No excuses, Tom just tells it like it was
Tom Parker Bowles was 13 when he first spotted paparazzi on the drive at home trying to get photos of his mother, Camilla. He was 18 when Princess Diana pressed the nuclear button and went public over Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla.
one year later, he was a student at oxford when a private, embarrassingly intimate conversation between the Prince and his mother was made public.
Having to suffer these mortifications at such an impressionable age would be enough to send any young man off the rails, or feel sorry for himself.
Indeed, Tom was caught in a tabloid sting when he was 24, in which he admitted snorting cocaine.
But his great triumph is that he doesn’t blame his background for anything. He takes full responsibility for himself and his mistakes. ‘It was nothing to do with pressures of the situation I was in. God no. I just loved raving,’ he told a newspaper this week. Good for Tom! No wonder he has thrived and survived, despite it all.