Queen Camilla’s Hard-Drinking, Chain-Smoking Reputation Is “Totally Inaccurate,” Says…see more

Queen Camilla’s Hard-Drinking, Chain-Smoking Reputation Is “Totally Inaccurate,” Says Her Son
Tom Parker Bowles has “never seen her so much as tipsy,” the cookbook author told the U.K.’s The Times.

If you imagine Queen Camilla boozing it up behind closed doors, constantly wreathed by cigarette smoke, as she’s been portrayed in pop culture on shows like The Windsors, her son Tom Parker Bowles has some news for you.

“My mother hardly drinks,” he told the U.K.’s The Times in an interview published over the weekend, in support of his upcoming cookbook Cooking and the Crown. “Never seen her so much as tipsy.”

He went on to say that she’d “never drunk a glass of gin in her life. Doesn’t smoke.” That caricature of the second wife of King Charles III is “totally inaccurate,” he said.

Parker Bowles himself, however, is a different story when it comes to vices. While discussing his time in school at Eton, he said that “like any school, there were a lot of twats … But it was the most incredible education, you know. If you were good at something …”

And you know what he was good at?

“Smoking,” he said. “You used to collect Marlboro pack tops to get [prizes]. Marlboro Zippos. The ultimate was the Marlboro leather jacket, which no one ever got. This was the end of the Eighties. Smoking was very cool. So: smoking, and I was good at English.”

While he told plenty of stories about himself, including a childhood escapade that can be summed up by him saying “I didn’t get caught, and I ate all the sweets,” and a later in life habit of binge-eating McDonald’s (“Big Mac, cheeseburger, and six chicken burgers” was then and remains now his order) due to “having been a raver all my teenage years,” Camilla’s eldest child returned again to the topic of his royal mother, calling her “tough” and saying he is “so proud of her.”

Though things were difficult once Camilla and Charles’ relationship became public knowledge, now, Parker Bowles said, he’s not surprised the nation has embraced his mother.

“If anyone ever meets my mother, they always… I mean, a son would say this, but she’s someone I love going to have dinner with,” he said. “And I go for a walk with her in Scotland. You’re always going to have your rows, differences of opinion. It would be very odd if we agreed [on] everything. Creepy. I certainly would annoy her sometimes.”