Princess Anne Wishes That Younger Royals Would Go Back To Basics
“Well, she’s obviously talking about us since William and Kate never left BASIC,” said a catty Prince Hot Ginge before throwing his copy of Vanity Fair onto a lounger and snapping at his Los Angeles pool boy to slather more SPF Infinity & Beyond onto his freckled bottom crumpets. Listen, during these times, just let me have my PHG/pool boy fantasy.
Vanity Fair’s May cover story is devoted entirely to THE QUEEN’s only daughter Princess Anne, and even though there’s a lot of messiness going on in the royal family right now (PHG and Meghan Markle leaving, Prince Andrew being a part-time resident of Pedophile Island, etc…), Princess Anne didn’t get into anything like that and her profile doesn’t really deliver anything new. But she did throw a look of disagreement at the young tricks of the royal family for trying to be *~diFferEnt~* instead of just shutting up and cutting that damn ribbon at a hospital wing opening.
Princess Anne is currently the perfect age of 69, and she turns 70 in August, but she’s not planning to quit the hand waving and ribbon-cutting game anytime soon. Anne usually gets the title of The Hardest Working British Royal of the Year, because she does the most events (except for last year when Prince Charles did 521 events while Anne did 506). And like her mom (to Anne’s surprise), she’s not looking to retire. During her interview with Vanity Fair, which happened BC (before coronavirus), Anne said this about retirement:
“I don’t think retirement is quite the same [for me],” she says, smiling wryly. “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.”
As for PHG and Meghan’s decision to leave their jobs as senior royals and start their own foundation, Anne doesn’t call them out specifically, but does let the youngins’ know to just put on their pantyhose and follow the blueprint that seasoned royals like her laid out. You can’t modernize an established institution, so says Anne, basically:
And she worries that the younger generation of royals may be in too much of a hurry to change the royal family’s tried and tested approach when it comes to philanthropy. Describing herself as “the boring old fuddy-duddy at the back saying, ‘Don’t forget the basics,’ ” she cautions, “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.’ ”
I get it, Anne is old-school, and when old-school royals wanted to bring some excitement into their lives, they didn’t do it through work. They just fucked somebody else’s boyfriend. And I wish that Vanity Fair would’ve asked Anne about PHG and Harry’s security needs, because I’m sure she would’ve let out a “pfft” and an eye roll to that since she’s the kind of badass who helped foil her own kidnapping, thankyouverymuch.
And Anne is so busy that I’m guessing she couldn’t even find the time to sit down and pose for a new cover photo, so Vanity Fair had to use an old pic of her:
At least I think that’s a young Princess Anne, but then again, someone working at home could’ve messed up and accidentally used Dana Delany’s high school yearbook picture for the cover.
Pic: Wenn.com