Royal photographer stirs controversy by claiming Camilla ‘is NICER than Princess Diana’ and ‘easier to get on with’: ‘People’s memories are slipping’
Princess Diana is still one of the UK’s most favourite Royals.
But royal photographer Arthur Edwards has claimed Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, ‘is nicer than the Princess of Wales’.
‘Diana has been dead for 25 years, so people’s memories are slipping, and they’ve embraced Camilla,’ he told Stellar magazine.
‘You know what? Camilla is nicer than Diana. Easier to get on with,’ he continued.
‘Diana used to have her moods, and when she died, she wasn’t talking to her mother or Sarah Ferguson because of silly rows. You don’t get that with the Duchess.’
It comes after Camilla recently admitted in an interview with her son Tom Parker Bowles in You magazine, her kitchen skills are limited and she has a friendly competition with her husband, Prince Charles, over the fruit and vegetables that they grow.
Describing her culinary style as ‘nothing too mucked about, or fussy or fiddly’, Camilla said she learnt to cook by watching her mother, Rosalind Shand, who made food the ‘heart’ of family life.
‘One of my earliest memories is podding those peas and beans with my mother, an accomplished cook,’ she said. ‘I learnt from my mother. I’ve never followed a recipe in my life.’
‘On Friday nights, we were allowed to choose our dinner,’ she recalled. ‘I always went for frozen chicken pie, much to my mother’s despair.’
In the Swinging Sixties the Duchess often visited London’s best restaurants, such as Alexander’s on the King’s Road. ‘I remember how excited I was when I first ate prawn and avocado at Alexander’s… The combination seemed impossibly exotic,’ Camilla said.
The Shand family spent summers on the island of Ischia, near Naples, which the Duchess sais ‘instilled a lifelong passion for Italian food’. Yet she takes little credit for the refined palate of her restaurant critic son, describing herself as ‘never the most adventurous of cooks’.
The Duchess specialised in simple, healthy food when Tom and his sister Laura were growing up in Wiltshire.
‘My cooking is about good ingredients. Nothing too mucked about, or fussy or fiddly. Lots of tarragon chicken, scrambled eggs and bacon, and chicken casserole. There were always roasts on Sunday.’
‘The children ate a lot of cheese on toast. We had a kitchen garden… so we ate seasonally before it became en vogue. That’s just what you did in the country back then.’
