During Duchess Kate and Prince William’s engagement, the British and American tabloids reported several stories about Kate possibly fighting with Camilla Parker Bowles, otherwise known as Camilla, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. The tabloids had Camilla attempting to talk Kate into cheaping out on her wedding, and Camilla offering unsolicited “advice” to her new step-daughter-in-law. Camilla later told reporters that Kate “is a lovely girl” and in my mind, I tend to think Camilla and Kate are cut from the same cloth – they have more similarities than differences overall. The Mail has an interesting story today about just how well Camilla and Kate really are getting on – apparently, Camilla is the one who has “taken Kate under her wing.” For real.

Of all the Royal Family’s hopes and expectations when Kate Middleton married Prince William, no one could have anticipated it would transform the former Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. Thanks to Kate, the Duchess of Cornwall’s stock has never been higher within the palace walls, especially with the Queen — who once looked upon Prince Charles’s former mistress as a potential threat to the stability of the monarchy.

The reason for this heartening approval is that Camilla, 64, has taken the Duchess of Cambridge firmly under her wing. Camilla has claimed the crucial role of making sure Kate that feels ‘at home’ as a royal. It was always clear that Kate would need help to see her through the difficult early years of life in the royal goldfish bowl — something no one gave Princess Diana, with tragic results.

William couldn’t really help very much. Indeed, he is viewed as lamentably inadequate in this area. ‘He’s not always the easiest of people, entirely understandably, given how old he was when Diana died,’ says a close family friend. ‘At the best of times, the royal men just don’t have much sensitivity when it comes to helping ease new members into the royal life. They’re not unkind — they just don’t think.’

Enter the Duchess of Cornwall, a woman who has lived more than a little. She is ‘in regular touch’ with Kate and has become her sounding board on practically everything: from how to deal with other, more prickly members of the family such as Princess Anne, to coping with photographers. She told Kate that one trick is to focus on the faces of one or two cameramen she recognizes in order to help her look more relaxed.

Camilla, of course, had a private, ringside view of the totally avoidable tragedy of Diana’s unhappiness. So for Diana’s friends, at least, it is a bitter irony that the fabled ‘third person’ in the Princess’s marriage should apparently be setting out to make herself indispensable to the popular young woman who would have been Diana’s daughter-in-law. They see it — unfairly, perhaps — as the strategic move to take control of an older and more experienced woman from a family that has been close to the royals for generations.

But Camilla’s expanding sphere of influence is something that seems to have started to take shape before William and Kate’s marriage in April. Many believe that her influence was stamped on the guest list, which excluded long- standing friends of Diana who had known William since he was a child, such as Rosa Monckton and Lady Annabel Goldsmith. Several weeks before the ceremony, Camilla and her daughter, Laura, enjoyed a girlie lunch with Kate and her sister Pippa at Koffman’s, the Berkeley hotel restaurant in London’s Knightsbridge.

One word in particular reached the ears of fellow diners during their animated conversation — ‘advice’. On the day of the wedding, Camilla arranged for Kate to have her nails done by her own favourite manicurist, Marina Sandoval, from the Jo Hansford hair salon in Mayfair. She also gave Kate a highly personal wedding gift — a gold charm-style bracelet with a small disc engraved with hers and Catherine’s cyphers. Each is a large ‘C’ under a coronet, though Camilla’s is surrounded by a circle. What makes the gift so significant? Camilla has a similar bracelet of her own that she rarely takes off.

‘Camilla’s exceptional warmth has really touched Catherine,’ says one of Kate’s friends.

The other area about which she has been talking to Camilla is which charities to support.
One idea is for Kate to help a specific charity intensively for a limited time of one or two years during special appeals. This could be more beneficial than if she spread herself thinly over dozens of good causes. Obviously, she is in high demand. These charities include those helping young people and military veterans as well as those in areas such as conservation and art therapy. But perhaps Camilla’s greatest help so far in smoothing Kate’s path as a fledgling royal is the change she has brought about in Prince Charles.

Though he adores Kate, he is the one figure who has found it difficult to adjust to her arrival in the Royal Family, mainly because of all the uncomfortable memories thrown up by constant comparisons between her and Diana.

