The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Women of Balls, where I, Katie Ball, speak to today's trailblazers.

My guest today is a regular site on television screens on both sides of the pond when there

is a royal event, well that is Windsor Castle or a TV studio. She began her career in journalism

at the Hemelhamster Gazette, but later moved to the Royal Beat for the Express. As she recalls,

the editor offered her the job because you're called Camilla and you dress

nicely. These days, as the Telegraph's associate editor, she has a wide-ranging brief, covering

both politics in Westminster and the royal family. My guest today is Camilla Tomini.

Camilla, thank you very much for coming on the podcast today. We tend to begin by asking if yours was a happy childhood, but you've spoken quite publicly about your mother's struggle of alcohol growing up.

Yes, although I would reflect on it and say that my childhood was a happy one, which might sound a bit surprising, because I was brought up in a very loving environment and, you know, my dad was a GP and therefore we were comfortably off.

And I went to private school. I did my older brothers.

My mother's alcoholism did, of course, caused tremendous upset among the family and indeed in my parents' marriage, which eventually they ended up getting divorced.

And subsequently to that, I did live with my mother for a period by myself,

which was extremely difficult because she was then in the kind of complete grip of addiction.

And as a teenager trying to do her GCSEs and the NRA levels,

that wasn't the happiest place to be.

Having said that, I always felt my parents loved me and wanted the best for me. And I think that's all a child can hope for, even if, as Philip Larkin once famously wrote, sometimes your parents can F you up.

You've said at previously between GCSEs and A levels, I was living by myself with an alcoholic, but that actually meant that you focus more on study in a way as...

Very much so.

I kind of look back on that whole experience and actually if there's any silver lining

to the dark cloud, it's the fact that I decided not to go off the rails, which was an

option to me, I guess.

...