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Despite her sporting successes, Anne was not popular with the public. Like her father,
she was outspoken, often rude, and had no patience with the media circus for which she
refused to perform. She was determined to be herself and made no attempt to conceal
her feelings or to play to the gallery as her grandmother did. She was uninterested in
clothes and had no fashion sense. Like her mother, she could seem forbidding when she
was not amused. On a joint visit with Charles to President Nixon at the White House in
1970, she singularly failed to charm the American media; the Washington Post dubbed her
the ‘Royal Sourpuss’ and accused her of being ‘sullen, ungracious and plain bored’. The
British public regarded her as arrogant; she and Princess Margaret regularly came at the
bottom of the royal popularity table for much the same reasons. The nadir of her
relations with the British press was still to come: when at the Badminton horse trials in
1982 she famously told a photographer to ‘Naff off!’ According to the dictionary,
although Anne was probably unaware of it, the term is mid-nineteenth-century slang for
‘fuck’. Later that year at another horse trials she told two Daily Mirror reporters to ‘piss
off’. Elizabeth, who, despite all rumours to the contrary, is a permissive mother, was
reluctant to attempt to control her daughter’s behaviour. Although, like any other
mother, she worried about her taking risks driving (Anne was fined at least twice for
speeding) and would plead with her to be careful, reproving her was quite another
matter. When, after the ‘Naff off’ furore, a courtier suggested that she really ought to
speak to her daughter about her language, Elizabeth replied gloomily, ‘I suppose it’ll
have to be me that does it.’
Despite her rather horse-faced looks (the member of the family whom she most
resembled was her great-aunt, the Princess Royal), Anne, with her powerful, direct
personality and healthy interest in sex, was attractive to men. She had many boyfriends,
among them the well-connected Andrew Parker Bowles, future husband of Camilla
Shand. But Anne was no snob; neither of her husbands was to be either aristocratic or
rich. She tended to prefer the men she found on the eventing circuit, like Richard Meade,
an immaculately handsome man with curly blond hair and an impeccable profile who
was also a brilliant horseman, a double Olympic Gold Medallist who had won every
major title in the eventing calendar. Meade described her as ‘humorous, amusing and
very exciting to be with’, but denied they had ever discussed marriage. Mark Phillips
came from the same eventing circle; he was a strong, expert horseman who had been
chosen by the Badminton Committee to ride the Queen’s big grey eventer, Columbus,
otherwise known as ‘the Monster’ or ‘the Brute’. Anne herself had suggested him to her
mother as ‘the most sympathetic of the good men I had seen riding’.
With Charles and Anne drawing most of the media attention, Elizabeth was more
successful in guarding her two younger children from publicity. Virtually no notice was
taken of them until they grew up and even then they were never to be the media stars
that their elder brother and sister were. Elizabeth was delighted in the new dimension
which having two new babies had given the family. ‘Andrew has been a source of great
fun this Christmas with everything being new and wonderful for him,’ she had written to
a friend in 1961. ‘The tree and presents and the masses of people ready and only too