There was a moment in February this year when Princess Anne stepped out in a familiar purple checked coat.

It was a regular day for the Princess Royal, back-to-back engagements including visits to a therapy group and a shawl factory in Nottingham in England’s Midlands.

The velvet coat — the hue of Scottish heather — had belonged to her late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, a favourite worn in private and twice in public. It’s not a dressy piece, Her Majesty was seen teaming it with trousers and her trademark headscarf, while Anne opted for a skirt and knee-high boots.

Of course, this is the sort of thing we all do. A poignant way to keep a loved one close while also recycling old and, in the late Queen’s case, extremely well-made clothes (the piece was designed by Elizabeth II’s dressmaker Angela Kelly). It’s also very Princess Anne, quietly respectful, no-nonsense, practical — and one reason she continues to poll as the UK’s most popular royal from the King’s generation.

The 2024 Ipsos poll, which annually measures attitudes to the Royal Family in Britain, showed Anne three percentage points ahead of her brother the King, with the Wales family members topping the poll. This was one percentage point higher than Anne’s figures the previous year and a recognition of how vital she is to Charles’ reign.

Last week Princess Anne, pictured here at an Easter service this year, carried out six engagements — more than any other royal.(Pool: Hollie Adams via Reuters)

A hardworking royal

The Princess Royal is regularly described as the most hard-working royal, based on the tally of her annual engagements — 457 in 2023 according to the Court Circular, compared to 425 carried out by the King. While this is not an entirely accurate workload analysis — much is done by King Charles and Queen Camilla aside from engagements — it does give a clear indication of just how much of the often mundane public service toil Anne takes on.

Since the King stepped back from public-facing duties to undergo cancer treatment, Anne has been even more in evidence. Last week she carried out six engagements — more than any other royal — and next week there are a further nine scheduled.

There’s no great fanfare to Anne’s work, which usually sails under the radar. She’s rarely trailed by a media pack and travels with a tiny staff retinue, often just security and one aide.

I have interviewed Princess Anne twice, including at a photo shoot on her Gatcombe Estate farm, and travelled with her on her last major visit to Australia to open the Sydney Royal Easter Show in 2022.

In person, she is warm, down to earth and eager to get on with the job. She has a quick, dry sense of humour and hits the ground running, never fading. “It’s quite frenetic but for quite short spaces,” she told me. “There will be quite a lot of flying in between. You just learn to pace yourself. I can now sleep in any form of transport, which does help.”

At the Easter Show, she strode through the grounds checking out the animals and meeting local farmers. She was completely in her element.

The royal juggle

It’s no surprise, this is very much Princess Anne’s manner. “I’ve never been a city girl. I may have been born within the sound of Bow Bells but definitely never my scene,” she told me for an Australian Women’s Weekly interview to mark her 70th birthday, in which she talked with fervour about her own farm in Gloucestershire.

“London was to me school days … weekends were at Windsor … where there was a farm, mostly dairy but there were pigs and chickens as well. My background … was always on the farm.”

Princess Anne views cattle during a tour the Royal Easter Show in 2022. (AAP: Bianca De Marchi)

Fitting in royal work with running her farm is a juggle, but like her mother and the King, the public service side of her job is non-negotiable. “We as a family see ourselves as there to support [the monarch],” she said in a 2023 interview with CBC in Canada, ahead of her brother’s coronation. “What we do, we hope, contributes to the monarchy and the way in which it can convey continuity … service and understanding the way that people and communities want to live their lives.”

Anne was very close to both parents and from her mother says she learned that the job is all about “the way you treat people, with respect for individuals”. On engagements, she is happiest chatting with regular folk who I’ve noticed warm to her quickly. “You just find people with stories to tell,” she says.

Her daughter Zara Tindall, who lives nearby on Aston Farm on the Gatcombe Estate, says she can’t see her mother ever slowing down or retiring. She’s probably right, but Princess Anne is on the record criticising the reduced number of working royals now available to call on, something that has become more apparent with the family’s current health issues.

“I think the ‘slimmed-down’ [monarchy] was said in a day when there were a few more people around to make that seem like a justifiable comment,” she told CBC in 2023. “I mean, it doesn’t sound like a good idea from where I’m standing.”

The comment caused a few raised eyebrows, but there is no sign that the King is about to call on the likes of Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice or recall Prince Harry and Meghan from the US to swell the ranks with an injection of youth.

‘A very mixed blessing’

When the Queen was crowned, Princess Anne was second in line to the throne. Today she is 17th behind many non-working royals and both of her younger brothers.

At the end of 2022, Anne and her brother Prince Edward were added to the list of Counsellors of State who can be called on to fill in for the Monarch if he is ill or overseas, but the succession line remains with Prince Harry and Prince Andrew and their children ahead of the Princess Royal.

Some Brits have told me they would feel more comfortable seeing Princess Anne higher up, but it will never happen. In a hierarchical monarchy, the outmoded gender rule that put male heirs ahead of females was changed when the Succession to the Crown Act was passed in 2013, but it doesn’t apply retrospectively.

While it must be galling, Anne has taken this gender inequality on the chin, saying she’s always felt she was treated as “an honorary man” in other parts of her life — notably in her chosen sport of horse-riding in which she was an Olympian.

The Princess Royal did however famously ensure that her own children were not given titles. This allowed them independence to make their own way and not be indentured to a life of royal work as their mother had been.

“I think even then [when I made the decision] it was easy to see that it [a title] was a very mixed blessing,” Princess Anne told me when I interviewed her in 2020. “And in my case because I was female, no advantages at all, really.”

Juliet Rieden is a royal commentator.