Kate Middleton (RF/Startraksphoto.com)
If you’re lucky enough to be invited to Friday’s royal wedding, there’s one guest you definitely want to be seated next to — the bride’s wild-man uncle, Gary Goldsmith.
Sure to be the life of the party, Goldsmith is the younger brother of Kate Middleton’s mom, Carole. His introduction into polite society arrived via a 2009 tabloid sting that allegedly caught him selling lines of cocaine to an undercover reporter and boasting about his royal connection. In 2006, when Kate and Prince William visited Gary’s villa in Ibiza, Spain — named “Maison de Bang Bang” — his first words to the future king were “Oi, you f- -ker!”
Such are the pitfalls of marrying a commoner. While Carole and Michael Middleton have built up a respectable mail-order empire, earning millions and sending their daughter to exclusive boarding schools, there are some black sheep of the family that have the royals holding their breath.
COMPLETE ROYAL WEDDING GUEST LIST
Gary, a tattooed IT millionaire, now lives in London. Since the engagement announcement, he has cleaned up his act and is no longer dating his lap-dancer girlfriend.
“Gary was the subject of much negotiation,” a royal source says. “Initially, he was only invited to the ceremony at Westminster Abbey and not to the queen’s afternoon reception and Prince Charles’ nighttime party.
“But the prospect of Uncle Gary visiting a central London pub in the afternoon and holding forth about the family wedding was viewed inside Buckingham Palace as a recipe for disaster. So he’ll be attending every wedding event.”
Royal minders will be on hand, however, to ensure that Gary doesn’t spend too much time with William’s exuberant younger brother and best man, Prince Harry. “Nobody wants to see ‘When Harry Met Gary’ headlines in the papers,” the source adds.
According to Katie Nicholl, author of the William and Kate bestseller “The Making of a Royal Romance,” Gary’s presence will mean much to his sister.
“He has done everything he can to reform, and Carole has forgiven him,” she says. “They only have each other, family-wise. He really has made an effort to clean up his act. He’s lost weight, and he’s not drinking. He’ll definitely be on his best behavior at the wedding, with his tattoos covered up.”
Although not as wild as Gary, Kate’s brother and sister have also made appearances in the gossip pages.
Pippa, 27, works for the events company Table Talk. Her brother, James, 23, runs Cake Kit, a bakery heavily backed by his parents’ firm.
Both are more social than Britain’s future queen.
“Kate is much less of a party animal than Pippa and James,” says a friend of the family. “She’s become even more cautious now she’s so much in the spotlight. She never puts a foot wrong in social situations. If she is leaving one of her favorite London nightclubs, like Mahiki, she will go to the bathroom and freshen her makeup just before she exits so that she looks good when she steps outside and faces the paparazzi.”
As maid of honor, Pippa has been busy planning the wedding, but that hasn’t derailed her own socializing. She attended an engagement party in London last Thursday for Holly Branson, daughter of British business tycoon Richard Branson.
“Both Pippa and James will enjoy Kate being a princess more than their sister will,” the royal source adds. “I remember attending a party Pippa was throwing when she was starting out as an events organizer. She herself was serving the food to guests! She’s definitely ascended a few rungs on the social ladder since then, and she can’t get enough of it.
“Pippa’s party trick is removing her clothes and draping herself in a pyramid of toilet roll. Somehow, I doubt she’ll be performing that piece next Friday.”
Pippa is taking her boyfriend, businessman and former cricketer Alex Loudon, to the wedding. Her brother, James, is attending solo.
James attracted unwelcome coverage in 2008 when pho tos of him wearing a polka-dot dress — loaned to him by Kate — were leaked to UK tabloids.
He caused further embarrassment to his older sister when he publicized his cake company in the UK celebrity-news magazine Hello! He was pictured posing with his cakes, which were emblazoned with Hello! covers, including one of William’s late mother, Princess Diana.
One relative who won’t be at the wedding is Katrina Darling, Kate’s 20-year-old cousin. Darling is a raunchy burlesque dancer based in northeast England whose signature act, dubbed “God Save the Queen,” ends with her clad only in red nipple tassels and a thong.
A fixture of the cabaret scene in Sunderland, Katrina mixes in decidedly different circles than her cousin. She told the London Daily Mail earlier this month that catching the burlesque bug was her equivalent of landing a prince. “I sneaked in to watch a burlesque show and knew that was what I wanted to do,” she said. Darling likes to strip to “Rule, Britannia.”
But despite colorful family characters, some say the Middletons are far too normal.
“The problem with the Middletons is they’re not super posh, and they’re not super common,” one royal observer says. “So in British terms, they’re super uninteresting.”
Middleton’s family has been meticulous at grooming themselves so as not to embarrass the family they are marrying into. Since the engagement, they have succeeded in avoiding scandal.
“There are more Middletons in the UK than people think,” says British social commentator Peter York. “Kate’s mother came from a family that made its way up quite quickly from miners and East End [of London] people. That’s not uncommon. What is uncommon is how fast it has happened.”
“He’s not marrying a J.Lo, Jenny-from-the-block type,” York adds. “It’s just unusual in terms of the historic, royal upper-class experience. But she’s not a poor girl, and she’s not a girl who doesn’t know how to behave.”
York thinks that William and Kate will fare better than Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
“Diana came from a family so aristocratic they considered themselves grander than the Windsors,” he notes. “This is a real wedding, not an arranged one like so many previous royal marriages. Kate Middleton is from a real family.”