‘At one stage he was almost tearing his hair out at the endless references to Diana and what she was like, because it always led to talk of his own shortcomings,’ says an aide. ‘It went on for months, and he has only recently calmed down.’

It was Camilla who soothed him, in the same reassuring way that she has been handling Charles’s glooms and fretfulness for 30 years. But now comes a new challenge. After the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year, the Prince of Wales will have to put up with Kate becoming chatelaine of Kensington Palace, the place everyone associates with Diana and her unhappy marriage — and with the powerful memory of the lake of flowers created by a mourning public after her death.

Earlier this month, it was announced that William and Kate would be moving into the late Princess Margaret’s old apartment there in 2013. Prince Harry is also due to move there, taking over the cottage that William and Kate currently use as their London base. Camilla is likely to be the key influence on young housewife Kate. Setting up home in this vast apartment of 21 rooms on four floors will need the guidance and advice of a woman with experience of that very different life as a royal. Camilla has already warned Kate that at Kensington Palace she and William will require a minimum staff of a butler, a housekeeper, a ladies’ dresser, a valet, a cook, chauffeur and several other workers.

Unlike Diana, an Earl’s daughter who had grown up with servants, Kate is still uncomfortable having staff pirouetting around her. But she knows that, on moving into Kensington Palace, she will have to accept the inevitable. Camilla has also advised her that a personal dresser is vital if she is to perform the royal role the public expect of her.

As for choosing the staff, the Duchess of Cornwall — mature, knowledgeable, reassuring, and the chatelaine these past six years of Clarence House, Highgrove and Birkhall — will be there to help. If ever the former Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles dreamed of playing a crucial role at the centre of the Royal Family, this is it.

[From The Mail]

It is interesting, isn’t it? It didn’t even occur to me that Prince Charles would worry about his daughter-in-law overshadowing him. I thought it was just William who worried about Kate that way – when are royal men going to realize that it’s not so much about them? People are more interested in princesses because of clothes and the styling. It really is that simple. Anyway, I’m uncomfortable with the way that Camilla is systematically shutting out Diana’s friends and Diana’s memory. One of the best things about Diana was that she challenged the status quo of royalty, but it seems like Kate and Camilla have no interest in doing anything to rock the boat.

Photos courtesy of WENN.

One of the things that bothered me in the run-up to Kate Middleton and Prince William’s wedding was that the British and American tabloids were trying to stir up trouble between Camilla Parker-Bowles (the Duchess of Cornwall) and Kate. I tended to believe that while Camilla might not be Kate’s favorite person in the world, Kate is totally polite to her de facto mother-in-law. Now it’s looking like they’re super-close, though. Camilla gave Kate a charm bracelet (seen in these photos) and Kate has been wearing that thing EVERYWHERE.

C is for Catherine, Cambridge and Camilla! A new charm bracelet that Kate has been wearing recently is a gift from her mother-in-law Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Kate, 29, was seen with it prominently dangling from her right wrist when she applauded tennis player Andy Murray at Wimbledon Monday and the previous Saturday, when she and Prince William attended a ceremony with the Irish Guards.

On her left hand, of course, rests Princess Diana’s sapphire engagement ring. But it is the newer piece of jewelry, believed to be a wedding present, that’s intriguing royal watchers.

The charm hanging from the bracelet has Kate’s new cypher of a “C” with a curl on one side, and Camilla’s cypher of a “C” below a crown is on the other.

A Palace source confirms to PEOPLE that it was a gift, but wouldn’t say more because it’s “personal.”

[From People]

British sources say that the bracelet was a “personal wedding gift” from Camilla to Kate, but they also note that Kate seems to have two versions of the bracelet, one in yellow gold and one in either white gold or silver. Here’s a question: is it somehow weird to give your daughter-in-law (step-daughter-in-law) a bracelet with YOUR initial and her initial? If it was a wedding gift, wouldn’t it have been more selfless and giving to give her something with Kate’s initial and William’s initial? While I appreciate that Camilla is getting along with Kate, it just seems like it’s overly familiar or somehow too much. I don’t know, though. Maybe it’s completely normal.

Photos courtesy of WENN & Pacific Coast News.

