How Prince George looks to Mike and Zara for guidance: Down-to-earth Tindalls are ‘helping the future King stay grounded’, claims royal expert

They’re widely considered to be among the Royal Family‘s most lively and outgoing members, so perhaps it’s little surprise that Prince George has taken a particularly strong liking to his godmother Zara Tindall and her husband Mike.

For most royal fans, it likely wouldn’t be difficult to get along with Princess Anne‘s daughter, 45, and her 47-year-old former rugby union ace husband. They’re seemingly always up for a joke – and they like to have fun as much as the next person.

But look at the pictures of the future king with his godmother and her husband, and something far more special is blossoming.

At least that’s the opinion of royal author Robert Jobson, who has penned several books on members of the Royal Family, perhaps most notably in Catherine, The Princess of Wales: The Biography.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Jobson said: ‘Watch Zara with George, and there is no deference in it. She teases him. He is easy with her the way children are easy with adults who want nothing from them.

‘Then there is Mike, who is not a godparent and has become something better. He talks to him about losing, the one subject nobody else raises, because everybody else is invested in the boy winning.

‘Mike has lost in front of eighty thousand people. He can be funny about it the next morning. You see it in the photographs. An arm round George’s shoulders, leaning in, saying something. No airs and graces about the man, and the child worked that out years ago.

‘Prince George is 13. In the autumn he goes up to Eton. The apparatus that makes a king is already built around him. The school. The staff. The gaze tightening by degrees until one day he notices it, and it is too late to mind.

Mike Tindall is known to have a close bond with George, putting his arm around the future king after the Christmas Day morning church service in Sandringham in 2024

‘All of that will make a king. None of it decides what sort. For that, look at the two people in his life who hold no rank at all, Zara and Mike Tindall.

‘I interviewed Zara at Gatcombe some years ago, for Channel Seven in Australia. She was brilliant. Confident. Refreshingly normal. Warm, direct, no side to her. Thirty-five years covering this family teaches you to spot a performance. There was not one.

‘When William and Catherine chose George’s godparents in 2013, they picked seven mostly old friends. One was blood, Zara.

‘Her mother Princess Anne turned down titles for her children, Zara and Peter, when they were small.

‘It was filed at the time under Anne-ish contrarianism. It was nothing of the sort. It was the shrewdest decision anybody in that house made in the twentieth century.

‘But it meant Zara had to go and win something. So she did. Aachen, 2006, on a chestnut she had found in an advertisement, and she came out of it World Champion.

‘That December the country voted her BBC Sports Personality of the Year, an award her mother had won in 1971.

‘She did it in the rain, in front of judges who did not care who her grandmother was. She won on merit.

‘Then she married a man who had done the same in another sport. Mike Tindall, 75 caps for England, a World Cup winner in 2003, remembered in that final for picking up the Australian scrum-half and dumping him on the turf.

‘He has broken his nose at least eight times. He married into the most scrutinised family on earth and has never once behaved like a man who married up. Two world champions. Neither remotely impressed by any of it. That is the lesson.

‘George is growing up among adults who are either dazzled by the institution or depend on it. Some are both. Indeed, it is the same for Charlotte and Louis.

‘But it is changing. William, when King, will slim down the numbers. Reduce the royal payroll.

‘He will spend 60-plus years surrounded by people whose warmth is professional. What he needs are grown-ups who won something on their own terms and then treat the whole business lightly.

‘Zara’s gift is the switch. She turns out when the family asks. Balcony, Jubilee, funeral. Then she goes home, earns her own living, gets back on a horse. Nobody else has managed both. She moves between the centre and the edge without fuss and without resentment.

‘Zara and William are eighteen months apart. Same Scottish summers, same Norfolk Christmases, same wet afternoons when the adults were elsewhere and the cousins were left to it. She knew him before he was a headline.

‘She was there in 1997, watching a boy she had grown up with become public property inside a week. Very few people alive can say that. None of them work for him.

‘So she can tell the heir to the throne he is being pompous, and does. He takes it. She has no angle. She did the same for Catherine, who married in from outside the tent and found waiting there a woman who had spent her whole life declining to be impressed by the tent.’

Continuing on Zara and Mike, Jobson said: ‘Fifteen years, three children, two world titles, no crisis.

‘They have never sold access or traded overtly on the royal name. Mia, Lena and Lucas belong to that small circle of cousins at Sandringham and Balmoral. None will be working royals. All are family. Inside this institution that counts for more than outsiders understand.

‘Americans ask what the monarchy is for. The usual answers are thin. Here is a better one. It is for producing people like this. Real achievement, no title, service when asked, silence the rest of the time.

‘Prince George is destined to be king. Whether he arrives knowing the difference between being important and being useful is not.

‘Two people close can undoubtedly help him. They have no titles between them. Only gold winners medals. That is exactly why they can.’

George has never quite known life without Mike and Zara – who celebrate their 15th anniversary on July 30 – by his side.

The couple married at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh in 2011 – less than two years before George was born – after dating for seven years.

And as young George grew, so did Mike and Zara’s own family. Their eldest daughter Mia was born in January 2014, just six months after George, before Princess Charlotte arrived in 2015.

Lena Tindall followed in 2018 – the same year Prince Louis was born – with Lucas completing the brood in 2021.

The children have grown up together, regularly spending Christmases, family holidays and royal gatherings side by side, while their parents have remained close friends away from the public eye.

Mike, meanwhile, is known to have a close relationship with George – and was snapped affectionately ruffling his hair before kissing him on the side of the head during December’s Christmas day service in 2024.

In another photograph taken in 2019, the pair share a sweet moment during a casual family outing at the Burnham Market International Horse Trials in Norfolk.

George is seen looking elated hitching a ride on 6ft 2in Mike’s shoulders while clutching a toy plastic sword. Just moments later, the young boy grins as he blocks Mike’s view entirely by playfully clamping his arms over his eyes.

Mike has also spoken fondly of George’s interests.

In a 2024 interview with The Telegraph to promote his podcast – The Good, The Bad & The Rugby with James Haskell and Alex Payne – Mike noted that George ‘loves’ playing football and is a huge Aston Villa fan like his father Prince William.

He also shared a sweet insight into his relationship with the young royal, saying they often play the game together.

Mike told the newspaper: ‘George loves his football. I’ve played numerous times in the garden with him. He’s passionate about Aston Villa, too. Wherever he is, he’ll sit down and watch that game.’