It is guaranteed to infuriate the Royals as they all see every invitation and decide which ones they are willing to accept. When Princess Diana was alive she was the number one choice for practically every event, and organisers, in the mistaken belief that there is a central clearing house at Buckingham Palace that allocates engagements around the family, often used to ask if Diana couldn’t make it would one of the others stand in for her. Even today, every member of the Royal Family receives far more invitations than they can accept, and those planning events sometimes still ask the first-choice Royal to pass on the invitation if he or she cannot make it. The private secretaries of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, the Earl of Wessex and the Princess Royal, all have a standard reply that is icily polite but curt, and states, couched in ‘Palace speak’ that the person inviting their particular Royal should always make it a personal invitation to him or her specifically. In other words, ‘We are not in the business of Rent-a-Royal.’ There is a pecking order and in the current Royal Family the Prince of Wales gets the choice of the more glamorous engagements, with the Princess Royal, the hardest working member of the family, receiving those that she has sometimes described as ‘less interesting than others’.
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