Anne Robinson confirms she is in relationship with Andrew Parker Bowles

Robinson acknowledged that she had been out of the dating game for some time, noting: “If you don’t drink, you’re not as reckless, are you?” But she told Saga magazine: “I’m a great believer in surprising yourself by taking risks. Their unlikely matchmaker is said to have been one of her neighbours, Father Felix Stevens, a retired monk, who attended Ampleforth, the North Yorkshire boarding school, with Robinson’s brother and suggested she include fellow alumni Parker Bowles on the guest list. Since then, the duo have conducted their fledgling romance behind closed doors, shuttling back and forth between each other’s homes some 30 miles apart and venturing out together only to attend private dinner parties with friends, Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, among them. On the surface, they appear an unlikely match: she the Lancashire-born daughter of a market trader known for her icy put-downs and he, the aristocratic cavalry officer and father of the Queen’s two children. Mr Parker Bowles became so well known for his philandering that Dame Jilly Cooper, an old friend of the Queen, said that he was one of the inspirations for her fictional seducer Rupert Campbell-Black, in the Rutshire Chronicles.