Camilla announced well ahead of time that she would be wearing her designer of choice Anna Valentine, who designed the off white gown and long jacket she wore for her wedding to Prince Charles in 2005. Valentine has created many dresses for Camilla over the years so her designer choice for the royal wedding wasn’t surprising.

I found the jacket, which was light gray with a kind of pale peach pleated skirt, pretty on camera but “off” somehow, like she was striving to be a little fashion-forward and didn’t hit the right notes. She paired the jacket with an asymmetrical champagne colored hat with ribbon-type accents. It wasn’t a bad look overall.

On CNN, a lot was made of the fact that the crowd cheered for Camilla, and that she was at the wedding and was able to traditionally greet the queen. Much has passed since Diana’s death and Camilla seems to be accepted by the British people. She’s spent many years earning it. I think it’s clear she’s not striving to be a fashion icon like Diana, but she’s well dressed enough and has her own well established sense of style.

In an ideal world, Kate Middleton and Camilla Parker-Bowles (otherwise known as HRH The Duchess of Cornwall) would realize how much they had in common and simply get along. However, the tabloids love controversies, so there have been endless stories about Camilla and Kate fighting, Camilla being judgy about the wedding dress, Camilla pulling rank, and Kate whining about Camilla to William. Probably none of it is true. And now Camilla is making an effort to talk up Our Little Waity! Aw…

She has taken Kate Middleton to lunch and accompanied the bride-to-be to the ballet. Now, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, has given Kate a very public thumbs-up.

“Kate’s a lovely girl,” Camilla, 63, said Wednesday during a visit to Covent Garden Academy of Flowers in London. Of Middleton’s joining the family, Camilla said, “We’re very lucky. I’m very much looking forward to the wedding.”

She also spoke about the role her granddaughter, Eliza Lopes, 3, will play come wedding day April 29 – as a bridesmaid.

“She’s only 3, and it will be quite nerve-wracking for a little one. But she will enjoy it,” said Camilla – who also made it apparent that her mind is on the upcoming big event.

While making a table decoration with some of the flowers, she also quipped to the students. “If I could do a few more of these, we could save money on the wedding.”

[From People]

Oh, nice little aside about the flowers. Maybe that story about Camilla trying to get Waity to cheap out on the wedding is true.

Another thing – it just occurred to me that Camilla is reinforcing Kate’s current “commoner” status by using the name “Kate”. All of the official releases from the Buckingham Palace and St. James Palace use “Catherine”. Camilla is going rogue (and perhaps being bitchy) by using the commoner address of “Kate”.

But seriously, why aren’t the tabloids comparing Kate to Camilla instead of Diana? Kate has way more in common with Camilla. Kate is slightly older than William – just like Camilla is with Charles. Camilla waited and waited and doted on Charles, just like Kate did with William. Both Kate and Camilla wore the “royal girlfriend/mistress” tag for years and years before getting the ring. And both William and Charles chose women that they hoped would not overshadow them. Basically, Camilla and Kate should get along really well.

Photos courtesy of WENN.

Last week, paparazzi got photos of Camilla Parker Bowles (HRH The Duchess of Cornwall) exiting a restaurant where she and Kate Middleton had enjoyed a lunch. The British papers claimed that the meeting was all good – that Camilla was giving Kate some pointers, some advice, and that Kate took it all in stride. The American tabloids, however, claim that the meeting went really, really badly. The Enquirer’s Mike Walker claims that Camilla has convinced Prince Charles that Kate shouls only be allowed to invite a “handful” of guests to the wedding, and that Camilla is conspiring to get all of HER guests royal invites. According to Walker’s sources, when Kate found out, she bitched out William and told him to stand up to his father and his step-mother, and that William totally did. Now, Kate can allegedly invite whoever she wants. I don’t really buy any of that – because Kate is a geisha. She’s not fighting with anyone over anything. But that’s not all! Star Magazine had another take:

Planning the wedding of her dreams has turned into Kate Middleton’s nightmare! Camilla Parker Bowles is sticking her nose into every detail, and Kate isn’t prepared to put up with it! During their lunch on February 9, Camilla was overheard telling Kate “If I can give you one bit of advice…” after which followed a long-winded lecture from Camilla about Kate’s wedding being too flashy, especially given the recession. Camilla even suggested sausages and minimizes for the wedding dinner.

