“Everyone’s always said ‘Why don’t you do royal cooking, why don’t you do royal cooking,’ and I’d always said ‘No’,” he says, over coffee at a private members’ club in Notting Hill. Looking boyish in a blue jacket, Parker Bowles, 49, is the epitome of slightly rumpled affability.
“Then, around the time of the Platinum Jubilee [in 2022] I was asked to write a piece on historical coronation food. I thought ‘This is fun’. And it was a hell of a word rate. And it was fascinating. I love street food, but you have to have the high and the low.”
As he approached 50, with a long career as a food writer and broadcaster under his belt, Parker Bowles decided at last to write about the great inescapable topic in his life. Family is the starting point for many good writers; the King’s stepson has taken a quarter of a century to make his peace with the idea.
“I suppose I have come full circle,” he says. “I knew that if I did it it would be all ‘Ah, he’s just a nepo middle-aged man, jumping on the bandwagon’. But I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. In the end I just thought ‘screw it’. After 25 years, I thought ‘I want to do something I’m proud of’. I was aware I was being given the opportunity to do something proper.”
If the book has provoked a few snarky comments, that is nothing he is not used to. “I’ve had [criticism] my whole life,” he says. “You get used to the slings and arrows.”
The result is Cooking and the Crown, a charming romp through regal dining habits, from Queen Victoria to Charles III, which came out in September.
Covering everything from breakfast and picnics to state banquets, there are recipes for Camilla’s porridge and the Queen Mother’s gin and dubonnet and Queen Elizabeth II’s curry, as well as tales of Edward VII and Victoria’s prodigious appetites.
As the book makes clear, being a royal is about moderation as well as excess. There is turtle soup and “trilogy of mutton”, but there is also Queen Camilla’s healthy chicken broth.
It serves as an interesting snapshot of how fast the royal role in food has changed. Where a century ago it was a matter of “souffle diplomacy”, roast cygnet and endless shooting weekends, today the King is a figurehead for organic and heritage produce.
Parker Bowles with his mother, Queen Camilla, at an event at Hampton Court Palace in June this year. Photo / Getty Images
Given the author, the book was never going to be a Spare-style tell-all, but Parker Bowles sought the appropriate permissions anyway.
“Everyone thinks I knew the late Queen, but we only met twice,” he says.
“Once when I was 8 and I was scared so I curtseyed rather than bowed, and again at my mother’s wedding, where my sister and I went for a fag and heard her voice behind us saying ‘Are you lost?’. [The relationship] was very much once-removed.
“I asked my mother if it would be okay if I wrote the book. I asked my stepfather, he said ‘Great’. I asked if the book had been mentioned to the late Queen – I’m not 100% [certain], but I think she said okay.”
While the name did not help in the research or writing of the book, it has been helpful for flogging it.
“You’re well aware of [the benefits],” Parker Bowles says. “The marketing people liked it. If my name was Tom Smith, I would not have been on Good Morning America. I might not be doing this interview.”
It is a surprise he was so concerned about the accusations of nepotism. Who better to write a book like this? Of all the extended royals, the genial and self-effacing Parker Bowles has long struck a respectful balance between not publicly criticising the family firm while acknowledging that he has benefitted from the associations. He has a discernible career and he has never grumbled about what must at times have been a difficult road.
Born in 1974, Parker Bowles grew up in Wiltshire, the only son of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles. He has a younger sister, Laura.
After prep school and Eton, Parker Bowles was studying English at Oxford when the news broke that his mother was having an affair with the then-Prince of Wales. Tabloids had published details of a romantic phone call between Charles and Camilla.
Andrew and Camilla divorced in 1995, Charles and Diana the following year. (Charles and Camilla finally married in 2005.)
In 1999, when he was 24 and working for a talent agency, the tabloids busted him for taking drugs at the Cannes film festival. He received a dressing down from his future stepfather and criticism in the then-rabid press.
(From left) Queen Camilla, Laura Lopes, Andrew Parker Bowles, and Tom Parker Bowles. Photo / Getty Images
“It was the very height of the tabloid era,” he recalls. “I remember being chased at 100mph [160km/h] by paps [paparazzi] trying to get a shot. My mother being screamed at to try to get a reaction. Pushing, jostling.
“It was horrific, and you are protective of your mother. Counting how many paps were at the gates, to see who was watching us and taking photographs: it was all as normal as bacon and eggs in the morning. You didn’t think of it in any other way … [But] it was barbaric.
“I learned a long time ago not to put my fat fingers into the world of William and Harry,” he adds. “But it was appalling what they went through. I’ve had a billionth of what they’ve had to go through but hell, I sympathise.”
