Kerry Parnell: Will an injury stop Her Royal Badass Princess Anne? Not bloody likely

Oh, how I wish there was a Princess Anne School of Life. Forget all the LinkedIn coaches and Insta-experts, I’d be signing up for a Windsor Webinar in seconds, writes Kerry Parnell.

You can’t keep a good woman down,  especially when she is the workhorse of the Royal Family.

Let’s hope Princess Anne makes a swift recovery, after she was taken to hospital last weekend, having sustained a head injury, thought to be from a horse, on her Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire.

The Princess Royal, 73, has doggedly kept calm and carried on, shouldering the extra workload, throughout the absence of brother Charles and niece Catherine, only to have been knocked out of action herself.

However, considering this is the same woman who once told her would-be kidnapper “Not bloody likely”, we can expect her to tackle her latest setback with characteristic grit.

In fact, Anne played down her kidnapping ordeal so much, it’s all but forgotten – seen as so insignificant, it wasn’t even featured in the six-season saga that was Netflix’s The Crown.

Princess Anne meets at a charity event for the National Lifeboat Institution in May. Picture: AFP

I know creator Peter Morgan couldn’t include every single event in the Windsors’ lives, but you have to wonder why he left out one so dramatic.

On March 20, 1974, the 23-year-old Princess Anne was being driven back to Buckingham Palace with her then-husband Captain Mark Phillips, when a car cut off their Rolls-Royce.

A loner called Ian Ball, 26, shot her protection officer Jim Beaton, chauffeur Alex Callender, policeman Michael Hills and journalist Brian McConnell.

Ball ordered the princess to get out of the car, declaring he wanted a ransom of £2m. But she wasn’t having any of it.

“Not bloody likely,” she replied, adding, “I haven’t got two million pounds.”

Ball was hit by a passer-by, former-boxer Ronnie Russell, then arrested.

Typically, the thing the princess was most furious about was the destruction of her new dress. “I was so annoyed he tore the sleeve out of my dress – it was a good new dress,” Anne, well-known for her thrifty approach to fashion, later said.

Ball was sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he remains. As for Anne, she said her career with horses had prepared her for such events.

“One thing about horses and sport is that you have to prepare for the unexpected,” she later told biographer Brian Hoey.

Five days after the incident, the Princess Royal attended her next engagement, as if nothing had happened.

Fifty years later, it’s as though it never did.

Imagine if that occurred now – it would be a very different response. But as Anne said in the documentary Princess Royal: Anne at 70, sometimes the best thing to do is to simply get on with it.

“People talk about being trained to be a member of the Royal Family … but there is no such thing,” she said.

But oh, how I wish there was a Princess Anne School of Life.

Forget all the LinkedIn coaches and Insta-experts, I’d be signing up for a Windsor Webinar in seconds.

Leader Anne does not suffer fools, legendarily once muttering “I  think this person is probably the most stupid person in world sport” at an Olympic committee meeting, forgetting her microphone was on.

She never flinched, recalled chairman Sebastian Coe.

“It was as though it never happened.”

As someone who regularly plunges both feet into sticky situations, only to have to extricate them, that’s my kind of role model.

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Originally published as Kerry Parnell: Will an injury stop Her Royal Badass Princess Anne? Not bloody likely