Zara's royal charm offensive

Zara Phillips, daughter of Princess Anne, is helping launch the CatWalk Trust for research into spinal cord injuries. Picture / Brett Phibbs

No, of course I didn't think she'd be wearing a tiara. Still, it is a bit of a shock to see a royal, albeit a minor sort of royal, wearing a tiny denim mini skirt and Ugg boots.

She looks like a girl you might see down the mall at Glenfield. This is rather the point of Zara Phillips.

Despite the fact that one news channel called her "Princess Zara", much has been made of the fact that she has no title and has had a normal upbringing. Whatever normal means when your nana is the Queen.

I can tell you that Phillips is indeed a completely normal 24-year-old. She's sitting at a table in a curtained-off corner of a room at the Hilton and she's texting as we are ushered in for our audience. If I was a 24-year-old royal who has suffered the mean gaze of the media all my life, when faced with one of them I'd rather be texting, too.

It would take some freak accident which wiped out the 10 in line to the throne ahead of her for Phillips to be Queen, but I can't help but think she would be rather good at it. She manages to maintain an air of imperious detachment while smiling nicely.

We are here because Phillips is in the country to help launch a charity: the CatWalk trust for research into spinal cord injuries.

Sitting next to her is Catriona Williams, who has set up the trust and who is in a wheelchair after a riding accident in 2002. She is warm and bubbly and obviously over the moon about having snared Phillips as patron. There are 10 years in age between them and Williams says she feels as though she's sharing the spotlight with a top model. She is generously delighted about this.

"Make sure you get a lovely picture of Zara," she says. She knows, as we all do, that the real reason we are here is to have a gawk at Zara.

There's something in that model comparison. Phillips has the lovely royal skin and long model's legs and her get-up is the sort of thing a top model might wear on a day off.

You can't blame her for wanting to dress down - after all, she's only being interviewed - because even minor royals seem to have to do a lot of dressing up.

"We don't usually do interviews," she says at one point. How wonderful. A royal "we", from a royal. You don't get to hear that every day.

You don't get to sit down with a royal every day either. Which is why a telly crew turns up, hoping to talk their way into an interview. And why, later that evening, I get a call from a mate who covers the royals for a British tabloid and who had found out I'd had an interview. He wants to know whether she'd said anything about her bloke, English rugby player Mike Tindall.

I do say to her that what we're all supposed to be interested in is whether she's engaged yet. She grimaces and says no, pointing at her bare ring finger.

I was, actually, poking fun at the ridiculous interest in her private life. Well, said my mate, we're interested in anything she says.

I try the rugby. As in: have she and Williams talked about the rugby? "Well", says Williams, "I'm a huge rugby fan and we know from past reports that Zara is too. So, yeah, a little conversation about who's going to win."

Williams says: "Oh, the All Blacks, of course." Phillips says: "I don't know. I'm not going to say either."

This is very diplomatic. "I'd only get quoted, then they'll slate me."

I should be able to flick that one to the tabs for a few quid.

So here we are, across a table from each other, both of us caught in an increasingly ridiculous situation. She doesn't want to say anything because it'll get quoted and I'm here to hear her say things that can be quoted. I ask her about something I read about a massage course she took and in which she was quoted as saying she preferred to massage horses because, unlike people, they didn't talk.

She laughs and swings her hair and says "you've been reading a magazine". This is a bad thing, obviously.

And then: "First of all, you have to do humans before you do horses anyway [but] horses are easier to do."

Because you don't have to talk to them? Of people, she says, "They're always in pain and something's hurting and why is that not better ... and, ooohh, dolphins." There are dolphins in the harbour and the photographer stops shooting Phillips and starts shooting them.

When I point out to Phillips that she is no longer the focus, she says, with feeling, "I don't care."

Down-to-earth

Phillips and Williams met for the first time the day before we go to see them but Williams has met Zara's mum, Princess Anne. I'd read - in a magazine - that she'd said before meeting Phillips that if she was anything like her mum, she'd be down-to-earth and have a good sense of humour. I wondered if that was what she'd discovered.

"Yep", says Williams, "it's true. After shopping with her yesterday, she's just like a normal Kiwi chick. So basically, she's just a normal person like the rest of us. Unfortunately, or fortunately for her, she's got a little bit of background that sometimes makes her life harder rather than easier sometimes and I'm sure she'd agree with that."

What do you think, Zara? I say, and she says: "I think it's [her life] fine. The things that make it worse is the media because they've got a tag on you."

I was quite keen to know what she thought that tag might be. There have been various attempts to paint her as the royal rebel but the only mildly rebellious stuff I've read about her is that she once had a tongue stud. "I think," she says, "they're always waiting for you to do something wrong and fall off or fail or say something."

Which is, presumably, why she takes the safe route and says as little as possible.

"They also like to have this image of how you should be and when you have a personality they slate you for it."

She seems to me to be as uncomfortable as most people are when they're impaled on that uncomfortable implement called the double-edged sword. The trust wants her profile because she has a profile and she is doing everything she can to play it down.

"It can," she says, "be useful. Like, if you're promoting things I know I'm going to get media attention, so it's good like that but personally, ha, it's not as good."

None of which is helped by her obvious loathing of the media who, she says, make up things about her. She says this is what journalists do and I say I find that quite insulting, really.

She maintains that the media twist things. Anyway, I tell her, if she's anything like her mum she'd be stroppy enough to deal with anything the media hands out.

"I'm going to tell my mum you called her that."

Actually, stroppy in my book is meant to be a compliment. Although I really don't fancy the idea of being hunted down by Princess Anne.

I've been asking Williams about her ongoing involvement with horses when you might have thought that after her accident she'd have wanted to have as little to do with them as possible.

Williams points out that "it's an accident. It could happen to you tripping down the step when you leave here".

And Phillips says: "Hold on to the bannister when you go down the stairs."

To which I respond: "I will. Before I go off to spin my lies."

"Yeah, exactly," she says, smiling a real smile.