Dear Gossips, 

Princess Anne covers the new issue of Vanity Fair in a piece that’s meant to mark her upcoming 70th birthday in August. Though the interview takes place before the COVID-19 lockdown, it is an interesting time for any senior member of the British royal family to be doing an interview, considering all that’s happened over the last few months. 

 

Princess Anne’s younger brother, Prince Andrew, has stepped down from public life because of his friendship with the dead rapist pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Her nephews, Prince William and Prince Harry, aren’t getting along, and Prince Harry has left England to live in America. Her son, Peter Phillips, recently announced his divorce. So you can imagine, there are some sensitivities. 

Please. 

If anyone’s up to it, it would be Anne. And, not surprisingly, she doesn’t give anything away here. Doesn’t seem like she even wanted to bother with a photo shoot, LOL. (Who does she look like, or who looks like her, in this cover photo?! I can’t put my finger on it.) In fact, there’s not much here that’s new in Vanity Fair if you have some British royal knowledge, and if you don’t, it’s a portrait of a woman who has no time for drama and has always just gotten on with it, even when she got kidnapped that one time. Amusingly, that’s actually how this interview reads – she shows up to say a few things about duty and responsibility and even some of the actual quotes she gives are basically in the spirit of “let’s get on with it”, like this one, when she’s at a meeting and there’s a luncheon and she skips it:

“I think during the day, eating’s not really an issue.” 

 

The point is, I’m pretty sure Anne’s Vanity Fair profile won’t be generating much heat. Unless, of course, the British tabloids, in their ongoing campaign of hate against the Sussexes, they put out an article about how Harry and Meghan could “learn from their aunt”. By the time you read this, the Daily Mail will probably already have that posted. Of course that wouldn’t be Anne’s intent. Unlike her older brother Prince Charles’s Vanity Fair 70th birthday profile published in the fall of 2018, about a year and a half ago, in which he and his team made him look great, arguably at the expense of his sons. There was so much tea in that article and the public fracture between him, William, and Harry can be traced back to that piece. Charles’s 70th birthday press is when all the gossip escalated to the next level. 

Princess Anne isn’t giving anything up. God, what would you give to know what she really thinks? For more on Princess Anne in Vanity Fair, click here.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey