Camilla’s former husband Andrew Parker Bowles has been romancing Weakest Link star Anne Robinson for 14 MONTHS… But now RICHARD KAY has all the gossip on the Queen’s ex, who was onced famed as the best lover in London

For decades he has been one of those shadows that flit discreetly about the upper reaches of society with friends in high places. Very high places.

Close to the Royal Family since boyhood, still an occasional escort of Princess Anne who, but for his Catholic faith, might have married him, and someone whose ex-wife, of course, is now the Queen.

A man about whom male chums would tell tales of his amorous adventures and legendary sexual prowess.

How gratifying then for Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, who has always batted away the more exaggerated stories of his bedroom conquests, to find that, 11 days short of his 84th birthday, he is still the subject of such admiring gossip.

This time, however, the object of his affection is receiving just as many headlines. Indeed, in the nation’s living rooms it is not the well-connected Parker Bowles who is the centre of attention, but Anne Robinson, 79, the Lancashire-born daughter of a market trader and the icy, deadpan former host of The Weakest Link and Countdown.

Reports of their late-life romance has enthralled not just the smart salons where the ex-soldier once cut a swathe, but those accustomed to the rolling countryside and drystone crannies of the Cotswolds where this improbable couple have become the most sought-after dinner table companions.

On the surface it would seem they have very little in common: Parker Bowles the ex-Household Cavalry officer, lampooned as the man who ‘laid down his wife for his country’; and twice-divorced Robinson, Annie to her friends, who boasts her own royal-style nickname — the ‘queen of mean’ for her withering TV put-downs.

Is it then a classic case of opposites attracting or is there something unexpected going on?

Certainly it is unlikely that the retired head of the Army veterinary service has ever dated anyone quite like Anne, whose mother sold chickens in Liverpool’s St John’s market.

But the Mail can reveal that it was Parker Bowles, whose food-writer son Tom, is the King’s godson, who has made the running in the relationship.

After learning that the two had been invited to the same local dinner party, having met previously, he asked his host to be seated next to the TV presenter, who lives in a magnificent converted barn.

Their shared love for this idyllic part of the English countryside has also played its part. For more than 14 months, I understand, the brigadier has quietly been making the journey from his home to hers some 31 miles away down unlit country lanes. It takes him under an hour.

Remarkably, until just over a week ago, their union was barely known about beyond the discreet drawing rooms of the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire county set. But, in fact, it was a romance being conducted in plain sight.

One gathering numbered among its guests the newly ennobled Foreign Secretary Lord (David) Cameron of Chipping Norton, as well as one of his former Downing Street aides. Yet still the secret held.

So how did they meet and just what is the truth of a relationship that not even the scriptwriters of The Crown would dare come up with? It was hardly the most promising of occasions on which to light the fuse of romantic love: a reunion of old school friends gathered around a country house dining table, along with a retired monk as matchmaker.

Once a year, Anne organises a lunch at her home, set in seven landscaped acres, for her older brother Peter who lives in San Francisco. One of his old friends at Ampleforth, the North Yorkshire boarding school known as the Catholic Eton, is Father Felix Stevens with whom he played cricket for the college and who later went into the priesthood.

It was Father Felix, a former master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a neighbour of Anne’s, who suggested she include the brigadier — also one of his contemporaries at Ampleforth — on the guest list.

Former newspaper columnist Anne has remained uncharacteristically silent about just what triggered the friendship, but I understand that the attraction on that first encounter was mutual.

According to friends, they discovered they had more shared interests than they thought.

Anne is no Cotswolds-weekender or media-townie (she has had roots in the region for 40 years) and, since her divorce from her ex-journalist second husband John Penrose 15 years ago, has lived there full-time.

Horse racing aficionado Parker Bowles has been a widower since the death of his second wife, Rosemary from cancer in 2010.

He has remained at the former marital home in Wiltshire, with its close proximity to some of the country’s best-known race tracks where he is a familiar figure.

Anne too loves racing yet, incredibly, the pair have avoided being photographed together. The reason for this, I am told, is because they both wanted to keep things quiet for as long as possible.

It is also likely that Parker Bowles, who has always been discreet about his life, was determined not to cause a show’, as one friend put it to me, in the busy 15 months in which his ex-wife Camilla has been the focus of such intense worldwide interest following the death of Queen Elizabeth and her May coronation.

Parker Bowles has remained close to Camilla despite their divorce 28 years ago and has had a front seat at her remarkable transformation from the hated ‘third person’ in Princess Diana’s marriage to the King’s respected first lady.

He was a guest at her Windsor wedding to the then Prince Charles in 2005 and had a prominent position at the Coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey alongside his son, who is divorced, and his married daughter Laura.

As for Annie, after two failed marriages — and a daughter Emma by her first husband, the late Times editor Charles Wilson, who like Parker Bowles was a member of the Jockey Club — she too has no wish for any attention.

So what is it about Parker Bowles that she finds attractive? ‘Well,’ says a figure who knows them both, ‘Andrew is still jolly good looking. Of course she knows about his reputation.’

Perhaps we should look at what Anne has said on the subject of male company. Her ideal man, she once said, would be someone who is ‘funny, clever, has integrity, will pick up the restaurant tab and not talk about himself all the time.’ According to another close figure, Andrew ticks all those boxes. Anne finds the debonair ex-Guards officer ‘funny, charming and a very competent cook’.

