Fit to carry Princess Charlotte: why the Land Rover is the horse-powered carriage to suit every royal occasion

There’s only one motor fit to carry a new princess, says Sam Leith
Royal runabout: Wills loads the Range Rover
The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images
Sam Leith8 May 2015

Amid the pestilential torrent of blether about the arrival of Princess Charlotte (to which this article is a contribution: please don’t bother writing in), social media yielded one nugget of immense perspicacity.

A reporter dutifully live-blogging the action at the Lindo Wing tweeted, in one of what we may presume were many idle moments: “If you’re a PR for Land Rover, this must be your best weekend ever. Every single car containing a royal this weekend has been one of theirs.”

Bingo! There — forget Burke’s and Debrett’s — is the social situation of Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, Princess of Cambridge, in a single, two-word sports-utility marque. Land Rover (maker of Range Rover), is where the House of Windsor and the House of Middleton meet.

The paternal in-laws, by necessity, have to spend a certain amount of time in stately limousines with bulletproof glass and a flag for a hood ornament. But their social circle will, by disposition, tend to favour either something open-topped and horse-drawn or a dinged-up Land-Rover manufactured in the year of the Coronation and with dried mud instead of a paint-job and a brace of dead pheasants mangled in the axles.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - in pictures

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That’s country toff chic: the vehicular semaphore of a class where “working” is something you do to hounds. The Middletons come from a class — traditionally sneered at by the former — where “working” is something you do for a living. (Or it’s something you have to do when the car has broken down; or a place in Surrey you’re rather glad you don’t live.)

The pinnacle of Upper-Middleton Class, as the select social stratum of smart-professional-with-daughter-married-to-the-future-king is inevitably now referred to, means driving a spotless latest-model Range Rover: a vehicle that looks like it belongs in the country when it’s in town and like it belongs in town when it’s in the country.

You can take it to meet clients, where it proclaims unshowy but considerable wealth, success and practicality. You can fit children and grandchildren in it. And if you need to deliver an emergency consignment of party poppers and helium balloons, or selfie-printed marshmallows, it has all the boot space you could need.

Here — in transition between the battered old “Landy” of the trad aristocracy and the gleaming Range Rover of the newly minted — is the monarchy that Princess Charlotte joins.

The old monarchy has its footwells full of half-sucked Werther’s Originals, expired tax discs and dog hair. The new one smells freshly valeted. It has leather seats. A pine air-freshener dangles from the rear-view. And in the back window is a little yellow sign saying: “Baby On Board”.

Follow Sam Leith on Twitter @questingvole

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