Princess Anne thinks younger royals need to "go back to basics".
The 69-year-old princess – who represents more than 300 charities and military organisations and carried out over 500 official engagements last year – has urged the newer generations of her family not to try to "reinvent the wheel" by constantly trying new approaches and suggested they stick with what has been proven to be successful.
She reflected: "I don’t think this younger generation probably understands what I was doing in the past and it’s often true, isn’t it?
"You don’t necessarily look at the previous generation and say, ‘oh, you did that?’ or, ‘You went there?’
"Nowadays they’re much more looking for ‘oh, let’s do it a new way’. And I’m already at the stage [of] ‘Please do not reinvent that particular wheel. We’ve been there, done that. Some of these things don’t work. You may need to go back to basics’."
Anne often fits four or five engagements into her day and though she admitted that can make things difficult for her aides, she’d rather not be bored or left "hanging about".
She told Vanity Fair magazine: "I make their lives more difficult in terms of the logistics, I’m afraid, but if I’m going to be in London, I don’t want to be hanging about.
"A lot of stuff goes on here, so there’s a question of filling in the time. I’m fortunate that the program that I make up is a direct result of being asked to do these things. It would be a pity if you didn’t try and do them."
The Princess Royal turns 70 this year but has no plans to retire, insisting things are not "quite the same" for her family.
She said: "I don’t think retirement is quite the same [for me].
"Most people would say we’re very lucky not to be in that situation because you wouldn’t want to just stop. It is, to a large extent, the choice of the organisations you’re involved with and whether they feel you’re still relevant."
Anne’s father, Prince Philip, 98, stepped away from official engagements in 2017, while her mother, Queen Elizabeth, 93, no longer travels overseas.
And the princess admitted she didn’t expect them to keep working for so long.
She added: "But I think both my father and my mother have, quite rightly, made decisions about, you know, ‘I can’t spend enough time doing this and we need to find somebody else to do it’ because it makes sense.
"I have to admit they continued being there for a lot longer than I had in mind, but we’ll see."
Princess Anne urges younger generation to go back to basics