“Kate was stunned and insulted,” says an insider. “She and William have a budget, of course, but the wedding is definitely going to be a luxurious affair.”

Camilla also smugly told Kate she needs to dial back the glamour – and not just on her wedding day. “She warned Kate that she shouldn’t go ‘the Diana way’ and get too caught up in the glitz of being a royal,” the insider says.

“Kate couldn’t believe that Camills held up Diana as an example of what not to be like… she has enormous respect for Diana because of what she did for the world and her sons. Kate was livid, and she told Camilla exactly what she thought of her.”

After the lunch, “Camilla actually called William after and told him that Kate is too headstrong.” Meanwhile, “Kate told William she never wants to spend time with Camilla like that again.”

[From Star Magazine, print edition]

The article goes on to detail how Kate is “pushing the envelope” and demanding her way on everything, including access to all of the royal properties so that she can “jog in peace” without the peasants milling about. According to Star, Kate is super-assertive and everyone is giving in to her because she waited for so long and they think she deserves it. My take? Kate is not assertive. Kate is not pushy. Kate is patient. She is quiet. She is reserved. She is anything the royals want her to be.

But yeah, Camilla sounds like a real bitch here. We knew that already, right?

Photos courtesy of WENN.

I’m old enough to remember when members of the royal family were considered prime targets for terrorist attacks… by the IRA. I wasn’t even born yet when Lord Mountbatten (the Duke of Edinburgh’s adoptive father, and Prince Charles’ mentor) was murdered in an IRA bombing, but I remember being a kid in the 1980s and watching the news with my parents and seeing all of the stuff about IRA bombs and their targeting of the “British establishment”. Anyway, Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were caught up in some kind of student protest last night in London. There was an “attack” on the “royal Rolls Royce”.

The students were protesting a major hike in tuition fees. The Rolls Royce “became separated from its police escort” (poor thing!) and “was surrounded by demonstrators who had spilled into the West End after an initially peaceful demonstration outside parliament rapidly deteriorated and spread.” Did the protesters know who was in the car? According to observors, the car was well-lit, so everyone could see inside. They just trashed it anyway:

One witness, Ben Kelsey, said: “There were 400 to 500 protesters there. It was fairly obvious who was in the car. It was very well lit up. Charles and Camilla looked quite relaxed at first but when they saw how many people there were they began to get worried. A few seconds later the area was packed with police. It was complete chaos.”

Another witness described how a police protection officer, dressed in a tuxedo, travelling in convoy with the royal couple opened the doors of his car to beat his way through the crowds.

The royal couple had looked visibly shaken when they arrived at the London Palladium for the Royal Variety performance, but Camilla later joked about the incident, saying: “First time for everything” as she left the theatre.

A Clarence House spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that their royal highnesses’ car was attacked by the protesters on the way to their engagement at the London Palladium this evening. Both their royal highnesses were unharmed.”

At least 38 protesters were injured, according to the Met. There were 26 arrests.

[From The Guardian]

“First time for everything!” Camilla is kind of easy-breezy kind of gal, isn’t she? “Oh, poppycocks, the Rolls is dead. Charlie, I’m going to bed and closing down the biscuit factory. Whatevs.”

So the Rolls Royce was damaged, but Charles and Camilla were not! Sigh… poor Rolls Royce. And poor students. I enjoy a good student demonstration, as long as it doesn’t get too violent and stupid. Sounds like they got just the right balance – take down the car, but not the people, and there are injuries but no deaths. Aren’t their soccer riots much, much worse?

Additional photos courtesy of WENN.

Of course this could totally be crap, but it’s really slow today, and I found this story very interesting. Back in 2005, Prince Charles finally bought the cow (horse?) and married Camilla Parker-Bowles after decades of getting the milk for free. Camilla was remade into the Duchess of Cornwall, and they lived happily ever after. Right? Not so much. I’ve read various rumors here and there over the years which basically claimed that Camilla hated being royal and that she and Charles didn’t really have their “happily ever after” after all. Now The Daily Mail is laying it all out, and saying they are living “separate lives.” The full piece is very long (here) but these are some of the juiciest highlights:

When the Duchess of Cornwall left Scotland and travelled south with a broken leg in plaster the other week, she chose to recuperate not at Highgrove, the marital home she shares with the Prince of Wales, but at Raymill House, her own home 17 miles away.

