Why unlikely couple Anne Robinson and Andrew Parker Bowles are actually perfectly matched
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She is the nation’s strict headmistress, the daughter of a market trader who became the stony-faced host of The Weakest Link and Countdown, giving short shrift to thickos and timewasters. He is a swashbuckling, public-school army aristocrat and friend of the Royal family, known for his charming manner and roving eye for the ladies – so much so that he has been nicknamed “Afternoon Delight”. She’s the Queen of Mean; he was once married to The Queen.
On the face of things, Anne Robinson, 79, and Andrew Parker Bowles, 83, make an improbable couple. Yet if reports are to be believed, that is exactly what they have become; their union an “open secret” in Cotswolds society.
They have been in a “secret relationship” for over a year, according to The Sun, after being introduced by a friend. Although they have not appeared together in public, Andrew has apparently been a fixture at Robinson’s dinner parties in Gloucestershire. One early date is said to have been attended by Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary.
“They have judiciously avoided being photographed together as they both wanted to keep this quiet for as long as possible,” a friend told the paper.
“Annie proudly tells everyone she is the daughter of a market trader and is as far removed from a toff as could be. Frankly it beats any storyline The Crown could come up with.
“Annie and Andrew get on splendidly. She makes him laugh a lot, and he is one of the few people to get away with poking fun at her. She loves to joke that she’s ‘new money’.”
While they might appear an incongruous duo, friends say they fit together surprisingly well. Far from a media townie, Robinson loves the countryside, according to those close to her, and has been a prominent supporter of hunting.
“She is not one of those ‘weekend in the Cotswolds’ people, she really lives there,” says a friend. “She loves her dogs and walks.” In that regard she will have a willing partner in Parker Bowles.
In fact the closer you look at the two, the more sensible their union seems. Both have long lived in the public eye and been married twice before. After Ampleforth and Sandhurst, Parker Bowles was commissioned into the Household Cavalry and rose to the rank of brigadier, serving in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe. He always had royal connections: he was a page at Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation and played on Prince Charles’s polo team. He was a talented young jockey, and rode in the Grand National in 1969.
He met Camilla Shand in 1966, when she was 18 and he was 27. Legend has it that she turned up to a party with one boyfriend and left having replaced him with Parker Bowles. Theirs was a tempestuous, “lusty” relationship. He had a brief relationship with Princess Anne – perhaps he has a thing for Annes – before he married Shand in 1973, much to the annoyance of the then Prince Charles, who already held a candle for her.
The couple had two children: Tom, a food critic, and Laura. Parker Bowles was repeatedly unfaithful. Once, having spotted his car outside one of her friend’s houses, the now-Queen reportedly let the air out of his tyres. In Tina Brown’s book The Palace Papers, an ex of Parker Bowles’s reports his “extraordinary” power over women.
Brown, who visited Andrew and Camilla at home in 1981, wrote that Andrew was “amused and flattered” that Charles was in love with his wife. He was reportedly one of the inspirations for Jilly Cooper’s philandering antihero Rupert Campbell-Black. Last month he attended the launch party for her latest novel, Tackle!, at Hatchards on Piccadilly.
Despite Parker Bowles’s serial infidelity, the marriage lasted 22 years. When they finally split up, after Charles admitted infidelity in his interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, Parker Bowles said: “Throughout our marriage we have always tended to follow rather different interests, but in recent years we have led completely separate lives.”
A year later, in 1996, he married Rosemary Pitman, with whom he remained until she died in 2010 after getting cancer. Parker Bowles has remained faultlessly tight-lipped about his royal connections. In 2000, when the Royal family threw a party to celebrate five significant birthdays, Parker Bowles and Pitman were invited but Camilla was not, some said as a thank you for his discretion.
Where Parker Bowles is pure blue blood, Robinson is all upward mobility. Her father was a schoolteacher; her mother an entrepreneurial grocer who managed to turn a market stall into an enormous wholesale poultry business. Robinson went to Farnborough Hill Convent, a Catholic boarding school in Hampshire. Afterwards she became a journalist. She was working on the Mail when she met her first husband, Charles Wilson, with whom she has a daughter, Emma.
The couple divorced on difficult terms: Wilson was granted custody of Emma against a backdrop of Robinson’s heavy drinking. She went on to the Sunday Times and the Mirror before moving into TV full-time as the presenter of Watchdog. The Weakest Link came calling in 2000; she hosted the programme for 12 years. She married her second husband, John Penrose, another journalist, in 1980. They divorced in 2008, which was costly for Robinson.
After her international TV success – at the peak of The Weakest Link, which was a hit in America too, she was earning a reported £4 million a year – she had to fork out a reported £20 million. 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 said in an interview. “There are few happy husbands under those circumstances, and I am astonished that Penrose and I got as far as we did.” She said she remained friends with both of her exes.
In 2017, she told an interviewer that “I have had two husbands and they are lovely”, but that she was a “committee of one”. She extolled the benefits of sex in her 70s. “I hope all women my age are having sex, why wouldn’t they be? It’s what keeps me young,” she said, as part of a BBC documentary about relationships.
She briefly joined Tinder, the online dating app, but complained that there were “slim pickings” on the site, and that as a recovering alcoholic she would dismiss out of hand anyone holding a drink. She said she was aiming to meet at least a chief executive. In Parker Bowles, a retired brigadier, she evidently feels she has found the equivalent rank in the cavalry.
If it is true Parker Bowles has been lured to Robinson’s house in the Cotswolds, it will not be the first time Robinson has used her 17th-century Gloucestershire home as a honey trap. When she was the presenter of Countdown, she boasted of luring celebrity guests into appearing on the programme by first inviting them to stay in what she called her “I hate my husband” guest suite. She told a diary columnist: “I can’t offer to sleep with them any more, like when I was younger, so they come to my barn for a weekend: Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry, Jo Brand...”
Parker Bowles, too, has remained friends with his most significant ex, even as she has become Queen. She is said to have given the union her approval. “Everyone loves Andrew,” the Marchioness of Lansdowne, a friend of the Queen, told the Sunday Times earlier this year. “He’s a real charmer, but he’s always terribly misbehaving.” Whether he still lives up to his racy nickname, we cannot say. But who better to rein him in than Robinson, the nation’s favourite put-down artist?
When asked for comment by the Telegraph, Robinson politely declined to comment. So too did Andrew’s son, Tom.
When The Sun asked, Robinson was less gentle. “It’s none of your business,” she said. It is reassuring to know love has not blunted her claws entirely. Any team is only as strong as its weakest link.
