The time I told Princess Anne to have a sex change ...and why she thought it was a jolly good idea!
AS A child, I was a right little Royalist. This changed when the new Queen came to visit Australia in 1954. Every schoolchild was summoned to see her at the Sydney Cricket Ground, on a day of 35C heat. We were made to wait six hours – kids all around me were fainting from sunstroke. I was only eight but I could recognise torture when I saw it.
The young Elizabeth passed in a closed car, her limp arm poking out of the window. It made me a lifelong republican.
When, in 1970, I won a Rhodes scholarship to study law at Oxford University, I was among the guests invited to lunch on the Royal Yacht Britannia, which had sailed into Sydney with the Queen and Princess Anne on board.
At lunch I was seated next to Princess Anne and we discussed LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights. Seriously, 40 years before that particular acronym came into being.
Our topic was a recent English court decision in the case of April Ashley, nee George Jamieson, who had had gender reassignment surgery and wanted the gender on her birth certificate changed. The judge refused. Anne was on the side of reforming the law to uphold ‘trans’ rights.
I suggested she might undergo a transgender operation herself so that she could inherit the throne (she was last in line, below her wimpish younger brothers, Andrew and Edward). She quite liked this idea.
If Charles did eventually lose the throne, I thought for a moment that Anne would make a very acceptable head of state for Australia.