wonderfully French… just greets everyone warmly as if it’s not remotely unusual to be meeting her boyfriend’s sister and brother-in-law for the first time wearing only an oversized men’s shirt”.
The picture is somewhat different to Meghan’s account of meeting the then Duke and Duchess for the first time, when she was “in ripped jeans and barefoot” and realised, she said, that her habit of hugging was “really jarring for a lot of Brits”.
As they leave after a happy weekend, James said, they all hug and “I get a special squeeze from Catherine, who whispers in my ear, ‘She’s just great.’ Mum’s warm smile tells me she agrees.”
Since then, James and Alizee have married, welcomed a son, and James has launched a dog food company and works to promote charities Pets as Therapy and Dogs Trust.
His eldest sister, as the world knows, has been hit by different challenges of her own: first illness requiring major abdominal surgery, then a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy.
Again, the Middletons have rallied to step up and step in.
When the Princess was photographed on her way to hospital before making her diagnosis public, it was her mother who was driving her. Her sister Pippa is said to have provided wise counsel throughout and helped behind the scenes as the Princess navigated telling her children and then the world.
James has said he “couldn’t be more proud” of Catherine.
If the future of the monarchy rests on the Prince and Princess of Wales and their children, this memoir suggests, they rest in turn on the Middletons.
Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life by James Middleton is published by Radar and is set to be released in New Zealand on September 24, 2024.
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