CAMILLA'S SIDE OF THE STORY REVEALED IN EXPLOSIVE NEW BOOK

CAMILLA'S SIDE OF THE STORY REVEALED IN EXPLOSIVE NEW BOOK



The Mail today lifts the lid on the love affair between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles – telling HER side of the story for the first time.

An explosive biography details the heir to the throne’s decades-long infatuation with Camilla and his tormented marriage to the Princess of Wales.

The book is written by Britain’s top royal author Penny Junor, who was able to speak to Camilla’s family and her confidantes.

Charles is said to have begged Camilla to call off her wedding to her first husband and to have wept the night before his marriage to Diana.

The book says a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, who had known of the prince’s misgivings, had stood with him at a Buckingham Palace window watching the crowds in the Mall with tears streaming down their faces.

The story of the enduring affair that rocked the monarchy is being serialised today and all next week in the Mail.



One night, at a dinner party, the woman sitting next to Andrew Parker Bowles turned to him and smiled. ‘I’m really hurt, Andrew,’ she said teasingly. ‘I’m the only one of Camilla’s friends you haven’t made a pass at. What’s wrong with me?’

Everyone who knew the Parker Bowles well was aware of Andrew’s serial unfaithfulness to Camilla, but it was passed off as a bit of a joke. It was nothing of the kind, of course.

All too often, the women were indeed friends of his wife, and showed scant loyalty to her by succumbing to his charms. Yet Camilla never seemed to blame them or even have any stormy showdowns with Andrew.

There was never a tense atmosphere in the couple’s home; no barbed comments or bitter exchanges. Andrew’s affairs were just a fact of life and not something Camilla often spoke about.



It was only those closest to her who knew quite how standoffish and cold Andrew could be towards her — and how deeply, bitterly hurt she was by his infidelity.

She loved him — for reasons her own family could never entirely fathom — and longed to be truly loved in return. But she didn’t feel she was. There was always someone prettier, wittier, sexier, waiting to take her husband away from her.

It wasn’t that Andrew Parker Bowles was reacting against the ties of marriage. He had been unfaithful even when they were just going out.



They had first met in March 1965 at Camilla Shand’s ‘coming out’ party as a debutante — a cocktail do for 150 people at Searcys, a smart venue behind Harrods in Knightsbridge. She was just 17 but remarkably self-assured.

A ‘deb’s delight’ par excellence, Andrew was then 25 and a rather beautiful officer in the Household Cavalry. Not only was he charming, smooth-talking and debonair but, thanks to his Army training and riding, he was slim and fit.

Another attraction was that he had noble blood and connections with royalty going back generations. His parents — particularly his father, Derek — were close friends of the Queen Mother; and in 1953, at the age of 13, Andrew had been a page boy at the Queen’s coronation.

Now, most of the upper-class women in London seemed to be after him, some of them married —and he knew it, and reaped the benefits.

Camilla, hugely popular with boys from an early age, had caught his eye at her coming out party and he had certainly caught hers. But they didn’t meet again until 1966, at a dance in Scotland. He went over to her and said simply: ‘Let’s dance.’

They danced, and she fell in love. It was the start of a long, torturous romance — torturous because Camilla became a puppet on a string.



Andrew was hugely fond of her and she was nominally his girlfriend, spending many weekends with him at his parents’ house near Newbury in Berkshire. But he couldn’t resist other women. And what was particularly hurtful was that — even then — many of them were Camilla’s friends.

Occasionally, she retaliated. One night she spotted Andrew’s car parked outside the flat of one of her best friends, so she wrote a rude message in lipstick on the windscreen and let all the air out of his tyres.

But, curiously for such a strong and confident woman, Camilla largely put up with his behaviour — possibly because she has also always been determined and stubborn. Once she had made up her mind she wanted to marry Andrew, nothing was going to stop her.



Five years later, however, there had still been no proposal. It was at this point that a good friend of Camilla’s decided that she needed to meet the young and shy Prince of Wales. Lucia Santa Cruz, a glamorous Chilean historian, had got to know Charles three years before when he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Back then, she had been working as a research assistant to the Master of his college, Lord Butler.

It was Butler — a friend of Lucia’s father, the Chilean ambassador —who had invited her to dinner at the Master’s lodge to meet the Prince, thinking they might enjoy one another’s company.

They did; they became lifelong friends — but never in a romantic