Tom Parker Bowles Refutes Portrayals of Queen Camilla as a Heavy Drinker: ‘Never Seen Her So Much as Tipsy’

Tom Parker Bowles wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his mother, Queen Camilla.

In an interview with The Times promoting his new book Cooking and the Crown: Royal Recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III, Parker Bowles refutes portrayals of his mother as a heavy drinker and a chainsmoker, as depicted in shows like the comedy The Windsors.

“Oh, you know she has that reputation of drinking gin and smoking?” he told the outlet, adding, “Never drunk a glass of gin in her life. Doesn’t smoke.”

He continued, “My mother hardly drinks. Never seen her so much as tipsy.” When asked about “the idea of Camilla as a gin-swigging chainsmoker,” Parker Bowles said that depiction was “totally inaccurate.”

Parker Bowles, 49, was in his late teens and early twenties in the mid-1990s when his parents Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles divorced, and his mother faced fervent vitriol as “the other woman” in the marriage of then Prince Charles (now King Charles) and Princess Diana, who separated in 1992 and ultimately finalized their divorce in 1996. 

The tabloid frenzy surrounding his mother made Parker Bowles “angry, very angry,” he told The Times. “Especially when the paparazzi were at their worst, saying things, trying to get a reaction. Running and screaming, and you’d just want to smack them. But you didn’t.”

He added, “We’d count them, you know? How many paps were lurking in the garden, on the public footpath…‘Oh, there are four today.’ I think we all [brushed it off] — especially my mother…She’s tough.”

When asked if Camilla, 77, was tougher than Parker Bowles himself, he said, simply, “Much.”

Cooking and the Crown is Parker Bowles’ ninth book; a restaurant critic and food writer, he’s written about food for 25 years, but never about the royal family — until now. (Cooking and the Crown hits shelves on Oct. 22.)

“Totally kept away from it,” he said of bringing the royal family into his work. “Separate…oh, not ‘church and state,’ but just separate the two.”

He did so to avoid the perception of cashing in on his connections to royalty, telling The Times, “If I’d [announced] in 1999, ‘I’m going to do royal food,’ it would have been more suspect.”

Even up to the present day, when it comes to writing about his mother and stepfather King Charles, 75, “There’s a line,” he said. “Everything went through my mother first, and then through the palace. My aim, obviously, as a food writer, is to write good books about food. But my other aim is never to embarrass, or jeopardize, or blur that line [with] my stepfather, whom I love and respect and adore.”

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In the 30 years that have passed since tabloid frenzy was peaking in the mid-1990s, and in the nearly 20 years since Charles and Camilla married in 2005, the public has come around to Queen Camilla, which doesn’t surprise her only son. (Camilla also has a daughter, Laura Lopes, with ex-husband Andrew.)

“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,” Parker Bowles said, adding he’s “so proud of her.”