In the 21st century, opening public buildings is one of modern royals’ most important tasks. That means passing the buck to one of their relatives is one of the few royal privileges they still retain. Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a distant cousin of the British royal family and descendant of Queen Victoria, has recalled how on one occasion the late Queen Elizabeth II refused to inaugurate an airport terminal as revenge for an unpleasant thing she understood had been done to her relative there.
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Known for having been the first Windsor relative to marry another man, the aristocrat said on a podcast Tuesday that he was on his way to Balmoral for a weekend of hunting with his royal cousins when, upon arriving at Bristol airport, he was prevented from boarding with his shotguns. After turning up without his guns at the Scottish castle, he told Queen Elizabeth II what had happened and how stubborn they had been with him at the check-in desk.
“We got on the flight and we turn up at Balmoral, ushered into the drawing room and immediately go into tea,” Mountbatten recounted Tuesday on Gyles Brandreth’s podcast, Rosebud. “I’m sitting on the right hand side of the Queen and I’m kind of irritated by this story. So I repeat it to Her Majesty. And I could see that she was getting rather irritated as well. So she turns to her equerry [Simon Brailsford]… She said, Simon, I would like Lord Ivar’s guns to be up here tomorrow morning. Please see to it.”
“Whereupon she turns back to me and she looks at me, over glasses, with a glint in her eye and she says, ‘They want me to open their new terminal.’ She says, ‘I don’t think I will now.’”
In the end, it was not she but her daughter, Princess Anne, who inaugurated the airport’s new terminal. “Every time I go back to Bristol Airport now… I have a quiet laugh to myself,” Mountbatten told Brandreth.
Originally published in Vanity Fair Spain.
