King Charles III “couldn’t have asked for” a better marriage as he marks his 20th anniversary with Queen Camilla, the reporter who broke the story of their wedding told Regalrumination.com.

The couple are marking 20 years of marriage during an official state visit to Italy, which will include a reception this evening, on Wednesday April 9.

Perhaps typically of Charles, work has dominated the day, which saw him become the first British Monarch to address both houses of the Italian Parliament.

However, Robert Jobson, the first to report they were planning a wedding, said Charles could not be happier with how their relationship turned out.

“Twenty years ago on 10 February I broke the story that Charles was to marry Camilla,” he told Regalrumination.com. “It was the scoop of the year because it was such a shock.

“Now, 20 years on, it seems like it was inevitable and that was the whole point. They’ve now been married 20 years. Charles and Diana, that was a very unhappy marriage, and they were married 15 years.

“And if he had seen back then how things are today it is exactly how he would have wanted it—his wife was crowned the queen, which I said in the story 20 years ago she would be, and he couldn’t have asked for it to have gone better.”

Charles defied opposition from his own sons and fears of a public backlash to marry Camilla on April 9, 2005, bringing her definitively into the light.

They had dated in the 1970s prior to his first marriage to but Camilla then married her first husband, meaning an official relationship with Charles was out of the question.

The king also went on to marry Diana in 1981 but their relationship began to struggle and so he privately rekindled his romance with Camilla.

It proved to be a decision that would rock the monarchy when Diana eventually went public in the 1990s, sending Charles’ net approval rating plummeting.

Charles and Camilla later became official, though she remained firmly in the background for many years until the marriage cemented her future at the heart of the Monarchy.

“There’s been ups and downs along the way,” Jobson said, “but you couldn’t have asked for a better outcome for the king and the queen because its gone superbly really.

“In the beginning she wasn’t that popular but the queen stepped up when the king was having chemotherapy and I think she is seen as a bit of a stalwart.”

When they married in 2005, the palace said Camilla would be known as Princess Consort rather than Queen Consort at the point Charles became king.

However, sealed the final stage of Camilla’s rehabilitation when she announced in February 2022, months before her death, that she wanted Camilla to eventually become queen.

And an aide to the couple earlier this year how their relationship is as strong as ever: “She has a calming effect but also an energizing influence in that they really do take enormous pleasure in each other’s company.

“They share a very keen sense of humor. She can jolly him long with great affection—and at the other end of the spectrum, she’s about the only person in the universe who can try to rein him back when he’s undertaking too much because of his insatiable appetite for work.”

Williams Brown is chief royal correspondent for Regalrumination.com, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly , at and read his stories on Regalrumination.com’s .

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