Princess Anne Has No Filter — And Here’s The Proof

From comedy-shrugging at the Queen while she was greeting Donald Trump to famously evading kidnap by simply refusing to get out of the car, Princess Anne isn’t just the most hard-working royal, she’s also comedy gold. And according to accounts from her official biographer, Brian Hoey, Anne deserves to be appointed Queen of the one-liner.

In an interview with the Daily Express, Hoey, who published “HRH The Princess Anne” in 1984, recalls attending various engagements with the royal. He revisited one story of a particular trip to Houston, Texas, which quickly began to resemble “a scene out of Dynasty starring Joan Collins.” Upon arriving, a civic dignitary said to Anne, “Congratulate your mother on being reelected.” Hoey recounts that another man stood up and told the royal: “I knew your grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill.”

Throughout, Anne successfully kept a straight face, but that soon changed when they were exiting the event. Hoey recalls: “We got up, we went into the lift, and she stood facing the front. We were behind her and she said, ‘My God, it’s enough to make your hair curl!’ And she looked at me, and mine was receding quite a lot at the time, and she said: ‘Well perhaps not in your case.’”

Hoey revealed that Princess Anne mostly shares jokes with people she likes. “When she made a joke about you, she said that as a term of affection,” he says. “She would never make a joke about any stranger, only about somebody she was comfortable with. So, in a way, it was a backhanded compliment, if you like.”

Elsewhere, he also claimed that Anne felt an affinity with the late Princess Diana. Hoey recalls Anne saying: “She [Diana] and I are in the same boat. Both sort of semi-detached members of the Royal Family.”