Princess Anne of England will visit Gibraltar on 17 and 18 November to attend the eighth edition of the Gibraltar International Literary Festival, of which she is honorary president. This new official trip by a member of the British royal family to the Rock occurs when talks for the new treaty between the United Kingdom and the European Union on Gibraltar after Brexit are postponed.
The sister of Charles III is scheduled to arrive in Gibraltar accompanied by her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, in what will be the princess's fourth trip to this controversial territory and which, according to Queen Elizabeth II, is her only trip. to Spain in 1988, “the only problem that remains between us.”
Princess Anne's first sight of the Rock was in 1954, when she was a child and accompanied her parents on what was the last stop of a world tour aboard the Britannia. Already in this millennium, the princess returned to Gibraltar in 2004, coinciding with the 300 years of British occupation of the Rock. And in 2009 she moved back to the territory to inaugurate a military clinic named after her, Princess Royal Medical Centre.
These and many other visits by the Windsors caused discomfort to the Government of the day and also conditioned relations with the Royal Family, but on this occasion the investiture debate of Pedro Sánchez has caused silence from the Government regarding Ana's new trip. The last royal visit to Gibraltar was that of Prince Edward and Sofia of Edinburgh in June last year as part of the platinum jubilee of Elizabeth II.
At 73 years old, Princess Anne faces a new role among the Windsors, as the king's sister after the death of her mother and as a favored front row member after the game of chairs due to the departure of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the defenestration of Prince Andrew.
Although Anne's work as a member of the royal family has been much more discreet for the media than those of her brothers or nephews, according to the lists of the Windsors' activities that Buckingham publishes each year, this septuagenarian princess was for decades the hardest worker. of the family, even attending more than 380 official events in one year.
Princess Anne's work, rigorous and prolonged over time, has made her an infallible asset in difficult times for the British royal family. She began to assume royal duties upon reaching adulthood and her diligence led her mother to grant her the title of royal princess in 1987, when she lost prominence and influence to the distinguished Lady Di. A respected Amazon, Anne also became the first member of the British royal family to compete in the Olympic Games. She is currently seventeenth in line to the British throne, but at birth she was third.
Another curious event that defines Anne's personality was her reaction to a kidnapping attempt that she experienced in 1974. The princess and her first husband, Mark Phillips, were returning to Buckingham Palace from a charity event when a car forced the vehicle transporting them to stop at The Mall, the large avenue between the palace and Trafalgar Square. The driver of the car, Ian Ball, who later turned out to be schizophrenic, fired several bullets at Ana's bodyguard and driver and approached her to tell her that he was going to kidnap her and ask her to get out of the car, to which she responded: " Not even a joke” (Not bloody likely, in English). Ana escaped by leaving through the other door of the car and years later she said that during her conversation with Ball she had to resist the urge to beat him up: "I was about to lose my cool, but I knew that if I did, then I would hit him and he would hit me." one shot".
The only scandal that Princess Anne has been involved in in seven decades was her divorce from Mark Phillips in 1992, contributing with this marital breakdown to the annus horribilis of Elizabeth II. With Phillips she had two children, Zara Tindall and Peter Phillips, for whom she did not want titles. Before the end of that fateful year for the British monarchy, the princess had already remarried the then naval officer Timothy Laurence, her current husband, whom she met while he served as her mother's equerry between 1986 and 1989. Their wedding took place. It was celebrated in the Crathie Kirk church, in the town of Crathie, Scotland, since religious marriage of divorced people is allowed there.
Her children have made her a grandmother of five. Zara, married to former British rugby player Mike Tindall, has Mia, Lena and Lucas. Peter, for his part, had Savannah and Isla during his marriage to Autumn Patricia Kelly.
