I've lost my home and my boyfriend

It hasn't been a good week for Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. The former It Girl, whose colourful antics delighted and annoyed us in equal measures, has been back in the headlines.

And these days that's no longer something she relishes. For the past 18 months, London's party scene has had to make do with post-It girls such as Lady Victoria Hervey while 30-year-old Tara swapped discos and designer frocks for domestic bliss. She had at last settled down with her first "proper" boyfriend, the 37-year-old mega-rich property developer Anton Bilton.

Instead of tottering along red carpets in high heels, she was waddling around in wellies organising low-key dinner parties at Bilton's Oxfordshire mansion or curled up watching videos in his luxury Belgravia pad. But last week, to the dismay of her friends and family, who were all grateful that she finally seemed happy with someone normal (former flames include the "love rat" Greg Martin, pop star Nick Rhodes and restaurateur Mogens Tholstrup), the pair announced they'd split up. And then a few days later it was revealed that Tara, who had moved back to her little house in Fulham, had been burgled early last Wednesday morning while she was alone in the house.

As a result of the break-in, which left Tara very shaken, she has moved temporarily into a tiny, bohemian mews house in west London. She can no longer face sleeping alone in her home and is planning to rent it out. She looks pretty, if a little tired, with her long hair unbrushed and no make-up. On the kitchen table is a copy of Marie Claire magazine. Poignantly, it is open on a page about relationships. Upstairs in the light-filled bedroom a selection of suitcases are spilling their contents all over the floor and a framed photograph of her and Bilton sits on the chest of drawers.

While stuffing her face with a raspberry and custard patisserie, she reveals how, while she was taking a shower last week, she heard two men break in through the skylight of her home. Burglars, it seems, no longer wait for homeowners to go out before attempting to ransack their houses.

"It was a little after five in the

morning when I got up and went downstairs to take a shower. I'm not usually conscious at that hour but I was being picked up at seven in order to attend a breakfast meeting with Christy Turlington. I was so worried I wasn't going to wake up that I got up extra early. I opened my bedroom window, had a shower and literally two minutes after I came out again I could hear two people come in through the skylight. I heard a clattering sound and a thud. It was awful. I literally wet myself I was so frightened. They must have heard me downstairs because I shouted at them to f*** off."

It didn't seem to deter the burglars, she could hear them still rummaging through all her things. Terrified that they would come downstairs and rape or hurt her - she was only wearing a dressing gown (cashmere, she points out) - she slowly twisted the key to the front door and ran onto the street. "It was only just getting light outside and there was nobody around. It was very quiet. Stupidly, I felt too embarrassed to bother the neighbours so early. Standing on the pavement I became aware that the intruders could probably see me from my upstairs window. I dashed back inside and grabbed my mobile phone which, fortunately, along with my wallet, was near at hand. I dialled 999 and within three minutes the police arrived."

It was like an early morning drugs raid - there were four police cars and one van. They ran inside and surrounded the house but the intruders had escaped back through the roof.

"The police were great and forensics came round, but there were no fingerprints. It was a professional job." There was a sickening mess upstairs: every box, every bag was opened. She'd just got back from holiday so all her luggage was thrown about. Luckily, most of the valuables were downstairs, so all they took was her collection of sunglasses and a handbag or two - "but it will probably be days before I discover if anything else is missing".

AS soon as the police had gone, she burst into tears and couldn't stop shaking. "I just decided I could never ever stay the night there again. That evening I checked into a hotel in Jermyn Street - I had won a free night's stay there at a raffle a few months before - and slept for 13 hours. I felt so secure."It was much-needed security that Tara had got from her ex-boyfriend. Bilton was seven years older than her, financially independent and, unlike her previous lovers, happy to stay out of the limelight. He had been married before and had two young children. It was the sort of grounding Tara desperately needed.

Despite the glam lifestyle depicted in her former newspaper column, what she always yearned for was a husband, a house in the country and children. Somewhere like home - "T-P Towers", the Hampshire farm she returns to most weekends to spend with her parents, Patti and Charles, close friends of Prince Charles.

"Anton was very security conscious. He would go round his house when we got in each evening, armed with all sorts of knives and weapons. He even had panic buttons. He'd march round and look under every bed while I shuffled around behind him. He was good at making me feel safe," she says, smoking a clumsily hand-rolled cigarette.