Three years ago, when she left hospital after a hysterectomy, she did exactly the same thing. Most married women will find it very strange that a wife should eschew the warmth and helping hand of her husband at such a difficult time, but then, this is a very strange marriage.

We are not talking about a constitutional crisis, or a split or separation between Charles and Camilla.

This is a story of two people whose relationship was idyllic while they were lovers for more than 30 years, but who have found things to be not the same since being advised to make what amounted to a marriage of convenience, as we shall explain later. Friends on both sides knew the risks each was taking when they married in 2005, because each was so set in their ways — and very different ways at that. No one, however, expected the impatience and frustration that each is known to cause the other around the house to be such a problem. Even the staff are said to be ‘bickering’ — a sure sign that all is not well at the top. One chauffeur working for another senior royal finds the atmosphere at Highgrove ‘so unpleasant’ that he refuses to stay overnight in the servants’ quarters.

When Mrs Parker Bowles became the Duchess five years ago, she already knew she would need to get away — and get away often — from the starchy formality of the Prince’s world at Highgrove. (How ironic that Princess Diana used to refer to Charles’s Gloucestershire mansion with its six bedrooms, scrupulously maintained gardens and 350 farmed acres as ‘another woman’s house’. She meant Camilla, of course.)

Camilla had known for decades about Charles’s obsessional neatness around the house, especially over where and how certain objects are placed, and that this had grown worse as he got older: he is now 61, she 63 in July. For his part, Charles, as a regular caller at Camilla’s home at Raymill, was familiar with her renowned domestic untidiness. But the problems go deeper than that.

‘When a woman’s been a man’s mistress for 30 years and then marries him, the relationship is bound to change,’ says one aged dowager who has known Camilla all her life. ‘They still love each other, I have no doubt of that, but life as a married couple is difficult for two such independent spirits, who have always enjoyed the physical aspects of life. There’s a certain electricity about sex between lovers which is bound to dissipate after several years of marriage.’

Friends of the duchess say she is finding it ‘hard to relax’, but they insist this is largely caused by the inconvenience of the leg she fractured when she stepped into a rabbit hole at Birkhall, their Scottish retreat, though it is now out of plaster.

‘Charles was brilliant with her at first, but he’s never been very good at looking after others,’ says a friend. ‘A friend of mine asked “How is Camilla?” the other week and had to listen to him whingeing on and on about how inconvenient it was that she was in plaster and had to use a wheelchair because she couldn’t go with him to this and that, and how it was making everything so difficult for him. My friend had to bite their tongue not to say that it couldn’t have been very convenient for Camilla either.’

What no one expected was for the duchess effectively to decamp from Highgrove to Raymill, where, when not on official duties either alone or with Charles — two weeks ago they were at the Royal Cornwall Show and this week they are together in Wales — she reverts to the informality of her former life, pottering in the garden, seeing friends and, these days, being a busy granny to her five grandchildren. She has even had the builders in to create a nursery wing on the top floor of the six-bedroom house. It is playing host to her daughter Laura’s three children, Eliza, two, and six-month-old twins Gus and Louis, and her son Tom’s daughter Lola, two, and baby Freddy.

There have been no such domestic or structural changes to accommodate small children at Highgrove, the tranquillity of which must remain undisturbed for the Prince of Wales. The duchess’s daughter Laura in particular, who is married to former male model Harry Lopes, has been relying a great deal on her mother at Raymill since the birth of the twins in January.

‘Having three so young is a bit of a strain on Laura, and it’s wonderful that her mother is available to help out,’ says a close family friend. ‘While the children are so tiny they are actually living at Raymill and Camilla loves it.’

The grandchildren are said to be an important additional factor in why Camilla and Charles spend so much of their time living in different houses. In fact, these days Camilla is said to come up to London to stay at Clarence House as little as possible.

‘Camilla absolutely adores having her grandchildren around her and is always talking about them, but Charles simply cannot stand the noise and mess that small children make,’ shrugs a seasoned royal aide. Some close observers, however, believe that Camilla is using the grandchildren as an excuse not to be at Highgrove.

