PETER PHILLIPS: An unblemished escutcheon

We’ll start by admitting that we’re finding it hard to drum up 500 interesting words to say about Peter Phillips. The most controversial point in his life came when his mother, the Princess Royal, irritated road-safety campaigners by carrying her newborn son in the front seat of the car on the return from hospital to Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. Thereafter, from a journalistic perspective, we’re running on empty.

There was the time that a photographer slipped the young Peter a few pence to pose at the Badminton horse trials, and the time, aged 15, that he was told off at Gordonstoun for being found out of bounds with three crates of beer, a friend and two blondes. When some Gordonstoun boys were caught in a punch-up with locals, a Scottish fly on the wall remarked that Peter was “shouting and cursing in his distinctive English upper-crust accent”. A gay men’s magazine once called him the “sexiest royal since Queen Mary”; and for two years he went out with a rich American horsewoman whose family made their fortune from fish extracts. Some called her “the cod-liver oil heiress”.

Now Phillips, 29, has announced his engagement to his long-term Canadian girlfriend, Autumn Kelly. She grew up in Montreal with her mother and stepfather. She is 5ft 4in tall with hair that stops just short of being revealingly fiery red – it is strawberry blonde. She met Phillips when he was sponsorship manager for the Williams Formula One team and moved to Britain to be with him. The motor-racing angle might have been interesting had Phillips not given it all up for a job at the Royal Bank of Scotland. In his down time the man who is 10th in line to the throne favours a jeans and blue-blazer combo set off with what look like suede trainers.

Even the Queen likes him. Old hands at the Palace say that when Peter was a toddler the Queen was so fond of her grandson that she “only handled her corgis with similar affection”. Since both Peter’s parents were Olympic equestrians, she had joked before the birth that her grandchild might be four-legged. But, unfortunately for our purposes, this didn’t turn out to be true.

We scoured the Canadian papers to find out whether they had come up with anything at their end. Sylvia Cook, the chairwoman of the Hamilton and area branch of the Monarchist League of Canada, has been anticipating the announcement since June, when the Queen invited Ms Kelly to stay at Windsor Castle during Ascot. “[Ms Kelly] wore a lovely red-and-white polka-dot dress to Ascot and I thought at the time, ‘Oh, how Canadian’,” said Mrs Cook.

Dear reader, you see before you the crème de la crème of our research. We predict the couple will sail so tranquilly into the future that any resulting ripple of controversy may not even make the pages of Hello!