While all the other members of the British royal family long ago cast off their gloves - literally - Princess Anne still appears at official events with impeccably white gloves on her hands. A trifle? Perhaps. But behind that detail stands a whole philosophy of ruling that is slowly dying out.

Diana of Wales changed the rules of the game forty years ago. She was the first to start touching people with bare hands, including those ill with HIV at a time when that was taboo. With a single gesture she turned intimacy into a standard - from then on, touch became an obligation, not a choice. Kate and Meghan inherited that logic without ever once questioning it.

Anne does not accept it. For her the glove is not a fashionable accessory but a work tool. When she has to shake hundreds of hands in a single day, the glove is a practical thing - hygiene, distance, protocol. Discipline instead of emotion. This is a woman who has built her whole life on efficiency and predictability, not on warmth for the cameras.

That is precisely why those gloves mean something more today. After a recent health break, Princess Anne returned to her duties with the same quiet code she has worn for decades. In a royal family where even Charles III began his era with unprecedented physical contact with the public, she remains the last guardian of an older way of behaving.

And here lies the question worth asking: does closeness in front of the cameras really mean closeness, or is it just another well-staged performance? Anne doesn't promise a hug. She promises to show up, to finish the job and to leave. In the Balkans we know the difference between those who shake hands for a photo and those who actually work - perhaps the old princess with the white gloves is, in the end, more sincere than all the smiling palms around her.