‘She finds the formality there rather claustrophobic, especially with all the servants,’ says a friend. ‘There are so many of them (Charles’s total staff in the past five years has risen from 94 to 125), and it’s all so polished that it’s rather like living in a museum.’

Her claustrophobia, however, doesn’t run to avoiding the excellent food produced by the chefs in the Highgrove kitchens. While at Raymill, and especially when her family are visiting, the duchess has food delivered from the Prince’s house. There are also said to be ‘tensions’ among Charles’s senior aides over the vexatious issue of Camilla’s relatively inactive official life before she broke her leg. The Duchess has never got over being labelled unkindly as ‘the laziest woman to have been born in England in the 20th century’ by a former senior aide to the Prince of Wales.

‘The way Camilla should have responded was to have raised her game and done a lot more work,’ says a retired courtier, ‘but she has failed to do so.’

‘Camilla is brilliant at all the military stuff because she so admires the armed services and is really quite knowledgeable about them – don’t forget Andrew Parker Bowles was in the Blues and Royals, and Charles commanded a Navy mine sweeper… But the fact is, she hates most royal duties and doesn’t like the family gatherings because they are like three-line whips, though these are few and far between. Charles does get annoyed with her over this, but he is so tetchy anyway, these days.’

Most of the prince’s friends accept that after his marriage to Diana failed, he would have been quite content to continue on his way through life with Camilla as his informal consort. But worries about the succession forced the prince to ask a group of senior courtiers to look into it. They reported only one real problem: the Camilla factor.

They advised that, although the Queen was in excellent health, it was unwise not to plan for the unexpected, and the possibility of the prince finding himself King with a woman at his side who was not his wife. So it was that they ended up getting married at the Guildhall in Windsor in April of 2005. More than five years later, Camilla has never really settled into the idea of being ‘royal’. As one friend says: ‘It makes her feel quite gloomy sometimes that she can’t be herself.’

‘She is petrified of what she will have to live up to when Charles becomes King,’ says one of her oldest friends. ‘As his virtual Queen in all but name, how could she disappear for days at a time to Raymill?’

Some – notably friends of the late Princess Diana – would say that if Camilla is not entirely content with life as the future Princess Consort, she only has herself to blame. So this unusual couple have gone back almost to the days before they were married, when they were part of each other’s lives, saw each other when they wished, and did not live in each other’s pockets. For now, theirs is not a marriage in actual ‘difficulties’, because it is an arrangement that both appear to be content with.

And yet – who would ever have imagined that the older woman for whom a crown prince dumped a young and beautiful wife now chooses to spend so much time away from him in a world of her own?

[From The Daily Mail]

Okay, so that was a really long piece, I’m sorry. I found it fascinating, and I bet that there are deeper problems than even this article is alluding to. I had never heard that quote about Camilla being lazy, but I have been wondering why she does so few events. She’s just lazy! And, you know, she didn’t want this sh-t. She just wanted Charles to keep her on as his mistress and pay her bills and she could have her own life. I’ve read many (too many) Princess Diana books, and one of them theorized that while Charles romanticized his relationship with Camilla, thinking that Camilla was his soulmate, she had never felt that way about him – her true love, the theory went, was her first husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles.

I’m not saying Charles and Camilla are done, by the way. I’m just saying that their marriage is having problems, and that they both deserve it.

Header: Charles and Camilla on 3/15 & April 27, 2010. Credit: WENN.

CB sent me this story, and it’s ridiculously funny. The gist is that Hello! Magazine asked Joan Collins how she would give Camilla Parker Bowles, The Duchess of Cornwall, a makeover. The piece is ridiculously passive-aggressive, with Joan taking up nearly a page to describe (as if to a child) how Camilla should apply makeup. Stuff like “don’t use anything shiny and orange, it will make you look old, which you are,” only Joan can be that honest. She says things like “Camilla has pretty eyes, so she should accentuate them… Camilla’s mouth is crying out for a strong-coloured lipstick.”

