Zara and Mike Tindall’s 15th wedding anniversary is coming up this week. Instead of just writing some half-assed keenery about the Tindalls and their chaotic marriage, the Mail has chosen to focus on Zara and Mike’s relationship with their cousin’s son. You cannot make this up. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the train of thought here. For years, royal commentators have tried to make it sound like Mike Tindall is the “replacement brother” for Prince William, following William’s violent estrangement from Prince Harry. Now Zara and Mike are being promoted as the much-needed replacement aunt and uncle for Prince George.

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 niece, 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.’

‘When William and Catherine chose George’s godparents in 2013, they picked seven mostly old friends. One was blood, Zara…George is growing up among adults who are either dazzled by the institution or depend on it. Some are both. Indeed, it is the same for Charlotte and Louis. But it is changing. William, when King, will slim down the numbers. Reduce the royal payroll. He will spend 60-plus years surrounded by people whose warmth is professional. What he needs are grown-ups who won something on their own terms and then treat the whole business lightly.’

‘Zara’s gift is the switch. She turns out when the family asks. Balcony, Jubilee, funeral. Then she goes home, earns her own living, gets back on a horse. Nobody else has managed both. She moves between the centre and the edge without fuss and without resentment. Zara and William are eighteen months apart. Same Scottish summers, same Norfolk Christmases, same wet afternoons when the adults were elsewhere and the cousins were left to it. She knew him before he was a headline. She was there in 1997, watching a boy she had grown up with become public property inside a week. Very few people alive can say that. None of them work for him.’

‘So she can tell the heir to the throne he is being pompous, and does. He takes it. She has no angle. She did the same for Catherine, who married in from outside the tent and found waiting there a woman who had spent her whole life declining to be impressed by the tent.’

Continuing on Zara and Mike, Jobson said: ‘Fifteen years, three children, two world titles, no crisis. They have never sold access or traded overtly on the royal name. Mia, Lena and Lucas belong to that small circle of cousins at Sandringham and Balmoral. None will be working royals. All are family. Inside this institution that counts for more than outsiders understand. Americans ask what the monarchy is for. The usual answers are thin. Here is a better one. It is for producing people like this. Real achievement, no title, service when asked, silence the rest of the time. Prince George is destined to be king. Whether he arrives knowing the difference between being important and being useful is not. Two people close can undoubtedly help him. They have no titles between them. Only gold winners medals. That is exactly why they can.’

[From The Daily Mail]

LMAO @ “They have never sold access or traded overtly on the royal name.” They absolutely have traded on their royal connections, and they have done so knowing that they’re fine as long as they remain on the royal leash. It’s not about “trading on the royal name,” it’s about control. As for George… the real point of this story is that Scooter King’s reign is going to feature a threadbare, ancient and lazy royal family. By the time of George’s reign… well, there will barely be anyone left but George’s second cousins. Jobson is underlining that fact and promoting it like it’s a good thing.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.