Two years after his brush with notoriety, he was hired by Tatler as their food columnist and never looked back. In 2003 he joined the Mail on Sunday. Cooking and the Crown is his ninth book; he has been a critic on MasterChef for a decade, as well as presenting dozens of TV and radio programmes. In 2010, he won a Guild of Food Writers’ award for work on British food. He has earned his dues.
“I don’t think you can get bitter about the whole thing,” he says. “I knew full well that I only got my job at Tatler … under [its then-editor] Geordie Greig, because of [his connections]. I wouldn’t totter up to the editor of the Socialist Worker. I hope I’ve made my own way since then. I know I can string a sentence together. I know I like food. I’m not really given to self-doubt on that front.”
At this point he is a veteran of the food media, who has seen chefs rise and fall, newfangled ingredients become commonplace, small plates come and go.
“All the young thrusters from when I was young – Angela [Hartnett], Jason [Atherton] – are the grand old ambassadors now,” he says. His industry has changed too: it can be a surprisingly angry place, where arguments rage over cultural appropriation and diversity. Parker Bowles casts himself as a curious, conflict-averse presence.
“With my reviews I go looking for good,” he says. “The language of hate is far richer and more satisfying than the language of like and love. We all know what fun it is to give something a massive kicking. But I don’t think many of the critics do it anymore.”
A few subjects nudge him from his usual bonhomie. As a reformed raver he is upset with how London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has managed the capital’s nightlife.
“London’s nightlife seems to have disappeared,” he says. “It’s not a 24-hour city. [Khan] has done badly by the after-dark industry. London for me is the greatest city in the world. But he is not the greatest mayor in the world, not by a long stretch.”
His ire also extends to those who go seeking offence. At an awards do, after we speak, Parker Bowles will rage against “virtue signallers”. “As for the ‘me, me, me’ moaners, the whiners, the bleaters, and the empty virtue-signallers and the eternally bloody offended,” he said at the Boisdale Cigar Smoker of the Year Awards, “f*** off”.
Tom Parker Bowles with fellow food critics Jimi Famurewa and Grace Dent on the latest series of MasterChef: The Professionals.
Farming heroes
As a country boy who has made his living writing about produce and producers, Parker Bowles has a special interest in the plight of the farmers.
“The farming protests were magnificent,” he says. “This idea that if a farm is worth £5 million ($10.9m) they’re millionaires – they make nothing. Food is the backbone of our country. I grew up among farmers. We’re a farming country and farmers have been criminally ignored by the Government.
“Think of the last great agriculture minister – Therese Coffey, Jesus Christ – you have to go back to [William] Waldegrave, or [Nicholas] Soames, for someone who took this role of minister seriously. If you care about food and producers, you’ve got to care about farmers. To start taxing it, you’re basically breaking a butterfly on a wheel. It’s not right. It’s the politics of envy. That’s the one thing I feel qualified talking about!
“The two heroes of farming are the King and Jeremy Clarkson,” he adds. “Clarkson’s a hero of the farmers because he has shown that it’s a thankless task.
“I’d never ever speak for the King. But all my life, way before it was trendy, way before regenerative was even a word … he has been banging the drum and supporting farming. There is no man – and I’m not being oily – who knows more about cheesemaking. If he wasn’t king he would be a fantastic food writer.”
Tom’s father, Andrew Parker Bowles, is in fighting form, too. “He’s almost 85, but he has always been fit and he has only ever drunk at night,” he says. “That’s why he’s fine.”
Parker Bowles senior has been in the news for his reported relationship with the former Weakest Link presenter Anne Robinson.
“I still don’t know the truth of it,” his son equivocates. “He denies it, he says they’re just good friends. And I’ll take his word for it. But there’s life in the old dog yet.”
Andrew and Robinson may want to thrash their story out: she confirmed the relationship earlier this year.
On reaching middle age, Parker Bowles has had to take his own health more seriously. The job of a restaurant writer is a calorific undertaking.
“When I first started writing about food I was whippet thin,” he says. “Then the weight slowly creeps up and now I can’t get it off. I do Pilates twice a week, which I really like, but I’m this 49-year old man sat with all these very buff men and lithe women. I went to the doctor and said ‘Can I have one of those Ozempics?’
“He said ‘No you can’t’. I said ‘Why? I’m eating more healthily, I’m exercising, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink three days of the week’. He said ‘It’s the other four I’m worried about’. I said how much rose and white wine I drink. He doubled it to get the right amount, and worked out that it was [equal to] about 18 cheeseburgers. At my age, diet is all it is. And it kills me. But I couldn’t give up carbs.”
