IT is an affair that has spanned three decades, produced several of the most creepily intimate phone conversations to have been printed in a national newspaper and, arguably, destroyed two marriages.

Camilla Parker Bowles, née Shand, first met the heir to the throne at a polo match in 1970.

Notwithstanding a 17-month age gap and her disapproved-of smoking habit, the couple discovered they had much in common.

They shared a passion for watercolour painting and hunting. Their favourite radio programme was The Goon Show . . . and their subsequent love affair had a precedent.

Her maternal great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, had been the mistress of the Prince’s great-grandfather, Edward VII.

Her first — with hindsight only semi-comical — words to Charles were: “My great-grandmother and your great-grandfather were lovers. How about it?”

Fascinated by her provocative gauntlet-throwing, the Prince soon became her lover. Then, characteristically, he dithered. His uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, has been blamed for having persuaded his nephew that the “bedded-can’t-be-wedded” rule still applied to the Royal family.

While the Prince was at sea with the Royal Navy in 1973, Miss Shand married her philandering boyfriend Andrew Parker Bowles. The Prince wrote dolefully in his diary of “such blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship . . . I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.”

But over the next 35 years, their emotional and sexual bond was ruptured only temporarily — for five years — when in 1981, the Prince finally married an 18-year-old nursery school teacher, Lady Diana Spencer; and seemingly not at all by Camilla’s own marriage. Her husband was so loyal to the Royal Family that, so the joke went, he laid down his wife for his country.

Even in the weeks leading up to the Prince’s wedding, Mrs Parker Bowles had the future king’s ear. In the week before his marriage, she received from him a bracelet engraved with the initials G F — “Girl Friday” or “Gladys and Fred”, Camilla and Charles’s pet names for each other (the two female rivals gave each other less affectionate nicknames. Camilla was “the Rottweiler”, Diana “gormless” and “bonkers ”).

It was Camilla, in an almost maternal role, who advised the Prince to marry the then mousey Diana, having scrutinised all his other prospective brides. The two women had little in common, bar their accademic achievements — both women had a single O level to their names. Having rubberstamped their marriage, it was also Mrs Parker Bowles who indirectly ensured the Royal couple would eventually divorce.

The Prince vowed to be faithful but letters made public by her butler Paul Burrell make clear that Diana felt he was “never emotionally divorced from (Camilla)”. During the first year of their marriage she overheard a muttered phone call in which the Prince told Mrs Parker Bowles, “You know I’ll always love you”.

In a letter to the Duke of Edinburgh, Diana wrote: “Charles told me that you said that if the marriage was not working well after five years, he could essentially return to Camilla.”

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