No.1 for Interviews - Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson

TPT: "I've learnt to deal with the fact that I'm not perfect"

The ultimate ‘It’ girl – complete with party lifestyle and Royal connections, until her fall from grace of course – Tara Palmer-Tomkinson has now turned to fiction.

In the mid 1990s, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson hit the London party scene and soon made a name for herself as the ultimate ‘It’ girl. Trampling every red carpet in town, she was as much a regular in the red tops as she was in the company of the Royal Family, counting Prince Charles as a family friend.

Then, 10 years ago, it all came jolting to a halt as her £400-a-day cocaine addiction was laid bare for all too see on the sofa of The Frank Skinner Show. Following her shambolic performance, the once unstoppable party animal found herself in the confines of that famous A-list holiday resort known as rehab.

Now, following the footsteps of many other celebrities-cum-authors, Tara has turned her hand to fiction with the salacious Inheritance.

No.1 caught up with her and discovered a woman who may have changed her ways but is still battling many of the same demons.

Your new book, Inheritance, is out now. Did you enjoy writing it?
I had a great time writing it. It’s very much my voice and my heart and soul in it, but obviously I am not going to pretend that I wrote it by myself. Anyone that knows me knows that I can’t even write a text message never mind write a book!

It is pretty outrageous. Is it based on your own life?
I would say a lot of it is autobiographical and the rest is a product of my imagination.

What made you want to write a book in the first place?
It wasn’t something I really wanted. I had just won Fame Academy for being the worst singer – well, I thought I was – and I thought afterwards, ‘Let’s do something else now.’ I think you should get the best out of life. I wanted to point the ship in a different direction and I was offered the book. I have been offered an autobiography all my life but I would never do that.
My personal life is very private to me, although people think they know my personal life they truly do not. Even when I wrote my Sunday Times column, it was a frivolous party girl’s column but no one knew about my private life.

Do you think it’s important to keep some things to yourself?
It’s really important but nowadays – I’m 38 and I’ve grown up a lot – the things I would once have made public, I make private now. You change the way you feel about things; you see life a bit differently. I mean, I used to do eight parties a night! Now I do about one a month.

So what do you do for fun now?
I still have a lot of friends around. I have a smaller group of friends who are trustworthy and that’s something I guard fiercely. It’s mainly family. It’s a smaller list of people rather than having an address book full of people who are acquaintances. You are born with your family but your other family, you choose yourself and that’s your friends.

I have always found it rather insulting when people have said, ‘But you don’t need to work.’ I’m like, ‘Well I want to sleep well at night and feel a bit of self worth.’ I have never contemplated not working. The problem is nowadays the world is based around the material and I was brought up to believe that the material is immaterial, but I know that’s very easy to say… I am very aware of the upbringing I’ve had but to consider not working because of my upbringing is just futile.

Do you feel you have to defend your upbringing?
Yeah I do quite a lot. The class system in this country is still quite a big one. Listen, you can be a supermodel and take drugs and it’s okay but if you do it and you’re from my background all hell breaks loose. It’s all equally scandalous but there does seem to be different rules depending on what pocket you are in.

Are you very close to your family?
Yes very – it’s like a fortress. We have never had a divorce in our family, actually. I came from a family with a lot of love around it. You might ask how I ended up in rehab 10 years ago, but a lot of things contributed to that. My family is my salvation.

Coming from a family that has never had a divorce, is marriage important to you?
It’s completely irrelevant to me. I have no interest in it – I just couldn’t care about it. This summer I have seen so much infidelity, from relationships breaking up to somebody finding out her lover’s gay… If you don’t read about it you’ll hear about it.

Quite a few of my friends have been unhappy in their relationships and have broken up and it doesn’t give me a huge incentive to… [trails off] I come from very old-fashioned values so I do believe in marriage and having children and if I did get married, it would be because I believed it would last forever but I certainly haven’t met a man who I would want to marry.

There is no one special in your life just now?
I haven’t kissed a man since last year – it’s my ‘No Men in 2010’ rule. I just want to focus on what I’m doing. The thing is, if I had to do press calls today and I had had an argument with my boyfriend, it would be really hard to do that job and I have been in that situation.

It’s very difficult to be a public person – it’s quite a roller coaster when you are launching something and it’s quite hard to do it when your whole life is under a microscope.

When you have personal problems inside it just wrecks it. I mean, it must have been how Cheryl Cole felt. I don’t know her but I’m a big fan of hers and for her to go out there and do all that with that pain in her heart must have been really difficult. People think, ‘Oh I feel sorry for you but it’s okay because you’ll just go to Christian Louboutin and buy some shoes.’ It’s not like that at all – it’s exactly the same feeling as anyone else.

What has been your proudest achievement in life?
Winning Fame Academy was a massive thing for me – it was so unexpected. Also it was much more therapeutic than a lot of people realise. I don’t know if I hugely liked myself then. I’m not going to pretend to you, I hardly love myself now but I have definitely learnt to deal with that fact that I’m not perfect and to be happy with what I’ve got and be happy with the friends around me.

You seem keen to seize all opportunities that come your way.
I am because there is a lot of shame in me from 10 years ago. I publicly fell from grace and put everyone through it. I want to prove myself…

Although I detached from the tabloid ‘TPT’. I haven’t picked up a newspaper for about nine years – but you hear about it, you see it – you can’t pretend you’re infallible.

So you never read the papers?
God no! There is so much inaccuracy now it is unbelievable. I was shooting in Bali recently and there was all that stuff about my nose collapsing again. I was like, ‘You must be kidding!’ If you had been on a diet for 10 years of your life and somebody said, ‘She’s just had a Krispy Kreme doughnut and her head has fallen off,’ you would be pretty pissed off too.

Through it all, what has been your biggest regret?
It’s a double-edged sword because my biggest regret is the embarrassment I put myself and my family through when all that happened before, but I don’t regret the years I had because they were decadent, they were debauched, they were real, unreal and a lot went towards the book. I regret the suffering I gave the people I love, put it that way.

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