The two of them met shortly after Tara split up with the Full Monty actor Hugo Speers early last year. She was depressed, pining away at home when a friend sent her a first-class ticket for her to join him and a few friends on holiday in Africa. "It was a very nice thing to do. So Anton, who was also invited, took me to the airport and off we went. It was amazing. An affair was the last thing I expected."

In typical Tara fashion, it was only a matter of days after the pair returned from the African trip that she arrived at Bilton's front door, suitcases in hand. "Soon after we got back, he gave me a key," she says. "When he came home from work the next evening my stuff was all there. Isn't that awful! Everything, including all my photos. Every man's nightmare: here's a key for when you want to come. He came back that night and I was totally installed and I mean, everything. I'd literally spent the whole day moving. He was so well-mannered, he was very discreet about it.

"In the first few months of a relationship you've got to maintain that mystery and aura. On day one I let all that go. I think that's because it felt so comfortable, so right. And it was a gorgeous house."

After spending so long in the limelight, dating paparazzi-friendly boyfriends, going out with someone like Bilton was quite strange for Tara. She says it was like "coming back to home-made soup". She often thinks of her boyfriends in culinary terms. When she was going out with Greg Martin she inexplicably compared him to "yoghurt". It was supposed to be a compliment. "At first I had to keep telling myself that going out with Anton wasn't boring but normal. Whereas other boyfriends would say things like, 'Let's just do this and live it and not think about the consequences', Anton was a father and a businessman and reliable. He would think about tomorrow and he wouldn't do those things. At the time, I used to think, 'Oh, that's a bit boring', but actually, after a year, you realise that responsibility is very attractive."

She even had a cordial relationship with Bilton's former wife, Anna, whom he had married very young and split up with 18 months previously, and loved spending every other weekend with his two children, aged five and three. She was in the middle of organising the renovation of a stately home he had recently bought, 50-room Tyringham Hall in Buckinghamshire, when the relationship ended.

"That's my biggest sadness," Tara laughs. "I'm going to get that house, even if I marry him and divorce him, I'm going to get it back. It was the most beautiful house. We entertained at his other home in Oxfordshire. It was just wonderful. I have always been a lover of the countryside. When I take my heels off and I'm barefoot in the grass, I'm a different person." Did she spend hours over a hot stove preparing dinner for their guests?

"No, we had an amazing chef. He lived there, it was a fully staffed house actually."

After her initial worry that going out with Bilton was boring, Tara soon embraced his lifestyle with open arms. "It was so nice when we went on holidays not to feel as if we had to go to a nightclub, because I've come to loathe nightclubs. We used to be in bed by 10.30pm. Well, not every night. We would have our wild nights. It was just really nice like that, a very normal life. You can always tell somebody by their friends. He had very balanced, together friends. People in the property business, investment, hedge funds, whatever." It was the sort of world that she'd left behind when she was little, the world she grew up with, and it was nice to come across all those sorts of people again.

But he can't have been perfect. After all, they are no longer together. But she doesn't want to slag Bilton off. In fact, he might be coming around to see her that evening - they are at that awkward post-relationship stage when you want to remain friends but are not sure how plausible it is. "I think men are good at avoidance, they bury everything, whereas I think confrontation is what leads to intimacy. That's not easy to deal with for some people." She chooses her words carefully. "But ultimately, the problem was that I probably moved in with him too quickly."

She knew the game was up when they returned from a holiday to Mauritius a few weeks ago. "We went to stay at the St Geran, in the Royal Villa, and if everything's not perfect when you're staying in that villa then you know you've got a bad relationship. You can't get anywhere more romantic than that. He just didn't make me feel special." Tara now feels, as anyone does when a relationship comes to an end, vulnerable and a bit of a failure. But she is still young and attractive, and she has grown up enormously over the past couple of years. And from this, her first serious relationship, she will have gained a lot of valuable experience for next time. It's just sad that someone who is so keen to settle down - her sister, Santa, is now happily married with a young child - and so needs to be protected from both herself and others is once again single.

"I think the reason why I've been desperate to get married," she explains, "is because I've got two parents who have been married for 30 years. We are such a happy family. We go home every weekend. There's my mother in the kitchen, my father on the tennis court, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews all running round the house. I think you can't get anything better than being married and having a family, having people over at the weekend. I have always been keen for that, I think it would be such a lovely thing to happen, but it just hasn't happened yet. So now I'm just watching Bridget Jones."

Then her eyes light up, revealing a flash of the old pre-rehab Tara. "But it's actually all right being single. If you're going to be single, you might as well be single for the summer. It's the perfect time."