The Princess Royal has given a rare interview to Vanity Fair ahead of her 70th birthday later this summer.
Of her heavy schedule, which she attributes to not wanting to sit around, she says, “I make their lives more difficult in terms of the logistics, I’m afraid, but if I’m going to be in London, I don’t want to be hanging about. A lot of stuff goes on here, so there’s a question of filling in the time. I’m fortunate that the program that I make up is a direct result of being asked to do these things. It would be a pity if you didn’t try and do them.”
She speaks of carrying on with engagements instead of retiring, saying, “Most people would say we’re very lucky not to be in that situation because you wouldn’t want to just stop. It is, to a large extent, the choice of the organizations you’re involved with and whether they feel you’re still relevant.
“But I think both my father and my mother have, quite rightly, made decisions about, you know, ‘I can’t spend enough time doing this and we need to find somebody else to do it’ because it makes sense. I have to admit they continued being there for a lot longer than I had in mind, but we’ll see.”
On the younger group of royals—namely her nephews William and Harry and their wives Catherine and Meghan—Princess Anne cautions against re-inventing the wheel.
“I don’t think this younger generation probably understands what I was doing in the past and it’s often true, isn’t it? You don’t necessarily look at the previous generation and say, ‘Oh, you did that?’ Or, ‘You went there?’ Nowadays, they’re much more looking for, ‘Oh, let’s do it a new way.’ And I’m already at the stage, ‘Please do not reinvent that particular wheel. We’ve been there, done that. Some of these things don’t work. You may need to go back to basics.’”
She says that if she weren’t a royal, she would have wanted to be an engineer. “The practicalities of how things work, I think, was always interesting as far as I was concerned. But I think it was a little bit early in the sort of scheme of things to have gone down that route.”
Instead, she has been championing women in engineering and science jobs through her patronages. “I’ve certainly enjoyed being part of trying to encourage more girls to look at engineering as a realistic career.”
She also reveals that her equestrian career came as a result of wanting to do something outside of the Royal Family and, she says, “I thought if I was going to do anything outside of the Royal Family, horses was likely to be the best way of doing it.”
“The original horse I rode was bred as a polo pony and should never have been an event horse, but it worked, so that was very satisfying. But I always knew it was going to be limited time.”
Princess Anne reveals her plans for the fall—provided she can again undertake engagements that have been halted due to the Coronavirus — and they include a trip to New York.
The Princess Royal will visit the English-Speaking Union’s New York branch, as its patron, and the National Lighthouse Museum on Staten Island. Her love of lighthouses is well-known, and the Museum has asked her to be its patron.
“They’re very important and need to be maintained, and that’s a part of the maritime sector I’m interested in, and I like trying to raise that profile.”
And about those birthday celebrations? It’s rumoured that The Queen wants to host a party for her on August 15, though Princess Anne says, “Well, it would be nice if it were just another year passed, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Princess Anne’s full interview can be read here.
"; n.innerHTML = "window._taboola = window._taboola || [];_taboola.push({mode:'thumbnails-a', container:'taboola-below-article-thumbnails', placement:'Below Article Thumbnails', target_type: 'mix'});"; insertAfter(t, e); insertAfter(n, t) }injectWidgetByMarker('tbmarker');
