Pippa Middleton Book About Party Planning

Pippa Middleton Book About Party Planning - Kate Middleton’s sister was an endearing scene-stealer at the royal wedding, but now she’s catching hell from all corners for a proposed party-planning book that will land in the middle of economic hard times.

The news that Pippa Middleton, the sister of Kate who displayed a scene-stealing derrière at the royal wedding, is to publish a book on how to organize the perfect party, has gone down about as well in Britain as would a keynote address by Prince Philip at the NAACP Convention.

In a rare pincer attack, both the left-wing Guardian and the right-wing Daily Mail have monstered the hapless Pippa, producing their own scathing parodies of how the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister’s new tome might look.

Neither can resist referencing Prince Harry’s ill-advised choice of a Nazi costume at a fancy dress party in 2005. “My royal in-laws love a fancy dress party with an original theme. For example, you could have a Nazi theme?” writes The Guardian's Catherine Bennett, while David Thomas, in the Mail, has Pippa saying, “I adore fancy-dress parties, but it's such hard work trying to think of a theme. I used to think it was a safe bet to go for uniforms, but since Harry got into all that trouble for wearing a swastika armband, that's a no-no.”

The Daily Mail piece was illustrated with an oft-seen cache of embarrassing photos of Pippa at various college parties, engaged in japes such as wearing a dress made out of toilet paper (“All the naughty boys pour wine on it to see if it goes soggy”) and clambering atop a human pyramid (“It’s crucial to be the girl on top—like me—because then everyone knows you’re the thinnest!”)

The justification for this book is that Pippa is in the party business—she works for her parents’ mail-order party shop, Party Pieces, but, as she has previously labored in the field of public relations, one might have thought that young Pip would recall the basic rule of that industry: try not to make the public hate you.

Has Pippa learned nothing from the adventures of the ghastly Sarah Ferguson (or “Duchess,” as she ludicrously still insists on being called, despite the fact that she divorced Andrew, Duke of York, in 1996) who was caught in May 2010 drunkenly offering access to her ex for $500,000? What about the treatment meted out to Peter Phillips, a lowly 13th in line to the throne, who was pilloried for selling his wedding photos to Hello magazine for £500,000? His sister, Zara Phillips, then tried to repeat the trick with her own nuptials, but was warned off by the palace.