When Prince Philip talked to me about Prince Charles in the 1980s and 1990s there was invariably a touch of exasperation in his tone – and often, too, a note of sarcasm. The Duke gave the impression that he would have liked his son to be more robust, less fey. The father did little to disguise his feelings about the son. In the summer of 1986, for example, at a meeting of the officers of the Playing Fields Association, we presented our president with what we hoped would be a welcome birthday present: three pairs of carriage-driving gloves. He unwrapped the parcel and inspected our gift. The first pair of gloves were a light tan colour. The Duke sniffed approvingly. The second pair were dark tan. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. The third pair were a pale lilac colour. He held them up disdainfully between his thumb and forefinger and said, ‘I think we’ll give these to the Prince of Wales.’
There was a time when the Duke of Edinburgh regarded the Prince of Wales as ‘precious, extravagant, and lacking in the dedication necessary to make a good king’ – and said so. I don’t believe that is what he felt at the time of his death, but it was certainly what he felt in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The Duke’s disdain for his eldest son was the more shocking because of the way he made little or no attempt to hide it. Once, boldly, I challenged him about it. I told Prince Philip that, having met him and his son, I was struck, not by their differences, but by their similarities. Their gait, their body language, the joshing humour, the moments of pig-headedness each displayed, the shared enthusiasms (nature conservancy, painting, poetry, comparative religion). I said, ‘You’re clearly peas from the same pod, you’re so similar.’ He interrupted me: ‘Yes, but with one great difference. He’s a Romantic – and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently. And because I don’t see things as a Romantic would, I’m unfeeling.’
Prince Charles was not alone in sometimes thinking his father ‘unfeeling’. As I researched this book, I encountered a number of people – including some who had known Prince Philip for some years, including members of his wife’s family – who, unprompted, described him to me as ‘cool’, ‘cold’, ‘hard’, ‘distant’, and ‘unfeeling’. In my experience of him, while he could be distant and forbidding – even frightening – when he chose, he was not unfeeling. That said, he did reflect the attitudes of his generation – much as Charles reflects his. Prince Philip was born in 1921 and brought up in the age when introspection equalled self-indulgence and a stiff upper lip was a virtue, not a disability. He made his marriage work, both because he wanted to and because, in his day, that’s what you did. ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’ As the Queen’s consort, whatever the frustrations, the Duke of Edinburgh knuckled down to the job in hand, because in his day that was what was expected. He was not one to brood about the past or talk to the flowers, because in his day you didn’t.
Prince Philip and Prince Charles both had unusual childhoods, but, by any standards, Philip’s was the more challenging. When Philip was a baby his father was put on trial and then sent into exile. When Philip was nine, his parents separated. His father left the family home in Paris and floated down to Monte Carlo, where he became something of a boulevardier, with a fondness for the ladies and the bottle. Philip’s mother suffered a mental breakdown and was sent away for treatment to a Swiss sanatorium. From the age of nine, and throughout his adolescence, Philip had no parental home. In the school holidays he travelled, without complaint, between the homes of assorted relations.
From first to last, Philip resolutely refused to accept that any of this affected him adversely. When I first wrote an account of his life, I sent my draft to him. By return, he sent me a memorandum correcting facts, dates, and usage with customary briskness (‘In the Navy you serve IN a ship, not on a ship. Rather like living in a house not on a house’), but he did not quibble with any of my personal observations – except when it came to his upbringing.
With regard to what I had written about his father, the Duke protested: ‘I am not sure what you mean by “floated” down to Monte Carlo. He was in exile with no home and very little money. It was a lot cheaper than living in Paris. He had a very small flat there and spent a lot of time visiting his daughters.’ With regard to what I had said about his peripatetic school holidays, the Duke questioned my turns of phrase: ‘Why “without complaint”? What did I have to complain about? Why “assorted” relations? They were my sisters and their in-laws.’
Prince Philip would not – did not – complain about any aspect of his childhood. In my experience he did not complain about any aspect of his life – except, perhaps, the way in which he and the Royal Family were treated by the press. Certainly, if you suggested that he might have been personally frustrated that the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952 had brought his naval career to a premature close, he would deny it. ‘You have to make compromises,’ he said to me. ‘That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.’
‘Try to make the best of it’ was what he counselled each of his three elder children to do when their marriages began to falter. As you will discover in Chapter 12, in his practical, pragmatic way he made heroic attempts to help Charles and Diana as their marriage failed. ‘I did my best,’ he told me. ‘We did our best.’
‘Did they do their best?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer.
‘Anne did her best,’ he said. When Princess Anne’s first marriage foundered, the Queen and Prince Philip were saddened, of course, but as the Duke put it to me, ‘What can you do? It isn’t easy. She tried to make it work. She really did.’ A few years later, when Anne had remarried, the Duke told me that she and her new husband were having a ‘rocky patch – you’re married, you know how it is?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what to do to help,’ he said. He shook his head. He made no attempt to hide his distress and concern. It clearly weighed on him quite heavily. It must have done because this conversation was taking place in public: at a charity fund-raising lunch in the Cabinet War Rooms. We had only just taken our places: food was being served. I was seated one place away from the Duke. He turned to the middle-aged woman who was seated between us. ‘As a rule, I try to keep out of these things,’ he explained.
