The Duchess of Cornwall turns 75 years old on July 17th, which is part of the reason why this summer has felt so Camilla-intensive. The “big birthdays” are always celebrated this way for royals, it’s true. But there’s another reason why everything is so Camilla-intensive: because this was always Prince Charles’s plan to remake Camilla and get the British public to “accept” her ahead of his kingship. Queen Elizabeth finally gave Camilla her blessing to become Queen Consort earlier this year, and the Clarence House PR campaign has been in full, obvious swing throughout the entire year. Camilla guest-edited Country Life magazine, and there will be an ITV documentary about Camilla (sanctioned by Clarence House) airing this week. The Mail had a preview of all of that:

She used to sneak cigarettes: [In the ITV documentary] We learn that Camilla used to enjoy ‘sneaking a crafty fag’ with former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson (a vice she gave up ‘decades ago’), is known to tell ‘risqué and naughty jokes’, and loves ‘invigorating’ cold-water swimming along the English coast.

She has a secret love of garden gnomes. ‘No place like gnome!’ she says. ‘Actually the Prince does at Highgrove, too – he’s got a gnome hidden away.’

On Kate photographing her for Country Life: ‘It was very relaxed,’ recalls Camilla. ‘[It was] very kind of the Duchess of Cambridge – [she] came with her camera. She’s an extremely good photographer and it was all very casual, there wasn’t much hair and make-up – it was just done in the garden with a lot of laughs. It was a lovely way of doing it.’

Camilla loves a risque joke: Later in the documentary, when asked if it was true that Camilla was known to tell ‘the odd slightly naughty joke’, Sarah Troughton, one of the Queen’s cousins and a friend of Camilla, not only confirms the rumour but goes one better. ‘Oh, lots of very risqué [jokes], I would say, as well as naughty.’

Why the documentary happened: The decision to allow a documentary crew to shadow the Duchess is part of a PR drive backed by the Palace to establish the Duchess of Cornwall as a deserving future Queen Consort. As well as this week’s documentary, Camilla appeared in Vogue magazine and, as this latest programme shows, guest-edited Country Life.

The invisible contract, hard at work: But far aside from any positive press the Palace can muster, sources there say the success for Camilla’s transformation can be put down to her own personality. As a Royal source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘PR for the Duchess of Cornwall is easy to some extent because the raw material, if I can call it that, is good. She’s clever, she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s good for Charles, and when people see that, they can’t help but like her.’

[From The Daily Mail]

Yeah, it remains one of the funniest and dumbest things ever that the British media spent months freaking out about the very IDEA that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would make a docu-series and then Camilla announces that she’s made a documentary and she’s allowed a film crew to follow her around everywhere for months. The problem was never that the Sussexes were doing a docu-series or whatever – the problem is that for the Windsors, there’s only one “right way” to do things, and that’s their way, to further the invisible contract, to play the British media’s games, to accept the British media’s terms. It’s a losing proposition long-term but I’m not sure anyone has sussed that out yet. Anyway, cute story about gnomes, I guess.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.