Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  It is that same tendency to come back with a swift retort which, from time to time, has landed the Duke in trouble. He once coined his own word – ‘dontopedalogy’ – for the science of putting one’s foot in one’s mouth.

  He’s always had a quick sense of humour, ranging from pithy four-line clerihews to earthier gags. Working his way down a greeting line at a film premiere early in the reign, the Duke’s eye was unavoidably drawn to the low-cut dress doing battle with Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. Turning to his Comptroller, the dashing ‘Boy’ Browning, the Duke whispered: ‘Hop in.’

  In the past, his asides and wisecracks were seen in the broader context of the man and his character. Today, they are simply known as gaffes. What upsets those who know him is that younger generations, less familiar with his achievements, have come to know him solely for his quips. Indeed, for some people, the Duke’s public role might as well have begun in October 1986 during the state visit to China. Meeting a group of Edinburgh University students in a crowd, the Duke joked to Simon Kirby that if he stayed in China much longer, he would go home ‘sliteyed’. Kirby innocently repeated the encounter to a journalist from Edinburgh, the phrase was reported as ‘slitty eyes’ and a gaffe was born. Kirby would later write a letter of apology to the Palace (the Duke thanked him and told him not to worry), the Chinese took no offence (‘round-eyed’ being common Chinese slang for Westerners) and the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, described the visit as a triumph. Yet, a quarter of a century later, ‘slitty eyes’ is routinely trotted out to reinforce the gaffe credentials of any remotely risque royal remark.

  Many papers keep a gaffe list on standby with the China remark at the top followed by the same old favourites – ‘You can’t have been here that long; you haven’t got a pot belly’ (Hungary 1993); ‘Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?’ (Cayman Islands 1994) … During an uneventful day of state visiting, such remarks are a godsend for royal reporters although, more often than not, the problem is finding someone who is genuinely offended. The remark then joins the Fleet Street Anthology of Gaffes, much to the irritation of both the Duke and the hosts whose event will have been entirely ignored in the faux furore. Like all good folklore, the gaffe narrative is easily grasped and based on truth. But it is only part of the picture. The Duke does not go out of his way to say something offensive. His default mode when introduced to a group of strangers is to break the ice with a jolly remark. Sometimes it goes wrong. As he himself concedes, the problem with ice-breaking is that you may fall through. Very often, his remark is second- or third-hand by the time it has reached the media. But the context must never get in the way of a good story. In 1999, the Duke was on an engagement in Scotland when he saw a fuse box sprouting a mass of tangled wires. According to reports, he joked: ‘It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.’ The press leaped on the implied racial insensitivity, despite the faintly baffling Indian/electricity non sequitur, while a Palace press officer gamely suggested that the Prince had meant to say ‘cowboy’. The Duke was unapologetic. He later explained that he had most definitely meant to say ‘Indian’ as he was alluding to the ongoing electricity crisis and power cut protests in India – as anyone should have known if they were bothering to keep up with world affairs.

  Another mistake is to imagine that the Duke’s gaffes are anything new. Many newspaper databases and online archives go back no further than the eighties but the Duke has had dontopedalogical moments throughout his life. Sometimes, he was simply trying to be polite. During the 1970 royal tour of New Zealand, he met a woman who reflected that she had not been back to England for thirty years. ‘You’re missing very little,’ he assured her. This tiny, harmless exchange duly appeared on the front page of the People in the eternal language of the gaffe story: ‘Prince Philip was in the centre of a new storm last night after making a remark which apparently knocked Britain …’