Christmas plans
Parker Bowles is unlikely to lose weight at Christmas. For the first time, although he says it is not 100% confirmed, he is planning to take his family to Sandringham for Christmas Day. Usually he has spent it with his ex-wife, former fashion editor Sara Buys, and their teenage children Lola and Frederick, but this year he is set on taking the children to Norfolk.
“For the past 15 years it has been: I go back to my ex-wife’s house, sit in my tracksuit bottoms, go to the pub while the beef’s in, then try to get my children to watch The Wild Geese. Classic. So this would be a bit different.”
He says he does not know which other family members will be in attendance, nor what the activities might be. No Monopoly with Meghan? Articulate with Prince Andrew? “I genuinely know nothing about it,” he protests. “I know there’s turkey and sprouts and church. And I have to bring a suit and a dinner jacket.”
Tom Parker Bowles (back left), his sister Laura (front centre) and her husband Harry Lopes (front right) attend the King and Queen’s Coronation in May 2023. Photo / Getty Images
He says that while the invitation has always been there, his mother specifically asked him to come this year. It has been a difficult period for the King and Queen, health-wise. The King is being treated for cancer; the Queen has been recovering from a bout of pneumonia after their trip to Australia and Samoa.
“My mum said ‘I’d love you to come, I haven’t had Christmas with you for a long time’,” he says. “It has been a hell of a two years for them. The older you get, the more conscious you become of mortality, especially with illnesses and the rest of it.”
Despite his mother’s recent infection, Parker Bowles says she is resilient.
“She went back to work before she should have done but she’s fine. She’s tough. She hates that she missed Remembrance Sunday. That’s a big day for her. She just gets on with it. She’s always been like that.
“Sometimes you don’t know where she is and you’ll look at the telly and she’ll be in Ireland. Nothing’s changed [since she became Queen] except she’s now Your Majesty, rather than Your Highness, and she works a lot harder.”
Frederick was a page boy for the Queen at the Coronation, along with his twin cousins Gus and Louis, but, other than that, he and Sara have mostly kept their children out of the public eye. “It was a huge honour to be asked,” he says, recalling the family discussion about whether to put them into such an enormous event. “We’d do anything for our mother and stepfather. But suddenly to show them to an audience of two billion …
“Luckily it worked out beautifully. They were great, they did it, then they disappeared again. The children are protected at school. The worry comes when they leave school and go out into the big wide world.”
Lola is 17, on the cusp of being at risk of the same tabloid scandals her father endured. “I just say, don’t trust everyone and don’t get caught falling out of nightclubs like I did,” he says.
“I can’t give my children the drink and drugs chat. I mean I can, but they can just Google [me]. Drugs and drinking are dangerous things. I don’t condone it. But one thing I do say is ‘Look, if something terrible happens, call us and call the ambulance straight away’.”
Turning 50
If Parker Bowles has any anxieties about turning 50 later this month, they are well hidden. He is planning a couple of lunches to celebrate. He is living in North Kensington with his girlfriend of almost four years, a relationship he prefers to keep out of the public eye. After his split from Buys, he suffered a public tragedy in early 2021 when Alice Procope, his partner of two years, died of cancer.
“The only worries you have are the people you love,” he says. “You want your children to be happy, your parents to be happy. I’ve been with the same girlfriend for four years, but nobody has any interest in her, thank the lord. In the past, people used to delve into my relationships and I always felt guilty.
“You just want to keep your head down and let the work speak for itself.”
Speaking of work, he and the drinks writer Henry Jeffreys have started a podcast, Intoxicating History, about the role alcohol has played in world events. Like many a journalist seeking to diversify his income stream, Parker Bowles is about to launch a Substack newsletter, about “everything, but mainly food and travel”. There are always more restaurants to seek out, more programmes to present.
Halfway through our interview another outlet messages him to ask if he will go on the radio and talk about Gregg Wallace, his Masterchef stablemate, who has been in the news recently following multiple accusations of inappropriate behaviour towards women.
“I’ve always liked Gregg. In my presence he’s just told a couple of crap jokes, nothing filthy,” he says. “Because I’m a middle-aged man I wasn’t made to feel uncomfortable.
“But I don’t like social media pile-ons. I respect [Telegraph columnist] William Sitwell for standing up for his friend. That’s what you do for friends. I always feel sorry for people [in media storms].” (Parker Bowles is speaking before allegations by Wallace’s ghost writer were made public.)
“But sometimes you need a bit of PR advice. Pile-ons are like storms of hornets. They happen and they move on.”
Wise words, from one who knows. Keep your head down and let your work do the talking. One or two other members of the Royal family could learn from him.
Cooking and the Crown: Royal recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III, by Tom Parker Bowles (Whitcoulls, $74.95) is out now.
