Per tradition, King Charles III and Queen Camilla are preparing to spend Christmas at Sandringham in Norfolk, with the rest of the royal family. But this year, there may more absentees than attendees, due to skipped invitations and cancellations. For example, Tom Parker Bowles and Laura Lopes, the children that Camilla shares with her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, won’t be making the trek later this month.
Tom, a food critic, told the Daily Mail that he has other plans. “I’m not [spending Christmas at Sandringham],” he said. “Nor is my sister.” The two were there in December 2024; it seems the siblings have decided to spend Christmas with their mother’s relatives (i.e., the royal family) every second year. “It’ll be every other year, one year on, one year off,” said Tom. “I’m going back to my ex-wife’s couch”: the home of Sara Buys, with whom he shares Lola, born in 2007, and Frederick, born in 2010. The couple, who married in 2005, announced their divorce in 2018.
Tom didn’t share his sister Laura’s plans, but the 47-year-old art gallerist will likely spend the holidays with her husband Harry Lopes, an accountant and former model, and their three children: Eliza and twins Gus and Louis.
Tom and Laura will not be the only family members absent from the upcoming royal Christmas. Prince Harry—who has been spending the holidays in America with wife Meghan Markle and children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet since 2020—will almost certainly not be there.
More importantly, it seems that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been excluded from the party, having been stripped of all titles and evicted from the Royal Lodge. Even if he is on the Sandringham premises, we are unlikely to see the former prince appear on the traditional family walk to St. Mary Magdalene Church for a Christmas service on December 25th. King Charles and his son Prince William do not want the figure of Andrew—now permanently disgraced—to continue to be associated with the monarchy.
Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, will certainly not be at Sandringham either, only two years after she attended Christmas celebrations for the first time since she was put on a “blacklist” by Prince Philip. In the summer of 1992, the duchess, not yet divorced from Andrew, was photographed topless in St. Tropez with the Texas billionaire John Bryan—in an image where he appears to be sucking her toe. The images drew Ferguson’s then-father-in-law’s ire. But as soon as Charles was king, Ferguson was invited back into the fold. Recently, however, Ferguson was also swept up in the Epstein scandal anew—and was reportedly forced to send the entire print run of her new children’s book, signed with her now-former title “Duchess of York,” to the scrap heap.
