Top 10 Tom Parker Bowles Quotes

It’s a very open-armed experience in Australia – you feel immediately welcomed – I felt being here for three months – honoured, delighted, proud.

My mother was a mother. She didn’t really work, apart from bringing us up, which a job in itself, but at an age where lots of people are thinking of retiring, so is having up to 20 or 30 engagements a day, and she’s brilliant at it – she has always been brilliant with people.

I have stayed in lots of great hotels around the world, and the Plaza Athenee is definitely one of my favourites.

There’s absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven’t heard before. You’d have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.

My father was in the army, and you know not to talk about things on the telephone that you wouldn’t want to hear transmitted.

I love London. I love the U.K., but if I was going to live anywhere else on Earth, it would be Australia.

It’s rubbish to say that just because it’s organic, it’s better. There’s good organic, and there’s bad organic. We should all be thinking about taste, not some stamp on the package.

The diet is a twisted, noxious thing, all tortured abstinence and short-term fraud. I speak from bitter experience. As a restaurant critic, I eat to live and live to eat. And having a toxic aversion to exercise, there is little to prevent the inevitable bulging of my gut. Hence the need for the occasional diet.

All you care about with your parents is that they are happy, and my mother is exceptionally happy at the moment, and I’ve always adored my stepfather, and he’s always been a kind and good and lovely man.

People moan about Twitter, people being rude and trolling. Just turn it off. Life goes on.