Tom Sykes: The Sex Lives of the Kings and Queens of England
Tom Sykes is a writer and journalist whose family has long-standing connections to the British Royal Family. Tom previously worked as a nightlife reporter and gossip columnist for the New York Post. He is currently working with John Taylor of Duran Duran, helping him write and edit his autobiography, to be published later this year by Penguin. Tom lives in London and Ireland.
We common folk can hardly be blamed for our sometimes prurient interest in the sex lives of the Kings and Queens of England. Given the hereditary principle, who’s doing what to whom when has not just been a subject for terrific gossip for the upper classes and peasantry alike through the ages, it’s a matter of vital national interest. Kate.
Indeed, the sex life of Prince Charles has been the subject of constitutional importance ever since a 1989 conversation with Camilla, recorded by an amateur radio enthusiast, was published in which Charles expressed a desire to be reincarnated as his lover’s tampon (in fact, when you read the tape in full and hear the tampon quote in context, it’s less creepy and more dumb than it sounds).
One of the principle reasons why Prince Charles’s detractors say he should not be King is because he indulged in an extra-marital affair with his now-wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles, when he was married to Princess Diana. But the outrage that greeted the revelation that the Prince of Wales was having an affair, especially when compared to the well-known licentiousness of the monarchs of the past, shows just how puritanical we have become in the 21st century, demanding that our rulers - even ceremonial ones - lead lives free from the blemish of sexual infidelity.
It was not always thus...