Princess Anne's nine-word admission about the Queen after Princess Diana died

02 December 2023 , 23:00

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Princess Anne, Princess Royal attends the 2023 Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbey (Image: Getty Images)

Princess Anne has said she thinks the Queen was entirely right to remain at Balmoral with her grandsons, Prince William and Harry, in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death.

The Princess Royal said her mother did "exactly the right thing" by refusing to return in the days after the car crash in Paris in 1997. Being absent from London, she missed the millions of mourners who went to lay flowers as a tribute to the late Princess. At the time they were bemused as to why the sovereign wasn't mourning Diana in public, reports OK magazine.

Many suspected that Her Majesty should have returned from Balmoral before she bowed to public pressure, returning to Buckingham Palace a day earlier than planned to speak to the nation. Certain royal commentators have even suggested it was the one slip-up of her entire time on the throne.

However, the Queen's daughter, Princess Anne is in disagreement and believes her beloved mother didn't misjudge the moment. Speaking to ITV's Chris Ship in 2017, the 72-year-old spoke in an interview which has now been aired for broadcast for the first time.

Speaking before the death of both the Queen and her husband Prince Philip, Anne also praised her parents' 73-year marriage, saying their partnership was "really important". She said: "I think my mother did exactly the right thing. I think it's absolutely extraordinary that any right-minded parent should believe... [there] would have been an alternative to bring those children down here to London in all that hoo-ha.

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"I just don't know how you can think that would've been a better thing to do." When they lost their mother, William was 15 and Harry was 13, on that awful night in the French capital.

When asked if the Queen was simply putting her two grandchildren first, the Princess Royal said: "Absolutely. I don't think either of those two would've been able to cope had they been anywhere else."

"If you were the grandmother of a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old whose mother had just been killed in a car crash, she did absolutely the right thing. If I had been her, I would have done that. Why would you bring them to London? Why don’t you let them get over the start of the shock in the bosom of their own family?"

Charlie Duffield