Charles has paid £1.5m to Camilla's sister who helped hide his affair: How interior designer sibling has earnt huge sums from Duchy of Cornwall for string of revamps in past 11 years

Right now the builders are finishing off, leaving interior designer Annabel Elliot hard at work on her latest, and perhaps largest, interior design commission from the Duchy of Cornwall.

The pub-cum-hotel has risen majestically in the centre of Poundbury, Prince Charles’s model village on the outskirts of Dorchester, and will be named The Duchess Of Cornwall — after Annabel’s elder sister — when it opens in October.

Inevitably there is renewed gossip about Mrs Elliot receiving more sustenance from her sister’s royal table — annual accounts of the Duchy, which provide Charles with his multi-millionaire lifestyle, reveal it has paid Annabel £1.5 million for goods and design services since Camilla, 69, married the Prince in 2005.

But this time the gossip is edged with amusement. Friends have noticed that the building, which Charles refers to as Poundbury’s new ‘pub’, bears a striking resemblance to Mayfair’s imposing Ritz Hotel, a place to which the Prince has a great sentimental attachment.

It was at the Ritz in January 1999, at a party celebrating Annabel’s 50th birthday, that Camilla famously emerged from the shadows to be photographed with Charles in public for the first time.

Some in his circle see the similarity in the neoclassical style of the two buildings as more than just a coincidence — since the new pub will perhaps always remind Charles of that key moment in his bid for public acceptance of Mrs Parker Bowles as his official consort.