A RIGHT ROYAL KIDNAPPING

In 1974, 23-year-old Princess Anne was very nearly kidnapped at gunpoint when her car was ambushed on the way home from a charity event. Fifty years later, the culprit shares his own surprising version of events.

- WILLIAM LANGLEY

It was just as Princess Anne was about to mark her 75th birthday in typically unshowy fashion that a ghost arose from her past.

Fortified by a lifetime's devotion to duty, the Princess Royal is a woman well-prepared for almost anything – except perhaps the return of the bizarre figure behind one of the most shocking events in modern royal history.

On the night of March 20, 1974, as Anne and her then-husband, Captain Mark Phillips, were returning to Buckingham Palace in a chauffeured limousine, they were ambushed by Ian Ball, a 26-year-old gunman whose plan was to kidnap the princess, then demand a £3 million ransom from her mother, Queen Elizabeth II.

Four people, including Anne's police bodyguard, were shot before the chance arrival on the scene of a retired heavyweight boxer, Ronnie 'The Geezer' Russell, who – having spotted what was happening from his passing van – ran over and delivered a thunderous blow to the would-be kidnapper's head, knocking him out cold.

A few months later, Ball (described by his own barrister as “quite mad”) was convicted of attempted murder and kidnapping at the Old Bailey, and sentenced to indefinite detention in a mental institution. He then disappeared behind the forbidding, Victorian-era walls of Broadmoor, Britain's best-known prison for the criminally insane, and as far as the public knew until recently, was still there.

But on the eve of Anne's landmark birthday in August, it emerged that Ball was again at large, having been quietly released five years earlier, and had now written a book giving his own outlandish version of the notorious attempted kidnapping.