Can donna and Kate’s brother be luckier in love than they are in business?
His firm’s lost £1m. She’s had a string of flops ...
SOME swear by chocolate, long walks, or the company of good friends. Socialite and former TV presenter Donna Air, though, is clearly cut from rarer cloth. Her response to breaking up with her long-term boyfriend was to go to an exclusive Alpine clinic, have vitamin infusions and try aerial yoga.
Donna confessed to Country & Town House magazine she was ‘desperate to get away from it all’, and told of being ‘diagnosed with stress’ at the Viva Mayr clinic in Austria after she separated last year from James Middleton, younger brother of the Duchess of Cambridge.
But such an experience doesn’t come cheap — at least £1,000 for a week of treatments, therapies and meal plans.
However, Miss Air, 37, is unlikely to have footed the bill herself. Country & Town House magazine editor-in-chief Lucy Cleland said this week: ‘[The trip] was arranged through Viva Mayr’s UK PR, who then asked us if we would like her to do a first person review for our spa guide.’
What remains politely unsaid is that a piece by Donna at that emotionally turbulent juncture in her life would have serious cachet because of its connection to the Middleton clan.
In publicity terms, its value would be many times the price of the specially tailored ‘liver compresses’ Donna underwent at the clinic, where she was cocooned in hot water bottles, all in a quest to recover from the sadness of splitting from Kate’s brother.
Thankfully, after her expensive heartbreak hotel, Donna and James, almost nine years her junior, reunited following a four-month ‘relationship sabbatical’.
Friends say they came back to the romance feeling it was the real thing. Marriage and babies are now being openly spoken of and they seem the picture of happiness.
Their reconciliation was welcome news, because both have been experiencing some rather tricky times financially.
Hard-won commercial deals have collapsed before Donna’s eyes, while James’s venture, Boomf, a personalised marshmallow company, has suffered losses of just over £1 million in a year. This after his cake making business also failed to take off.
So tight had things become, that in May 2016, Boomf took out a loan, reportedly for £500,000, from Barclays.
Still, Donna and James seem to sustain rather enviable lifestyles. Both have flats in Chelsea, and are regular fixtures on the cocktail and canape circuit.
How? Well, no doubt the Middleton family fortune helps James along the way, and Michael and Carole own the smart pad where he lives. Meanwhile, the ever-determined Donna is now trying to pay the bills by reinventing herself as a fashion stylist and brand consultant.
To date, her ventures have been less than successful. Her first foray into business as a clothes designer crashed when her children’s clothing range for Debenhams, which was on the shelves from 2012-13, ended.
HER turn as a jewellery designer has hit similarly troubled waters — the TV shopping channel QVC has stopped selling her Little Bird designs, and the online catalogue, Very, merely has a profile of Donna, with links to her jewellery...but they seem to be all sold out.
The latest accounts filed for Little Bird Limited suggest a very small scale business. In 2015 she reported the company’s total cash came to just £3,095, with net liabilities of £1,320.
Donna’s other commercial forays have not taken off either. The cosmetics company she set up in 2013, Letsblo, seems to have never filed any accounts and was dissolved in 2014.
Another business, Air Organics, appears to be dormant. Another firm, Airhead And Money, was dissolved in 2011, while an earlier project, Airhead Entertainment, was dissolved in 2003.
Little wonder she was keen to take part in Celebrity MasterChef, for an estimated £50,000 fee last year.
Despite her jokey ‘Airhead’ persona, Donna is, says a friend, ‘the sort of person who is always concerned about the future and where the next penny is coming from, and for her daughter Freya.’ Her determination is to be admired. She does some styling work and recently worked on a fashion shoot for the ‘clean eating’ Hemsley sisters.
She also praised their cookbook in a recent interview with the Telegraph: ‘I don’t follow food trends, but I do have the Hemsley & Hemsley cookbook and I’ve bought a spiraliser for their courgette spaghetti,’ she said.
She added: ‘Freya and I eat a lot of marshmallows and we’re big fans of Boomf (James Middleton’s marshmallow brand).’
