Royal aides have drawn a sharp contrast between Queen Camilla and Princess Anne, lifting the lid on two very different working styles at the heart of the monarchy.
According to new claims, the King’s sister is seen inside the palace as a relentless consumer of briefing papers, while the Queen is said to prefer a looser, more instinctive approach that relies on meeting people and reading the room in the moment.
Reporting on Anne’s recent trip to Singapore, insiders told the Times that the Princess Royal arrived at engagements armed with a deep command of names, dates and technical detail.
During a visit to Rolls-Royce’s Seletar campus, where she was shown aircraft engines destined for Airbus and Boeing planes, she was described as “reeling off” facts and figures about engineering and productivity, questioning executives closely on performance.
The picture that emerges is of a royal who still runs on homework. Courtiers speak of “the bag” – a weekly postbag of briefing notes, suggested engagements and biographies of everyone Anne is due to meet, including journalists.
Every Friday, staff at St James’s Palace compile the material and send it to Gatcombe Park, her Gloucestershire home, where she is said to work through it meticulously over the weekend.
That methodical approach was on display in Singapore. Anne flew in for a two-day working visit with her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, to mark 60 years of diplomatic relations between Britain and the city-state.
As President of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, she laid a wreath at Kranji War Cemetery and met veterans and serving personnel, before touring the Royal Navy patrol ship HMS Spey and speaking to its crew about life on deployment in the Indo-Pacific.
Queen Camilla is ‘totally opposite’ to Princess Anne as royal aides make distinction
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She also attended an orchid-naming ceremony at Singapore’s National Orchid Garden, where a flower was named Dendrobium Anne, and held separate audiences with President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.
On the final day, she visited the Airbus Asia Training Centre, strapping into a flight simulator, and returned to Rolls-Royce’s headquarters, where observers again noted how thoroughly she appeared to have mastered her brief.
By contrast, Queen Camilla is portrayed by some aides as far less interested in dense paperwork.
The Times report cites insiders who say the Queen “barely skim-reads her briefs”, preferring instead to “find people how they are”.
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The Princess Royal, and her husband, Vice-Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, visit the Royal Navy warship HMS Spey | REUTERSRather than arriving with pages of notes committed to memory, the Queen is said to rely on her natural ease in conversation and her ability to put guests at ease, allowing encounters to unfold more spontaneously.
Those close to the Queen have long argued that this style is a strength, particularly during the most difficult period of the King’s cancer treatment.
A royal aide recently described her resilience as “astonishing” as she balanced a heavy programme of engagements with the strain of supporting her husband through illness, including visits to cancer centres where she could not show “the slightest flicker of vulnerability” in public.
Queen Camilla trying honey during her trip to Jersey in 2024 | PAThe contrast with Anne, however, is striking.
While the Queen has been praised for emotional intelligence and warmth, the Princess Royal is increasingly cast as the monarchy’s workhorse technocrat – a royal who comes armed with chapter and verse on defence, engineering, agriculture or whatever sector she is visiting that day.
In Singapore, that meant grilling aviation executives on productivity one moment and discussing naval operations with sailors the next, all in humidity and driving rain that did not appear to slow her down.