  On occasions, he has managed to offend his own family. At the height of Princess Margaret’s romance with Group Captain Peter Townsend, the Queen Mother sighed that the poor couple would have nowhere to live. When the Duke joked that he had heard it was now possible for people to buy a house, his mother-in-law walked out and slammed the door. But the Royal Family – along with most of the world – take the view that it is far better to be tactless now and then than to be humourless all of the time. And some of the Duke’s remarks remain priceless more than half a century later. Take, for example, his message to his superiors in 1951 when Princess Elizabeth was visiting Athens in HMS Surprise and the Duke was in command of her escort ship, Magpie. One day, he received a cheery signal from the royal flagship: ‘Princess full of beans.’ Quick as a flash, the Duke signalled back: ‘Can’t you give her something better for breakfast?’ During a tour of Australia, he was offered the chance to shear a sheep. He tactfully declined: ‘I might nick it and we’ve had enough mutton on this tour.’ The tale of Kenya’s 1964 independence ceremony is another example. As the British flag was being lowered and the spotlight descended on founding father Jomo Kenyatta for the moment of destiny, the Duke was heard to whisper: ‘I suppose you don’t want to change your mind?’

  The fact is that the vast majority of people are not bothered whenever a gaffe hits the headlines. Much as he may loathe the idea, the Duke, like the Queen, has achieved the status of ‘national treasure’, typified by a fond, if occasionally ribald, series of parliamentary tributes from both sides of the Commons to mark his ninetieth birthday in June 2011. Labour MP Chris Bryant even quoted the conversation between the Duke and a colleague at a Palace reception.

  Duke to Labour MP: ‘So, what did you do before you got this job?’

  MP: ‘I worked in a trade union.’

  Duke: ‘Bugger all, then.’

  MP (somewhat offended): ‘Well, what did you do before you got this job?’

  Duke: ‘Fought in the Second World War.’

  A few years earlier, such an exchange might have prompted a chorus of synthetic outrage. On this occasion, both sides of the House roared with laughter. ‘There are occasions,’ Bryant concluded, ‘when a little humility from this House towards His Royal Highness is entirely appropriate.’ Even the media’s tone has switched from mock outrage to an indulgent rolling of the eyes. But the Royal Family and their staff dislike seeing a man who has made a profound impact on the monarchy, his country and the wider world being presented as little more than an amiable blunderer. What’s more, the inference of blinkered insensitivity is completely at odds with the Duke’s contribution to modern multicultural society. Long before words like ‘interfaith dialogue’ were in common parlance, the Duke was organising gatherings of Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders at St George’s House, the residential conference centre-cum-retreat he has built inside Windsor Castle. ‘Through his involvement with WWF,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury points out, ‘he is interested in the religious and theological dimension of environmental questions. He’s someone with a very active interest in reading theology.’ Indeed, during his WWF days, he made great progress in getting different faiths to unite in the cause of conservation. ‘If God is in nature,’ he argued, ‘nature itself becomes divine.’ By 1986, he had persuaded all the main religions to issue their own ‘Declarations on Nature’. He even established a WWF/Vatican conservation committee with the Pope. Raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, received into the Church of England, married to its Supreme Governor, revered as a god by a tribe in Vanuatu and the son of a nun, the Duke has plenty of avenues through which to explore the meaning of life. He is extremely proud that his mother was granted the accolade of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by the authorities at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in recognition of her protection of Greek Jews during the war. He is equally proud of his Russian great-aunt, Grand Duchess Ella (another nun). The Bolsheviks pushed her down a mineshaft and then threw hand grenades after her. She took three days to die of her wounds, during which she tended fellow victims and sang hymns. His family’s experiences at bo
th ends of the totalitarian spectrum have made him a passionate advocate of individual freedoms versus the collective power of the state. In 1982, he published a series of essays under the title A Question of Balance. In them, he attacked early Soviet sympathisers like Sidney and Beatrice Webb for their ‘obstinate and blind commitment’ to communist ideology and their ‘remarkable aversion to reality’. More broadly, he deplored communism for its lack of compassion: ‘The concepts of charity (in the voluntary sense), or of obligation, or of social conscience, hardly exist in Marxist doctrine but there are vast numbers of people of all classes in this country who give money generously to charities.’ He has also been happy to question more orthodox socialist dogma, including certain basic assumptions about the Welfare State. ‘The promise of benefits,’ he wrote, ‘makes people overlook the loss of choice and responsibility which inevitably follows.’ All of this is far meatier media material and far more thought-provoking than a gag about pot bellies in Hungary, yet it has all passed beneath the press radar with barely a murmur. Far from knocking diversity, he is fascinated by it. When a Mountbatten cousin was recently trying to prop up an old family story that she was descended from the Native American princess Pocahontas, the Duke put his staff on the case. Sadly, the investigation drew a blank. There is no lineal connection between the House of Mountbatten and the Powhatan tribe of Virginia after all. But he tried.