Donna also acts as an adviser or consultant to brands including Habitat, with whom she collaborated on an internet campaign, and the clothes designer Karen Millen.
A friend said: ‘She is very savvy, very pleasant and very professional, and she has always been ambitious to make it beyond TV presenting.
‘She had a range of organic baby food years ago and that never really became a money-spinner. Maybe she was just ahead of her time. ‘She is very good at networking and at staying friends with people,’ says the friend. ‘I have never known her to fall out with anybody, ever.’ This, it seems, includes aristocrat Damian Aspinall, the father of her daughter Freya, now 13 and at boarding school. Despite dating for six years, they never married, but remain on good terms, and were pictured in happy conversation at a charity ball last year. Aspinall has since married fashion executive Victoria Fisher. Donna is not believed to have been given huge sums following their split in 2007. Little wonder that she once confessed to an interviewer that she’s a great believer in saving for a rainy day: ‘I have good survival instincts and generally anticipate problems before they arise . . . it’s often feast or famine. But when it’s famine I just carry on regardless.’ Her upbringing, no doubt, helps. Born in Wallsend, North Tyneside, Donna is the eldest of three children born to bus mechanic Trevor and BT receptionist Marie. Cast aged ten in the Geordie drama series Byker Grove with Ant and Dec, she went on to become a teenage pop star, and was then canny enough to buy a house in London’s smart Belsize Park, which is now worth £2.8 million. Her glory years followed: successful TV presenting roles, and friendships with everyone from Zoe Ball to Liam Gallagher. The late socialite Tara PalmerTomkinson introduced her to Damian Aspinall — who is the son of John, the casino owner best friend of Lord Lucan. Her social circle rapidly changed and, today, she’s great friends with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, among others. Despite being hand in glove with blue bloods, the horror of being anything less than comfortable hasn’t left her. She said last year: ‘I am scared of ever being super poor. ‘The thought terrifies me, as you can’t imagine not being able to feed or clothe your child.’ That’s not to say she doesn’t love to spend. She went on: ‘I recently succumbed to a pair of Chanel boots. They are divine and cost £600.’ For all her dogged chasing of fame and fortune, James is, in contrast, a bit of an eccentric dreamer. Happiest when mucking around with his dogs or restoring old tractors and cars, he dropped out of Edinburgh University after one year, only to see two early businesses, selling cake kits and cupcakes, fail to thrive.
This despite the support of his business-minded family — his first business, Cake Kit Company, was started with an £11,000 loan from his uncle Gary Goldsmith, a former property developer. However, it was dissolved in May 2015, alongside two other businesses James set up, Nice Cakes Ltd and Nice Wine Ltd.
The parent company of Nice Cakes and Nice Wine, Nice Group London, lost more than £110,000 between 2011, when it was set up, and 2015, when the latest accounts were filed. For the year ended March 31, 2015, it made a loss of just under £49,000.
JAMES is now engaged in trying to get Boomf off the ground — and every bit of publicity helps.
Based in a grain store near his parents’ Berkshire house, James sells boxes of marshmallows, embossed with personalised photographs and messages, at the rather steep price of £15 for nine — nearly £1.70 for each marshmallow.
After losing just over £1million, and desperate to breathe new life into the business, in January, James appointed a new chief executive, Sophie Dummer, 40.
She made her name at Moonpig. com, whose founder Nick Jenkins is a big investor in Boomf.
Jenkins sold Moonpig for £120 million in 2011 and joined Boomf as chairman in 2014.
He holds more than 65,000 shares but he has so far not seen much of a return on his investment.
Another backer of James’s company is his sister Pippa’s multimillionaire fiance James Matthews, who recently paid more than £100,000 to buy a stake of more than 12,800 shares.
Meanwhile, it is rumoured that Donna and James Middleton might tie the knot after Pippa gets married this May, despite James’s reticence about the subject in public.
He said last year: ‘I love Donna very much. Marriage is absolutely not something I’m scared of [but it] isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all.
‘She makes me very happy [and] I think I make her very happy. I want children. I’ve said that before. I will have children, but you’ll have to wait.’