BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

The no-frills princess who’s nearing her 70th birthday was a rebel in her day, but she has no patience with how younger royals want to change The Firm COMPILED BY NICI DE WET

- NICI DE WET

THERE are many constants about the queen’s only daughter. Her hairstyle, for one, unchanged over the decades. The fact that she’s happiest either in gumboots striding across the moors with her dogs, or in jodhpurs atop one of her beloved horses.

Down-to-earth, no-nonsense, unfussy, content to fly under the radar – that’s Princess Anne.

So it was a surprise to many when the Princess Royal recently popped up on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine ahead of her 70th birthday in August.

The cover image is of a winsome 19-year-old Anne, wavy locks tumbling over her bare shoulders, in a picture taken in 1969 by Lord Snowdon, the renowned photographer who was then married to her aunt, Princess Margaret.

Securing an interview with Anne is something of a coup for the publication – she rarely agrees to a sit-down with the media. Yet chatting in St James’ Palace, London, to them the princess opened up about royal life and her work and offered some good old-fashioned advice for the new generation of royals.

Calling herself a “fuddy-duddy” who places value in the tried-and-tested ways of The Firm, she raised eyebrows when she implied the younger members of the family were guilty of trying to “reinvent the wheel”. “I don’t think this younger generation probably understands what I was doing in the past. Nowadays, they’re much more looking for, ‘Oh, let’s do it a new way’,” she says in what’s widely been deemed to have been a subtle swipe at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan.