CAMILLA AT 70:
William, Kate and Harry will lead 300 guests in a chorus of “Happy Birthday”, as bow ties and stiletto heels are cast aside for wild jiving to a sixties disco.
At Saturday’s Highgrove party for her 70th birthday, beaming Camilla will be full of the smiles and laughter we see so many times from her and Charles, 68.
The mere fact she is regarded as a national treasure shows what an astonishing journey she has been on since being dubbed The Rottweiler and “Britain’s most hated woman” after Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana failed.
The first milestone on that journey was also hosted by Charles – an Arabian Nights banquet on her 50th birthday in 1997.
It was for close friends, but as Mrs Parker Bowles arrived at the gates of Highgrove, in Gloucestershire, her chauffeur deliberately slowed down – so the pack of royal photographers could take her picture.
Wearing a figure-hugging black dress and the diamond and pearl necklace Charles had given her, Camilla looked radiant... regal even.
CONFIDENCE
“She swept into Highgrove with all the confidence of a Queen,” reported one paper next morning.
“More like the Queen of bloody Sheba!” stormed a furious Princess Diana when the papers reached her Kensington Palace breakfast table.
Divorced for 11 months, Diana – then dating Dodi al-fayed – had actually come to terms with Charles’ relationship with Camilla.
What she would accept was Camilla replacing her as queen. Nor, it seemed, would the public.
In a poll of 100,000 TV viewers that month, two-thirds thought the heir to the throne should not become king if he married Camilla.
Yet Charles insisted she was now a “non-negotiable” part of his life and the 50th birthday extravaganza was a “coming out party”.
But six weeks later a car crash in a Paris tunnel sent Camilla back into hiding. Diana, Queen of Hearts, was dead – and the woman she’d accused of wrecking her fairytale was Public Enemy No 1 again.
So how did Camilla, once thought capable of destroying the monarchy, become a respected royal and potential queen?
Friends say it is down to a unique blend of love, loyalty, courage and humour.
They recall her as a London debutante in 1965, when she met Household Cavalry officer, Andrew Parker Bowles.
He With Charles at game, then wedding day with Andrew