All The Best Things Princess Anne Has Ever Said
Celebrating the wit and wisdom of the hardest working royal on her 75th birthday
I wanted to compile a list of 75 quotes to celebrate Princess Anne’s 75th birthday. I got stuck on 53, and after trawling the internet for hours and only turning up quotes that I either already had, or couldn’t be verified, I had a brainwave…maybe my readers could do the rest of the work for me!
If you have a Princess Anne quote you love—even better if she actually said something funny to you in person—pop it in the comments.
I’m sure the hive mind of Substack can generate another 22 classics.
1. “Not bloody likely!” – Princess Anne’s famously defiant reply to would-be kidnapper, Ian Ball, who demanded she get out of her car during a kidnapping attempt on 20 March 1974. Anne was returning to Buckingham Palace with her husband when Ball ambushed them at gunpoint.
2. “We had a sort of discussion about where or where not we were going to go. I was scrupulously polite because I thought it was silly to be too rude at that stage.” – Anne’s deadpan description of her standoff with kidnapper Ian Ball in a 1980 interview on the chat show Parkinson
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3. “Naff off!” – A much-publicized royal one-liner from the 1980s. Anne reportedly yelled the phrase at press photographers who annoyed her at the 1982 Badminton Horse Trials when they kept snapping after she fell from her horse.
4. “When I appear in public people expect me to neigh, grind my teeth, paw the ground and swish my tail – none of which is easy.” –The curse of being an accomplished horsewoman.
5. “Golf seems to be an arduous way to go for a walk. I prefer to take the dogs out.”
6. “People don’t believe they’ve experienced the event unless they’ve taken a photograph.” – On living in the moment (or failing to) in the age of cameraphones.
7. “You are a pest, by the very nature of that camera in your hand.” – A sharp rebuke Princess Anne gave a persistent photographer.
