RICHARD KAY: Anne’s absence exhibits risks of a slimmed-down monarchy

Mercifully the blow she received was not life-threatening and the wounds to her head were described as ‘minor’.

But even if Princess Anne makes a characteristically swift recovery from the concussion that has kept her under close observation at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital, the unfortunate incident is a dramatic reminder of just how vital she is to the monarchy.

Indeed without the ever-present Anne, it is impossible to imagine it continuing its schedule of public engagements on anything like the scale that it does. In recent times, with both the King and the Princess of Wales being treated for cancer, she has almost single-handedly propped up the Royal Family.

In the first three months of the year, she took on more than 30 per cent of all royal appearances.

But the reliance on Anne is not just confined to the past six months; her workload, which shames the output of younger royals, has been consistently high for years, decades even. More than anything, though, her absence — however long it will be — offers the most compelling warning of the perils of a slimmed-down monarchy.

Who could possibly step in with that same extraordinary power of concentration and sheer endurance for hour after gruelling hour? Who could demonstrate that ability to absorb the details of anything from trade to pollution, theology, art and canine distemper, as she might do on any single day?

Over the years Anne has often been compared to her no-nonsense late father Prince Philip, not just in personality but in outlook. To Philip, his only daughter was gutsy, pragmatic and brave — the embodiment of the kind of son he wanted.

But in terms of her diligent dedication to duty, her uncomplaining manner and let’s-just-get-on-with-it approach, she is in fact much more like her mother.

At times she can come across as imperious and aloof — remember how when competing as a young horsewoman she would routinely shout at photographers to ‘naff off’? — the epitome of the haughty princess.

But Anne can also be surprisingly vulnerable. Years before her brother was opening up about his miserable marriage to Princess Diana, she confided that she was not ‘everyone’s idea of a fairy-tale princess’.

It was an ambiguous remark, capable of different interpretations. Aware that she was not conventionally pretty, perhaps? Or that it was not her good fortune to live happily ever after in marriage?

Though the ever practical Anne remains on good terms with her first husband, fellow horseman Captain Mark Phillips, the father of her two children, the near 32 years of her marriage to second husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, suggests that happy-ever-after has worked for her after all.

In a rare moment of candour she admitted to chatshow host Terry Wogan that she didn’t much ‘like children’.

This, remember, is the same woman who has been the spectacularly hard-working and successful president of the charity Save the Children, for 55 years.

It is also the same loving grandmother to the five children of her daughter Zara and son Peter. She will be 74 in August, long past the retirement age for most modern women. But then that is part of the paradox of Princess Anne.

With her horses and running her beloved Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire — where she suffered her injury on Sunday evening — there would be plenty to do. But would it be enough?

For her, true contentment has always come from her official life.

As a princess she has always been an enigma who, in public, maintains an old-world sense of regality, while being the Royal Family’s most willing moderniser.

Where other royal women might gush, she is always restrained; where Princess Diana, for example, would scoop up a sickly child lovingly in her arms, Anne usually follows the traditional royal manner of standing unbending, seldom revealing the hands beneath her white gloves.

Nothing marked her out more than her imaginative decision not to allow her children to be weighed down with royal titles, insisting it would give them more freedom. ‘My children are not royal,’ she would say, ‘it’s simply that the Queen is their grandmother.’

How striking to contrast Anne’s position with that of her nephew Prince Harry, and Meghan, who clamoured for titles for their California-based children who are unlikely to lead royal lives.

Long before she had children, Anne’s daughter Zara paid a warm and telling tribute to the princess. ‘If I was going to be a mother, that is what I want to be like,’ she said. ‘I would like to be as good a mother as she’s been to us.’

It has not just been her relaxed attitude towards titles that is significant, but also Anne’s non-judgmental approach to Zara and Peter’s domestic travails.

When Peter Phillips split from first his wife and then a long-term girlfriend, the princess did not intervene. She took the same view when, before her marriage to ex-rugby star Mike Tindall, Zara was involved in a public bust-up with then boyfriend, jockey Richard Johnson.

This may, of course, be partly due to her own brushes with marital unhappiness and gossip about her private life.

For some years before they parted, she and Mark Phillips were not really happy. As he flew around the world riding — siring an illegitimate child in New Zealand — there was talk about Anne’s closeness to her former protection officer Detective Sergeant Peter Cross, a married man from Mitcham, South- West London.

Cross was later removed from his duties and put back in uniform. He sold his story to a Sunday tabloid. For her part, Anne never acknowledged, let alone commented on, his claims.

Her relationship with Tim Laurence, the late Queen’s former equerry, was revealed after several intimate letters he had written her were stolen and offered for sale to a national newspaper.

Just months after divorcing Mark, she and Laurence married at Balmoral Castle’s local church in Scotland.

None of this has affected the hold she has on a grateful nation. From her swept-up hair — unchanged in half a century — and recycling of outfits, irrespective of fashion, Anne is seen as the most in-touch royal. But it doesn’t mean that people aren’t slightly in awe of her — they are.

What she possesses is nobility and practicality — and it cuts across all classes.

Only last week the Left-wing firebrand George Galloway said he’d vote for Anne as president if Britain abolished the monarchy. She is, he declared, ‘an outstanding woman’.

It is hard to disagree and it is why she will be sorely missed from the royal stage.