How Prince George looks to Mike and Zara for guidance: Down-to-earth Tindalls are 'helping the future King stay grounded', claims royal expert.
They're widely considered to be among the Royal Family's most lively and outgoing members, so perhaps it's little surprise that Prince George has taken a particularly strong liking to his godmother Zara Tindall and her husband Mike.
For most royal fans, it likely wouldn't be difficult to get along with Princess Anne's daughter, 45, and her 47-year-old former rugby union ace husband. They're seemingly always up for a joke – and they like to have fun as much as the next person.
But look at the pictures of the future king with his godmother and her husband, and something far more special is blossoming.
At least that's the opinion of royal author Robert Jobson, who has penned several books on members of the Royal Family, perhaps most notably in Catherine, The Princess of Wales: The Biography.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Jobson said: 'Watch Zara with George, and there is no deference in it. She teases him. He is easy with her the way children are easy with adults who want nothing from them.
'Then there is Mike, who is not a godparent and has become something better. He talks to him about losing, the one subject nobody else raises, because everybody else is invested in the boy winning.
'Mike has lost in front of eighty thousand people. He can be funny about it the next morning. You see it in the photographs. An arm round George's shoulders, leaning in, saying something. No airs and graces about the man, and the child worked that out years ago.
'Prince George is 13. In the autumn he goes up to Eton. The apparatus that makes a king is already built around him. The school. The staff. The gaze tightening by degrees until one day he notices it, and it is too late to mind.
'All of that will make a king. None of it decides what sort. For that, look at the two people in his life who hold no rank at all, Zara and Mike Tindall.
'I interviewed Zara at Gatcombe some years ago, for Channel Seven in Australia. She was brilliant. Confident. Refreshingly normal. Warm, direct, no side to her. Thirty-five years covering this family teaches you to spot a performance. There was not one.
'When William and Catherine chose George's godparents in 2013, they picked seven mostly old friends. One was blood, Zara.
'Her mother Princess Anne turned down titles for her children, Zara and Peter, when they were small.
'It was filed at the time under Anne-ish contrarianism. It was nothing of the sort. It was the shrewdest decision anybody in that house made in the twentieth century.
'But it meant Zara had to go and win something. So she did. Aachen, 2006, on a chestnut she had found in an advertisement, and she came out of it World Champion.
'That December the country voted her BBC Sports Personality of the Year, an award her mother had won in 1971.
'She did it in the rain, in front of judges who did not care who her grandmother was. She won on merit.
Tags: Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince Louis, Prince William and Kate Middleton, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Meghan, Lilibet
Do you have a question about King Charles III, William and Kate, Meghan and Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email thuongvietland@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.
0 Comments