Joan also goes in detail about all of the horrible clothes Camilla wears, the terrible way Camilla does her hair, how lumpy Camilla looks, and how Camilla needs to work out. But again, Joan doesn’t come out and say it. The weird thing is that Camilla’s appearance has drastically improved the past few years. Her hair alone is applause-worthy. Camilla, bless her heart, has always been and will always be one of the horsiest women ever, but she’s putting some effort into her appearance, and it shows. This is, after all, the woman whom Princess Diana referred to as “The Rottweiler”.

Let’s start with her clothes. Camilla is looking a little matronly of late. The big hats that she has taken to wearing… overpower her. They seem to mirror the Queen’s style, yet Camilla is 22 years younger than Her Majesty. In some photographs, they could even be contemporaries.

The Duchess needs to dress younger, but not too young. There is a fine line between mutton dressed as lamb and a chic, slightly daring older woman.

Camilla should invest in a one-piece bodysuit that hugs her figure and pulls in at the waist. And shoulder pads are excellent for improving shape.

As for her hair, Camilla’s current style drags her face down. As we get older, gravity pulls everything down, so she needs to counteract this. A richer honey-blonde shade, with a few paler highlights at the front and sides, would bring light to her face. One should always have a lighter colour next to the skin.

And for toning up without the horror of going to the gym (how I hate it!), my trainer… comes to my house two or three times a week and, without knocking me senseless, works me out brilliantly and gets fabulous results.

[From Hello! Magazine, print edition May 5, 2009]

It’s almost enough to make me feel badly for Camilla. It’s not her fault the future King of England prefers women who look like horses. Part of me thinks there aren’t enough highlights in the world to make Camilla look beautiful, but really, it wouldn’t hurt her to take some of Joan’s advice. And, by the way, I’ve always loves the expression “mutton dressed as lamb” – definitely not for Camilla. Perhaps a sleek pantsuit? Maybe a good ashy blonde hairstyle? But for my money, the devil’s in the details… who cares what Camilla’s wearing if she’s blinged out in millions of pounds worth of royal jewels? Who would even notice how lumpy she is? Besides Joan Collins.

Here’s Camilla looking quite fetching at the Trooping the Colour in London in June. Images thanks to WENN.com .

Prince Harry’s girlfriend (or is she his fiancé?) has topped pizza maker Goodfellas list of sexiest summer celebrities.

She was followed by Hollywood beauties Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson and Cameron Diaz.

Sienna Miller was fourth, just ahead of chart star Rihanna and Girls Aloud’s Cheryl Cole. Kate Middleton, girlfriend of Prince William, was in seventh place.

Paris Hilton and Big Brother’s Chanelle completed the top 10.

The boys of Britain weren’t left out of the competition.

The X Factor presenter Dermot O’Leary was a surprise choice at number one. He was followed by T4 hunk Steve Jones. Johnny Depp, Justin Timberlake and Orlando Bloom came next.

Prince Harry appeared in the list at number six – three places ahead of brother William.

The top 10 also included Jude Law, David Beckham and Liam from Big Brother.

thisisnottingham.co.uk

Rumours are hitting the tabloids again that Harry and Chelsy are engaged, but she isn’t going to be attending the Princess Diana Memorial service. Neither is Kate Middleton, or Camilla.

In a statement, Camilla said she had been “touched” to be invited to the event by Charles and Diana’s sons, Princes William and Harry, but had decided to stay away.

“I accepted and wanted to support them,” she said. “However, on reflection, I believe my attendance could divert attention from the purpose of the occasion which is to focus on the life and service of Diana.”

New Zealand Herald

I can only imagine that Diana, who hated Camilla her entire marriage, who blamed her for it’s ultimate break-up, would hate that smirking woman (why does she smirk all the time? Is it requirement of royalty when appearing in public to smile?) sitting next to her ex-husband in the front row of her memorial service. I must add a clause to my will instructing my husband that I don’t want his new wife anywhere near my grave, my funeral or my memorial. Except unlike Diana, if I knew my husband was cheating, I wouldn’t be the first to die…tee hee.

Picture note by celebitchy: Chelsy Davy is shown on a girl’s night out on 7/11/07, thanks to Splash News. Camilla Parker Bowles is shown at the Brit Awards on 5/3/07. Thanks to PRPhotos.