  The Duke has written books, essays and lectures on theology, spiritualism and even the nature of friendship. He has devoted a large part of his life to the promotion of academic excellence and is entirely comfortable pondering deep issues in the company of dons. He likes intellectuals but does not believe they hold all the answers. Indeed, he regards some of them as a menace. As he put it (to the author) on the eve of the first state visit to Russia: ‘We got over the development of an urban industrial intelligentsia reasonably easily … because we had a constitutional monarchy.’ He would undoubtedly have thrived had he gone to university, but he is not remotely chippy about the fact that he did not. As he told a gathering of eminent university leaders: ‘I am not a graduate of any university. Oddly enough, I don’t regret it. I owe my allegiance to another of the world’s few really great fraternities, the fraternity of the sea.’

  His lust for innovation has resulted in that bulging file of royal patronages. During the earlier part of the reign he was founding and endowing new organisations and prizes with the same panache as his forebear Prince Albert. From the Royal Agriculture Society of the Commonwealth to the Pakistan Army Bagpiping Trophy, they are all still going strong. Quite apart from his contributions to specific causes, millions of young people around the world have enjoyed the benefits of his Award scheme. His initiatives half a century back – from fighting vehicle emissions to campaigning for natural habitats around the world – gave crucial early respectability to causes which are now received wisdom. So it is not entirely surprising to learn that, some years ago, when his achievements were fresher in the mind, a group of international admirers began mounting a discreet campaign to propose the Duke for a Nobel Peace Prize. He was not even informed of the idea (and would probably have winced if he had been). This is the man who shunned his own ninetieth birthday exhibition at Windsor Castle on the grounds that it was a lot of fuss about nothing. This is the man who refuses to discuss anything as vulgar as his ‘legacy’. ‘I’d rather other people decided what legacy I left. I’m not trying to create one,’ he told the author a few years ago during an interview at Windsor Castle. ‘Life’s going to go on after me and if I can make life marginally more tolerable for people [who come] after, I’d be delighted.’ For whatever reason – timing, perhaps, or politics – that Nobel campaign was left to drift. Might it be revived? The 2007 award to America’s Al Gore for his climate change work could be seen as a precedent. It is not as if the Duke is short of honours but it would put the international dimension of his life’s work in perspective. Contemporary commentators might scoff at the idea. History may view it otherwise. As the Queen remarked at the end of that Golden Wedding speech: ‘I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.’

  * The Duke’s creative streak is reflected in the prestigious Prince Philip Designer’s Prize, now going for more than fifty years. Previous winners include James Dyson and Terence Conran. He is not slow to offer opinions on all forms of design. Introduced to a member of the Chartered Society of Designers recently, he remarked: ‘Well, you didn’t design your beard very well.’

  * Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, died in Britain in 1969, having left instructions that she wished to be buried at Jerusalem’s Church of Mary Magdalene. She was finally interred in 1988 but diplomatic and security considerations prevented the Duke from visiting Israel for another six years. Her children had warned the Princess that her choice of resting place would prove difficult. ‘Nonsense,’ she replied, ‘there’s a perfectly good bus service from Istanbul.’

  * In some countries, the organisers prefer to give the award a different name. In Ireland, for example, it is known as Gaisce, or the President’s Award. The Duke’s not bothered, as long as it works.