He is also remarkably unstuffy. ‘One of the best things about APB is that he never complains,’ says one long-time friend. ‘When you think of all the c*** he has put up with over the past 40 years, he has just said nothing.’

She is also well aware of his reputation as a ladies man who was one of the inspirations for author Jilly Cooper’s most celebrated characters, the ruthless and caddish Rupert Campbell-Black, the anti-hero of the bonkbuster novel Riders.

In the book, Campbell-Black is described as ‘well-constructed. Usually, men with such long legs had short bodies but Rupert, from the broad flat shoulders to the lean muscular hips and powerful thighs, seemed perfectly in proportion.’

The same might be said of Parker Bowles, who was one of four figures on whom Miss Cooper modelled her hard-riding, free-loving upper- class bounder.

Age may have robbed him of some of that virility, but he has lost none of his celebrated charm. ‘He’s old school — dogs, sporting events, the country and Annie loves all that too,’ says one of her circle.

‘People have often misjudged her as some pushy upstart from Liverpool. She was expensively educated at Farnborough Hill, the private Catholic girls convent and at Les Ambassadrices, a finishing school in Paris.’ But there is one other significant factor. For Anne is as blunt in private as she is direct in public. Indeed she once told Camilla (before she was Queen) to get a proper bra fitting.

‘Andrew loves that,’ says one Cotswolds neighbour. ‘I would say there are similarities between Anne’s sharp wit and Camilla’s rather waspish turn of phrase.’

All the same it is difficult to reconcile Robinson — whose autobiography Memoirs Of An Unfit Mother went into unflinching detail about her alcoholism, losing custody of her daughter and battle for sobriety before finding her TV success — with the erudite Parker Bowles whose parents were close friends of the Queen Mother and who at 13 was a pageboy at Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1953.

One figure who has followed this intriguing match is Queen Camilla. She is understood to be amused by the flowering of romantic love between her ex-husband who is always scrupulously polite and acid-tongued Anne who famously dispatched quiz contestants with the withering phrase: ‘You are the weakest link, goodbye.’

She is said to be supportive of the relationship.

In fact the more you look at the two, the more sensible the developing friendship seems. Both have been married twice, both have grandchildren they adore and both have long lived in the public eye.

All the same, their lives, now so richly entwined, reached this point in vastly different ways.

Parker Bowles has mixed with royalty since childhood — his father Derek and formidable mother Anne, chief commissioner of the Girl Guides — were friends of the Queen Mother. After their deaths Andrew found himself elevated to the status of royal favourite.

From Ampleforth he went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards in 1960 serving in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe, where he was awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery.

He was one of the first on the scene when the IRA detonated a bomb in Hyde Park killing four soldiers and slaughtering seven horses.

A courageous horseman himself, he rode in the 1969 Grand National, finishing a creditable 11th. He was 25 when he met the teenage Camilla at her coming out party as a debutante in March 1965.

They met again at a party in Scotland the following year, when legend has it that she arrived with one boyfriend and left having replaced him with Andrew, a dashing subaltern.

It was a tempestuous relationship but Parker Bowles was an unreliable and unfaithful boyfriend who couldn’t resist other women, including Camilla’s friends, and found to his considerable pleasure that the ladies found him irresistible.

He was at one time described as ‘London’s best — and busiest — lover’. So busy, in fact, that he temporarily ditched Camilla to embark on an affair with the then 19-year-old Princess Anne — a scenario gratuitously immortalised in season three of The Crown. In it the two lovers are seen enjoying a post-sex Bloody Mary.

Marriage with the Queen’s daughter was out of the question because of his faith, but they have remained life-long pals and Parker Bowles is godfather to the princess’s daughter Zara.

Other girls came and went before he finally settled on Camilla — to Prince Charles’s heartbreak who had fallen head over heels for the earthy young woman so unlike the demure aristocrat’s daughters he usually dated.

‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,’ he wrote at the time to his uncle Lord Mountbatten.

But being married to Camilla did not see Andrew ending his bachelor habits and his philandering continued.

The marriage survived until Charles’ TV confession in which he admitted his adultery and the couple divorced in 1995.

A year later, Parker Bowles quietly remarried divorcee Rose Pitman — whose former husband was part of the famous Pitman shorthand family — and with whom he remained until her death 13 years ago. Throughout these turbulent years, he stayed discreet not just about his royal connections but also his womanising.

Despite her stellar career as a Fleet Street columnist, editor and star TV presenter, Anne has had her fair share of heartbreak. Her first husband was granted custody of their daughter against a backdrop of her then heavy drinking.

Two years after giving up alcohol in 1978 she remarried, but the marriage ended in divorce in 2008. She later suggested that the mismatch of success and wealth had proved too much of a strain on their relationship.

‘No mother puts her son on her knee and teaches him what to do when he grows up and marries someone who earns more money and might even be smarter than him,’ she told one interviewer.

There is no danger, I am told, of history repeating itself in this sense. ‘For a start,’ says a friend, ‘Annie and Andrew aren’t married.’

Parker Bowles has also had a successful business career since leaving the Army and doesn’t just live on his military pension. He is a director of several property and hotel companies and is comfortably off.

So what might the future for this odd couple?

Anne once said: ‘I’m not going to marry a third time. It is not necessary [and] it is quite hard at my age to find someone that punches at your weight. I am quite demanding.’

But then that was before the oh-so charming Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles came galloping into her life.