COULD the fairytale marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Diana have survived if the IRA hadn't blown up Charles' favorite uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in 1979? Tina Brown, author of the new best-seller The Diana Chronicles, says the assassination is what drove him back into the arms of Camilla Parker Bowles, the "Rottweiler" said by Diana to be the destructive third wheel in the marriage. "It was the death of Charles' beloved Uncle Dickie on August 27, 1979 that threw his emotional life into chaos and revived his affair with Camilla, " writes Brown. "Mountbatten's affection for his Irish neighbors around his holiday home, Classiebawn Castle at Mullaghmore in Co. Sligo, and theirs for him, created an opportunity for the assassination."

The blast on Mountbatten's boat killed four and injured three. Charles was devastated, as he himself has said on many occasions.

"Prince Charles wrote in his journal, 'A mixture of desperate emotions swept over me agony, disbelief, a kind of wretched numbness, closely followed by fierce and violent determination to see that something was done about the IRA,'" writes Brown.

"What Charles needed now was not Windsor stoicism, but Camilla's husky empathy on the other end of the phone. She had called him at Broadlands, where he was staying, to offer her support and he poured out his confusion and pain to her.

"It was fortuitous for him that, four months after the murder of Mountbatten, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles left for Rhodesia with Lord Soames, the last British governor."

Andrew was, of course, Camilla's philandering hubby who entered into yet another extra-marital relationship while he was away, according to Brown. Camilla then felt free to console Charles . . . and the rest, as they say, is history.