  * To this day, the Duke reveres his father’s memory and recently had Prince Andrew’s medals mounted in a special display case at Buckingham Palace. As the Duke has pointed out, his father’s role in his life is often overlooked. ‘One impression that needs to be corrected,’ he once said, ‘is that I was brought up by Lord Mountbatten. I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father. I grew up very much more with my father’s family than I did with my mother’s.’

  * The Duke, instead, became Colonel of the Welsh Guards, informing them that they were ‘the only regiment in which the Colonel is legally married to the Colonel-in-Chief. He stepped down in 1975 to make way for the Prince of Wales.

  9

  Heads and Tails

  ‘No monarchy is ever looking for a legacy.’

  Some things haven’t changed inside these three-hundred-year-old walls. Marlborough House still retains much of the grandeur of the royal residence which it was until the death of Queen Mary – the chandeliers, the grand staircase, many of the royal portraits. Wander round the enormous garden backing on to the Mall and you will find the graves of Queen Alexandra’s dogs and the final resting place of her pet rabbit, Benny.

  It is hardly surprising that the Queen feels entirely at home inside the world headquarters of the Commonwealth, even if her grandmother’s old bedroom – the room in which Queen Mary died – is now the SecretaryGeneral’s office. The Duke of Marlborough’s victories still decorate the walls of the Blenheim Saloon, the main entrance hall. But no one is looking at the art in the Blenheim Saloon tonight. Everyone is watching a band of half-naked Rwandan drummers wearing huge straw wigs and thumping out traditional tunes.

  Rwanda has officially joined the Commonwealth today and President Paul Kagame has come to the Commonwealth headquarters to meet the Queen. He explains that these drummers were performing in the Marlborough House garden when the Rwandan flag was hoisted aloft earlier. ‘Not dressed like that?’ replies the Queen, shivering at the thought. It has been freezing all day. ‘Yes, just like that!’ replies the gangly, softly spoken Kagame proudly. Prince Philip attempts conversation with the drummers. ‘Is this your own hair?’ he asks, pointing to the straw wigs. Blank looks. He tries again. ‘Can you vary the note?’ he asks, pointing at the drum. More blank looks. It is not surprising. Until recently, Rwanda’s language of government was French, because it spent most of the twentieth century as a Belgian colony. Following genocidal civil war in the nineties, it is rebuilding itself with a new English-speaking identity. Joining the British Commonwealth is a crucial part of the process. The Queen is delighted to welcome Rwanda aboard. It is a sign that her Commonwealth still has a purpose and an appeal. ‘Good luck,’ she tells Kagame, shaking his hand. Now that his nation is in ‘The Club’, he will be seeing rather more of her in
the future.

  Today is Commonwealth Day 2010. Every year, on the second Monday in March, the Queen travels to Westminster Abbey for the most unorthodox event in the Abbey’s calendar. For a start, it is not a service. It is the ‘Commonwealth Day Observance’. Those officiating include representatives from the Muslim, Hindu and Baha’i communities. This year’s theme is science and the sermon is delivered by the fertility professor, Lord Winston. The Queen’s Commonwealth Day broadcast is screened. She talks about the power of technology to unite the Commonwealth but makes no mention of the Almighty. ‘You’d never get St Paul’s Cathedral allowing this,’ notes an admiring old hand from the Palace. ‘Some of the clergy were pretty horrified in the early days but the Queen wanted it. That’s why it happens.’ With no bishop to answer to, the Abbey is known as a ‘royal peculiar’. Its earthly boss is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. And the Queen also happens to be Head of the Commonwealth. So if she wants her Commonwealth to hold its ‘observance’ in her Abbey, she can. In any case, Christianity is actually in third place in the Commonwealth rankings, outnumbered by both Islam and Hinduism. It would be rather rude to make this an entirely Christian do.