Princess ANN Turns 60

Probably the hardest working of the Royal Family

By Geoffrey Levy

Sometimes a woman's deepest thoughts are best left unsaid, but the Princess Royal has never regretted once describing herself as 'not everyone's idea of a fairytale princess'.

It was a deliberate message and the moment she laid the ground rules for her life as a professional royal.

But everyone knew what she was getting at all those years ago.

Enigmatic: Princess Anne strikes a regal pose on her 21st birthday

In a celebrity-besotted world inhabited by pretty people endlessly proclaiming the message that physical beauty brings instant happiness, Anne was having to deal with being a real princess who is not blessed with chocolate-box prettiness.

On Sunday, she will be 60.

She's had two marriages, international sporting success, there has been talk of affairs and now, thanks to her son Peter and his Canadian-born wife Autumn, she's about to become a grandmother  -  a considerable challenge for a woman who once admitted to Terry Wogan on TV: 'I don't like children.' (though it has to be said that this same woman has been the spectacularly successful and hardworking president of Save the Children for 40 years).

As a princess, Anne has always been an enigma who, in public, maintains an old world sense of regality, while being the Royal Family's most willing moderniser.

Where other royal women gush, she is always restrained; where Princess Diana would scoop up a sickly child lovingly in her bare arms, Anne, even now, usually follows the traditional royal manner of standing unbending and apparently aloof , seldom revealing the hands beneath her gloves  -  though she has started to shake children's hands.

Indeed, behind palace walls the Princess Royal poured scorn on Diana's hands-on style, which was totally opposite to the uneasy distance she always kept with the public.

It's hardly surprising she never warmed to Diana.

Her attitude to the Princess was described by one former aide as 'cool to the point of deep freeze'.

She customarily referred to her as 'that woman'.

Laid back: A rare relaxed portrait taken in 1973

And yet while the rest of the Royal Family indulge themselves and their offspring in self-aggrandisement and privilege, Princess Anne, the monarch's second child and only daughter, refused to allow her children to be weighed down with royal titles  -  preferring them to have more freedom.

How different from Princess Margaret, for example, who, when she married photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, insisted on him being given an earldom.

Equally, Prince Andrew and Fergie's daughters Beatrice and Eugenie are not only royal princesses, but cost taxpayers £250,000 a year as protection officers traipse from party to party and across the globe with them.

Consider Anne's children, Peter and Zara, by her first marriage to fellow equestrian Captain Mark Phillips.

Today: Anne with her trademark 'loaf of bread' hairstyle

Peter Phillips, 33, who works in promotions for the Royal Bank of scotland in Hong Kong, is the first grandson of a monarch not to have a title (not even a mere 'Hon' like the common- or-garden offspring of countless ennobled politicians and party groupies).

Zara, a former World and european eventing champion (her mother was only a european champion, in 1971), is Miss Zara Phillips.

Both are happy to dash about the world sharing the hazards of life with everyone else, without the need for costly protection officers to look after them.

The apparently stiff and traditional Anne had the foresight to realise that the privileges of royalty would be a burden for her offspring, even though they are the Queen's grandchildren.

One former courtier is convinced she took the decision largely to protect Zara, in case as a young girl she did not match up to the world's expectations of what a 'princess' ought to be.

'Anne wanted to make sure she'd be comfortable in the world,' he says.

'I'm certain that's what made her seem so stiff to the public.'

It might even explain why the Princess Royal has for years continued to wear her hair swept up in a Victorian creation that recently was described as being 'like a cottage loaf '. However, men around her are said to find her slender, horse-woman's figure - an unchanged size ten since she was 20 - and rather bossy manner not unsexy.

'I can only think she has never wanted people to think she is trying to compete with other women in the glamour stakes,' says a close figure.

If that is so, it is a great pity. I remember one day, 20 years ago, when she was touring the Soviet Union and agreed to give a talk to students at Moscow University and take questions.

Anne had arrived at the airport with the usual severe, swept-up hairstyle.

But when she walked into the lecture hall she was like a movie star, her soft and voluminous hair falling and swaying about her shoulders in a way the public has probably never seen.

The students loved her. One 20-year- old female student said to me: 'You know, I don't think it would be too bad if we had a royal family.

‘I can see why it is good for your country.'

Elegant: Anne and Captain Mark Phillips pause in an ornately decorated hallway for a wedding picture in 1973

Ironically, the Soviets had originally invited Charles and Diana, but the Queen and the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher decided to send the Royal Family's safest pair of hands.

Zara, 29, whose boyfriend is the Gloucester and England rugby star Mike Tindall, paid a warm tribute to her mother in a joint BBC interview with her last night in advance of the 60th birthday celebrations.

'If i was going to be a mother, that is what I want to be like,' she said. 'I would like to be as good a mother as she's been to us.'

Even the troubled Fergie, joined at the hip with her daughters as she is, doesn't earn a more heart-felt compliment than that.

Yet Princess Anne's decision to ensure her children are brought up in the real - as opposed to royal - world has inevitably led to controversy.

