Pippa Middleton: they all want a piece of our party queen Both the Middleton girls attended Marlborough College in Wiltshire. Both were popular and shone, particularly at sports, but there were - and remain - striking differences between them. Kevin Allford, a housemaster at the school during the girls" time, remembers: "Pippa was tough, not like Catherine. If she fell down, she picked herself up and just got on with it. While Kate headed for St Andrews, where she would meet William, Pippa studied English Literature at Edinburgh. The absence of available princes did nothing to deter her social rise, as she aligned herself with a group informally known as the "Castle Crew," largely composed of the heirs to stately homes and landed estates. One former undergraduate has said of her: "Pippa arrived knowing no one and made it her business to leave knowing everyone." Unlike many well-bred and well-educated girls of her generation, she felt entirely comfortable with the idea of social elevation, and struggled to understand the "toffish" tendency to play down wealth and privilege. For some years after leaving Edinburgh, Pippa had bobbled around the fringes of London's social circuit, earning Tatler's "No 1 Singleton Award," and working for the party goods company owned by her parents, Michael and Carole. But it wasn't until her memorably Monroesque appearance at last year's Royal wedding - one that put the term "bum envy" into the popular discourse - that the world really took notice. We are still not sure what we are seeing. Just when it seems safe to agree with Time's flattering diagnosis of discretion, and classiness, Pippa turns up in Paris in the company of a man on a dog lead and a woman in a chastity belt, and the following day, when one of her raffish new aristo pals pulls a gun on a photographer, she is judged lucky not to end up in the slammer. So the Castle Crew has, seemingly, given way to the Château Crew, but the progression is a natural one. Last year, Pippa made her social breakthrough in Paris while attending the French Open tennis as a guest of Xavier Peugeot, a descendant of the car firm that sponsors the event. He took her out to dinner with a group of friends, one of whom was Vicomte Arthur de Soultrait - the host of last week's notorious birthday party. Still, we all have to work for a living, and there's no doubt that Pippa - destined never again to be that anonymous, middle-class girl from Berkshire - is reconciled to playing the cards she has been dealt. It isn't such a bad hand, and to her credit, she plays them fairly. Since the wedding, she has been flooded with commercial offers, and turned almost all of them down. She reveals nothing about her life or that of her sister. The picture editor of a national newspaper recently told the Leveson inquiry that he is offered up to 400 Pippa photos a day. Not one of them shows her losing her cool. For now, there is the book to be finished. Pippa is known to be writing it herself, without the help of a ghostwriter, and to see it primarily as a guide to the pitfalls of the party scene - one of which may be failing to understand the motive behind your invitation.