Penny Junor: The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail

Andrew was a debs’ delight par excellence . One of his partners in crime was Nic Paravicini, a fellow officer and polo-playing friend who later became his brother-in-law and business partner, being married to Andrew’s sister, Mary Ann. The couple subsequently divorced, but Andrew and Nic remain good friends. Footloose and fancy-free in those early days, and based with their regiment at Knightsbridge Barracks, they were geographically at the centre of all the action, and were two of a kind. Andrew was charming, smooth talking and debonair, and thanks to his Army training and riding he was slim and fit in every sense of the word. All the women were after him, some of them married – and he knew it, and reaped the benefits. He was one of the most attractive young men on the deb circuit, and a good catch too: he has noble blood coursing through him 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 thirteen, he was a page boy at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Camilla may have had a boyfriend at the time of her coming out party – she was hugely popular with boys from an early age – but she noticed Andrew that night, and he her.

Soon afterwards he disappeared to the other side of the world to be aide-de-camp to the Governor-General of New Zealand, Sir Bernard Fergusson. They didn’t meet again until 1966, at a dance in Scotland, shortly after his return. She was looking very pretty, as usual, and the centre of attention, as usual, so he went over to her and simply said, ‘Let’s dance.’ They danced, and she fell in love. It was the beginning of a long and torturous romance – torturous because she became a puppet on a string. He was hugely fond of her, and she was nominally his girlfriend – she spent innumerable weekends with him at his parents’ house near Newbury with all his siblings and their friends, but he couldn’t resist other women, and what was particularly hurtful was that many of them were her 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, confident and intelligent woman, she put up with his behaviour – possibly because as well as being strong and confident, she has also always been determined and stubborn, and once she had made her mind up that she wanted to marry Andrew, nothing was going to stop her.

Lucia decided her friend needed to meet the Prince of Wales, who had no satisfactory girlfriend, and so she contrived to introduce them to one another. It happened on an evening in 1971 when Lucia and the Prince had arranged to go out together; she told him to come early, she had ‘just the girl’ for him and described Camilla as having ‘enormous sympathy, warmth and natural character’. Charles had recently been in Japan and had brought a present for Lucia, a little box, and knowing he was to meet her friend Camilla, he’d brought a gift for her too. As Lucia made the introductions she joked, ‘Now you two be very careful, you’ve got genetic antecedents’ – referring to Alice Keppel, Camilla’s great-grandmother, who had famously been a long-term mistress of King Edward VII, Charles’s great-great-grandfather. ‘Careful, CAREFUL!’

In Lucia’s first-floor flat that evening, there was an immediate attraction between the two of them and an instant rapport; Charles loved that she smiled with her eyes as well as her mouth, and laughed at the same silly things he did. He also liked that she was so natural and easy and friendly, not in any way overawed by him, not fawning or sycophantic. He was very taken with her and after that first meeting he began ringing her up. Then they met and he continued to feel easy in her company. But it was a busy time for him and he was seldom at home.

Charles was young and shy, only twenty-two, and in the midst of intensive military training. He had just qualified as a jet pilot with the Royal Air Force, and was about to embark on a career in the Royal Navy. He loved flying – he had taken it up at university and had a natural aptitude for it – but the Navy was a family tradition, and boats were deemed safer for the heir to the throne than jets, so that was where he was ultimately headed. He passed out of RAF College at Cranwell having earned his wings in just under five months – rather than the normal twelve – with the highest commendation, and having won membership of the exclusive Ten Ton Club by flying at more than 1,000 mph. He was in the back seat of a Phantom, scrambled from RAF Leuchars in Fife on a training exercise; they climbed to 35,000 feet in two minutes, almost vertically, launched a mock attack on an enemy aircraft, and flew twice over Balmoral, the Royal Family’s home in the Highlands of Scotland, at 400 feet, causing seven locals to phone the police in protest, before going supersonic over the North Sea. He had also scared himself half to death by jumping out of an aircraft at 12,000 feet with a parachute that wrapped itself round his feet. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to disentangle himself and descended harmlessly into the sea at Studland Bay in Dorset. The press was full of praise for his derring-do and started billing him as Action Man. At that time, the country’s most eligible bachelor could do no wrong.

After the freedom of flying, Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where he started in September 1971, was like going back to boarding school all over again, and he hated it. He did an intensive ‘fast stream’ six-week course, again half the length of the normal course. Yet when he graduated, top in navigation and seamanship, neither of his parents came to the ceremony. The only member of the family who showed was his beloved great-uncle, Louis, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the man who had been Supreme Commander in South East Asia during the Second World War, the last Viceroy and first Governor-General of India, First Sea Lord and finally Chief of the Defence Staff. Mountbatten was the man Charles called his honorary grandfather. He had been devoted to him since he was a small child. Realising at the last minute that no one else would be there to watch the graduation, Mountbatten flew down to Devon from his home in Hampshire in a helicopter for the occasion. Weeks later, Charles flew out to Gibraltar to join his first ship, the destroyer HMS Norfolk .

Charles was with Norfolk for nine months, some of which was spent on shore-based training courses in Portsmouth. Mountbatten’s home, Broadlands, was less than half an hour’s drive away and so Charles was a frequent visitor, and this was the time when the two men became especially close. Mountbatten had realised some years earlier that Charles was adrift; his relationship with his parents left a lot to be desired and he needed confidence and guidance in his future role. It was Mountbatten who told him, in regard to women, that it was important ‘in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for … I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.’

In the late autumn of 1972, Andrew Parker Bowles was away with his regiment and Charles was on dry land for long enough to hook up with Camilla. They saw one another whenever the opportunity presented itself. This was quite often at Smith’s Lawn, the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park, where both Charles and Andrew played, for a time in the same team. Camilla had been a regular sight at polo matches for years, watching Andrew and his friends play – and the father of one of her friends was chairman of the club. So she could go and watch Charles play without arousing particular attention. The Prince had not taken up polo until the age of sixteen, but he became a fanatical player, raising vast sums of money for charity in the process. The Duke of Edinburgh was president of the club and a very able player, as was Lord Mountbatten, who had written the definitive book on the sport. Both had been very keen that Charles should play.