Anne has long condemned the manner in which the Royal Family has become 'public property', yet her daughter modelled her first clothing range last month and has made hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from high-profile advertising campaigns, including Land Rover, Rolex and the Queen's bank Coutts.

Isn't she exploiting her royal connections? in the BBC interview, Anne admitted she is uncomfortable that Zara merits the label 'celebrity', but suggested that she has no other option.

'She has to [be a celebrity]. In the context of her eventing career, and the fact that she has sponsors and the sport has sponsors. It comes with the territory these days.'

But then Anne has an unusually pragmatic approach to her exalted position. Behind the starchy royal image lies a personal and private life that is astonishing for its lack of formality.

Mark Phillips, who trains riders and designs showjumping courses, is almost as much a presence in his former wife's life now as when they were married.

Mark, who got a 'modest' divorce settlement from Anne in 1992 after 19 years of marriage, lives with his second wife Sandy at Aston Farm, on his former wife's Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire, where Anne likes to spend most of her free time.

'They're all great friends and it's very relaxed,' says a close friend.

'The children see as much of Mark as they do of their mother, which is nice.'

All very cosy and domestic.

But the Princess's busy life, in which she has constantly been one of the hardest working royals over the years, has attracted a certain amount of tittle-tattle.

For some years before they parted, she and Mark Phillips were not really happy.

As he flew around the world riding and teaching (and siring an illegitimate child in New Zealand, whose mother eventually came looking for maintenance), there was talk and innuendo about Anne and the men close to her.

Much of it involved Detective Sergeant Peter Cross, a married officer from Mitcham, South-West London, who be came her protection officer in 1979.

Happy: Peter and Zara Phillips were given freedom by their mother

A year later, Anne came down to breakfast at Gatcombe Park to find grim-faced Royal Protection Squad senior officers waiting to meet her.

Cross was being relieved of his duties amid suggestions that he and the Princess had become 'too close'.

Never was the Princess' s imperious manner as useful as when rebutting such suggestions.

The formerly high-flying Cross found himself back in uniform, but moved from the glamour of royal protection to a mundane role behind a desk at Croydon police station.

Alas, that wasn't the end of the matter because four years later, in 1984, handsome Sergeant Cross (by then retired) sold his kiss-and-tell story to the News Of The World.

They paid him £600,000 - worth about £2million in today's money  -  in exchange for which he claimed the Princess snuggled up to him on the sofa while watching TV at Gatcombe, had intimate meetings in the library and in a lodge on the estate, the changing rooms of a swimming pool at Windsor and even a rendezvous in a three-bedroom semi in Ewell, Surrey, loaned to them for the afternoon by a fellow officer.

The Princess Royal has never acknowledged, let alone commented, on his claims.

Next, Captain Tim Laurence, the Queen's former equerry, arrived on the scene after he had written her a series of intimate letters that were stolen and offered to a national newspaper.

Four months after she and Mark divorced, Laurence and Anne married in a church in Scotland.

Settled: Anne with her current husband Tim Lawrence in 2007

These days, Tim Laurence is a vice- admiral with a desk in Whitehall and remains far more at home with boats than horses.

The couple have a flat in St James's Palace and he also maintains his old flat in Dolphin Square on the Thames embankment.

There are continuing rumours that their marriage is not as strong as the Queen and Prince Philip would wish, but friends are certain they will remain together.

Becoming 60 does not worry the Princess.

 'It's just another birthday,' she told a friend. Her intensive round of official duties - often as many as six in a day - will continue, with no plans to scale them back.

To Prince Philip, his only daughter - gutsy, pragmatic, bright and independent - remains the embodiment of the kind of son he always wanted.

He is on record as saying that he wishes his daughter had been born a boy.

'It's rather sad that none of the boys measure up to Anne,' says a close family figure.

'No wonder Philip adores her and talks to her about practically everything.'

Anne has also said that she would have preferred to have been born a man.

Come to think of it, she would have made a rather good king.

Zara Phillips' Princess Anne praise

Zara Phillips has paid tribute to her mother - Britain's Princess Anne - stating she hopes she can be as good a mum to her children in the future.

Zara Phillips has paid tribute Britain's Princess Anne.

The eventing world champion - who is the only daughter of the princess - has praised her mother, stating she hopes she can be as good a mum to her future children.

Speaking to the BBC in an interview to mark Anne's 60th birthday, Zara said: "I look at her and just think if I was going to be a mother that's what I would want to be like. I would like to be as good a mother as she has been to us."

I look at her and just think if I was going to be a mother that's what I would want to be like. I would like to be as good a mother as she has been to us.

Meanwhile, the princess's son Peter - whose wife Autumn recently announced her pregnancy - admitted the advice his mother has given he and Zara throughout their lives has been "invaluable".

He explained: "Her advice about life has been invaluable. Whenever we may have got slightly above our station she'd be the first one to bring us back down to earth fairly hard."

Zara - who has been dating England rugby star Mike Tindall since 2003 - recently admitted while she is not yet engaged, she would like to have children in the future.

She said: "I'm not engaged. I don't know why people say that I am. If I were I'd wear my ring with pride. I would love to have children. But I have got a lot to do before then.