Last month, Pippa Middleton won the battle but not the war. Truly, a pyrrhic victory for the Wisteria Sister! Pippa and her husband, Terribly Moderately Wealthy James Matthews, won the right to block pedestrians and ramblers from the entirety of their Kintbury estate, even the parts of the estate which were previously believed to be “common use.” Pippa and TMW James spent several years on this battle and they won. But they lost the larger war, because their neighbors despise them and those neighbors openly bad-mouth them to the media. Not to mention, Pippa still has to dig up her tacky parking lot, so there! Anyway, the gossip around Pippa has never been worse. Around her September birthday, the Daily Mail did a huge piece about how she’s a flop who will never escape her sister’s shadow. Now the Times of London is sharpening their knife. Times columnist Max Hastings (via The Royalist) had some fun gossip about Pippa’s reputation around Kintbury.

[Max Hastings’] notebook column in The Times is a case in point. Tucked into a reflection on posh country life (the gist being that it is prudent to rub along reasonably peaceably with one’s neighbors) is a thoroughly delicious morsel about Pippa Middleton and her husband, the hedge fund manager James Matthews, whom Max describes as the “newish squire and squiress of Kintbury” in his corner of West Berkshire.

Much local gossip, Max reports, focuses on the couple, who recently won a long-running battle against local objectors to close a footpath across their estate, on the grounds that it infringed their privacy. One neighbor who has walked that way for years, he writes, has found the gate codes changed.

Then comes the line that caught my eye. Other snippets “rattling” around the area, Max alleges, include “stingy tipping, more-royal-than-the-royals behaviour.” None of it, he concludes, makes the family entirely beloved locally, though he is careful to add that her sister, the Princess of Wales, offers “a daily masterclass in how to do the princess bit” right.

[From The Royalist Substack]

The “more royal than the royals” knock is one we’ve heard before. If I’m not mistaken, the infamous 2020 Tatler cover story on Kate included some juicy gossip about how Kate, Pippa and Carole act very grand and like they can’t believe they pulled off one of the biggest scams in history. That 2020 piece was published three years before Party Pieces went bankrupt, leaving millions in debt to a lot of creditors. My point? The Middletons are the biggest grifters out there and it’s not a surprise that their neighbors easily see through their grift. Carole’s neighbors hate her too – when Party Pieces collapsed, someone in Bucklebury kept papering the town with posters about Carole’s debts. Pippa’s neighbors have been openly bitching about her for years. Kate stole hundreds of acres of public parkland so she wouldn’t have to deal with the peasantry. Let’s not pretend that these women are salt-of-the-earth. Oh, and Pippa being a bad tipper… yep. I bet they all treat service workers like sh-t.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.