The Queen Consort’s son has hit back at some of Prince Harry’s most incendiary allegations, insisting Camilla had no “sort of end game” to become Queen.
Food writer Tom Parker Bowles, one of the Queen’s two children from her first marriage, told the News Agents podcast that his mother had “just married the person she loved”.
Parker Bowles’ comments come after the King’s younger son branded Camilla a “villain”, and called her the “third person in the marriage” of the King and Princess Diana.
“The need for her to rehabilitate her image … that made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press,” Prince Harry told US 60 Minutes during promotional interviews in January for his memoir Spare.
In the book, the prince wrote that his stepmother had played “the long game” with a campaign aimed at marriage and “the crown”. He also claimed he and brother Prince William had pleaded with their father not to remarry after Princess Diana’s death.
Camilla and her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, divorced in 1995. She and the then Prince of Wales married in April 2005.
She will be crowned alongside the King in a coronation at Westminster Abbey in London on May 6.
Parker Bowles’s youngest child, Freddy will be a “page of honour” at the coronation, alongside his cousins Gus and Louis Lopes, and the King’s grandson, Prince George.
This week, Parker Bowles told podcast hosts Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel: “I think change happens but I don’t care what anyone says – this wasn’t any sort of end game.
“She married the person she loved and this is what happened.”
Asked if he found it difficult to think of Camilla as Queen, he said: “Not really because she’s still our mother.
“I say ‘our’ but not the royal ‘we’, speaking for my sister and me. She’s our mother.”
Also this week, a former Archbishop of Canterbury has revealed how he arranged a secret meeting with the now Queen Consort in his son’s south-east London flat to get to know the future royal.
George Carey, who was archbishop from 1991-2002, has told ITV series The Real Crown: Inside the House of Windsor that he met Camilla at a flat in Peckham before her wedding to the then Prince of Wales.
“She walked through the front door. We met and had coffee together and I was really struck by her,” he said.
“Very nice looking lady, very presentable, very intelligent. We had a really animated conversation and we talked about her relationship with Charles, going way back to when they were teenagers and so on.
“After she left, I said ‘well, there’s no way I could ever treat her as other than a really nice human being who’s deeply in love with Charles’.
“That affected me in talking to other people behind the scenes and I hoped it had a way forward. I think it did.”
The Real Crown chronicles the royal family throughout the late Queen Elizabeth’s reign and her successor the King, featuring interviews with contemporary figures.
“I remember going to see the Queen (Elizabeth) once to hand in my resignation and said ‘Your Majesty, the time has come,” Lord Carey says in the final episode.
“She looked at me, more or less she said: ‘You people come and go. I can’t resign. I can’t surrender – I’ve got to keep going.’
“And I said ‘well, the Lord tells me at the age of 70 I’ve got to go’.”
-with AAP
