Princess Anne may be one of the most disciplined royals to ever do it, with a hard rule against drinking to ensure she remains as alert and professional as possible during the hundreds of engagements she attends each year.
In 2025 alone, the Princess Royal attended 478 engagements, making her one of the hardest-working royals in her family – beaten only by her older brother, King Charles, who conducted 532 in the same year.
Anne's workload includes everything from international and diplomatic visits to investitures and military duties, and the total number of engagements she has attended throughout her life exceeds 11,000. Many royal fans have wondered just how she survives the constant travel and intense schedules – and being teetotal might just be the answer.
"The princess doesn’t drink [alcohol] at all," confirmed her former private secretary, Captain Sir Nicholas Wright RN, in the documentary Anne: The Princess Royal at 70.
© UK Press via Getty ImagesFamily matters
The 75-year-old is not the only one in her family who has chosen to forgo drinking; her younger brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, told The Evening Standard, "I haven't got the head for it," when asked why he didn't drink alcohol.
This trait was surely a byproduct of their parents' self-restraint, as Robert Hardman, author of Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story, wrote in his book.
"Both [Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip] exercised a steely self-restraint. It was something which they passed on to all of their children, all of whom eat sparingly, while the middle two are also teetotal," he explained.
Meanwhile, Princess Anne's aunt, Princess Margaret, was known for "smoking and drinking excessively" according to Andrew Morton's 2021 biography, Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters.
© Samir Hussein/WireImagePrince Harry's struggle
Anne's nephew, Prince Harry, has been open about his struggles with substances, which he leaned on in his 20s and 30s to numb the loss of his beloved mother, Princess Diana.
"I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling," he said in the 2021 docuseries The Me You Can't See.
"But I slowly became aware that, okay, I wasn't drinking Monday to Friday, but I would probably drink a week's worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night. And I would find myself drinking, not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something."
© Getty ImagesAnne's go-to dish
While Princess Anne is strictly teetotal and has been for decades, she is far less rigid about her diet. In fact, she is a fan of incredibly overripe bananas, as former royal footman Steven Kaye told Slingo.
"Once the chefs had cleaned up in the kitchen, you’d go and get things for breakfast, and there would always be a bunch of bananas literally on the side that were black. They were left to rot. They were never put away in the fridge," he recalled.
"I remember asking who they were for and it turns out the Princess Royal only eats black bananas – the royal chef had strict instructions to serve them overripe."
The mother of two also loves to indulge in a simple tinned meat pie courtesy of Fray Bentos. Former royal pilot Graham Laurie shared on HELLO!'s A Right Royal Podcast that Anne couldn't get enough of the British classic during flights.
"We had to provide food for her, so we never left Benson without what I call the bottom line in catering – those wonderful flat-tinned meat pies by Fray Bentos," he recalled.
"And we'd do that, we'd take tinned vegetables, tinned potatoes, [and] the stewards would tart up a gravy, add a few spices to it. And we'd serve steak and kidney pie or chicken and leek pie. And do you know, they used to love it."