‘But you want to help,’ said the woman, who had married children of her own.
‘Yes,’ said the Duke, contemplating his starter, ‘but I don’t know what to say – except, “Keep going, it will work out. With good will on both sides, it usually does.”’ He sighed. ‘Children.’
On the whole, he was reasonably circumspect when talking about his children and their relationships – except in the case of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. He spoke with real affection of their daughters, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, but he made no secret of the fact that he regarded Sarah, Duchess of York, as ‘simply beyond the pale’. That Andrew and Sarah appeared to remain friends after their separation – and that they shared a home even after their divorce – seemed to him ‘truly bizarre’. ‘I don’t pretend to understand it,’ he said.
‘But you won’t even see her,’ I said to him. ‘She is the mother of your granddaughters. Why won’t you see Sarah?’
‘I am not vindictive,’ he said, looking directly at me. ‘I am not vindictive,’ he repeated emphatically, ‘but I don’t see the point.’
When, one day in the summer of 1992, photographs appeared in a daily newspaper of Sarah, topless, having her toes sucked by a lover in the south of France, the Duke of Edinburgh decided that, as far as he was concerned, ‘enough was enough’. He did not want – or need – to have anything more to do with her.
A few years later, in the spring of 2001, when a Sunday newspaper ran a different embarrassing story about another of his daughters-in-law, the Duke was more sympathetic. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, wife of the youngest of the royal children, was the victim of a ‘sting’ set up by the News of the World. Her reported remarks were unfortunate, but her parents-in-law imm
ediately forgave her. Why? ‘She was “set up” by Murdoch and his merry men,’ said the Duke. ‘It was entrapment.’
Sophie’s husband, Prince Edward, seemingly a bit wet and a tad irritating to the rest of us, was always his parents’ favourite. That became apparent in 1987 when Edward, aged twenty-two, opted out of the Royal Marines when he was just a third of the way through his twelve-month basic training course. To the surprise of some, Prince Philip (Captain-General of the Royal Marines) did not come down on his son like a ton of bricks. He accepted that the Marines ‘wasn’t right for Edward’ – and to this day Edward is grateful for that.
Edward was always close to his father. At the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, when Prince Philip was taken into hospital, it wasn’t a surprise to see that it was Edward and Sophie (the parents of the only ones of the royal grandchildren to carry the surname Mountbatten-Windsor) who were the first to visit the Duke. And Edward and Sophie were there, in pride of place, in a wedding photo on the sideboard behind the Queen, when Her Majesty made her Thank You broadcast to the nation at the end of the jubilee celebrations. And now that Prince Philip is dead, it is Prince Edward who will be recreated as the next Duke of Edinburgh.
‘I tried to be a good father,’ said Prince Philip. ‘I did my best.’ That he was an outstanding grandfather has never been in dispute. From youth to old age, he was always good with very small children, and with William and Harry, who lost their mother when they were only fifteen and twelve years of age, he was – in William’s phrase – ‘a tower of strength and understanding’. At the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Prince Harry managed to capture both Prince Philip’s elusive quality and his indispensability to the Queen in the same revealing sentence: ‘Regardless of whether my grandfather seems to be doing his own thing, sort of wandering off like a fish down the river, the fact that he’s there – personally, I don’t think that she could do it without him, especially when they’re both at this age.’
What was remarkable about the Duke of Edinburgh was that he managed, across seven decades, to be both a pivotal figure at the centre of the British Royal Family and, at the same time, something of a loner, an outsider, his own man: a face familiar to all and yet an individual who remained a touch unknowable, even to those who knew him well.
To me, sometimes he seemed like a proper friend, sometimes almost like a father (I was born in the same year as Prince Charles), but in my experience you could never be entirely sure where you were with him: the easy intimacy of one meeting might be replaced by a definite formality at the next. For the most part, when others were present he treated me as though, somehow, I had joined his staff by mistake, that I shouldn’t really be there, but since I was, I might as well stay. He seemed gently amused by me, if a little wary. He knew that I was fundamentally ‘on side’ – I was the chairman of one of his pet charities; I wrote and broadcast about him sympathetically – but he also never forgot that I was a journalist and, with good reason, he was very suspicious of journalists.
Over the years I spent many hours with him – at breakfasts, lunches, dinners, in meetings, formal and informal, on sundry visits and official tours – and I never found him anything but agreeable: occasionally impatient, but always tolerant. When I accompanied him to a charity pantomime one Christmas, he hissed the villain as required and chorused, ‘He’s behind you!’ on cue. When I asked him if I could bring a parade of clowns and stilt-walkers into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace as part of a fund-raising event, he raised a doubtful eyebrow but agreed.
In the early 1980s, when I was a presenter with TV-am, Britain’s first commercial breakfast television station, I told Prince Philip one day that I happened to have had breakfast with ‘Blake Carrington’ from Dynasty. His Royal Highness looked at me, bemused. ‘I haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I had breakfast with the Queen.’ When I told him there was now breakfast television on both BBC and ITV, he seemed utterly appalled. ‘Every day?’ he asked, incredulous. In those days he watched very little TV – A Question of Sport and the Nine O’Clock News, that was about it. On another occasion I was at Buckingham Palace, in attendance, while he presented the Playing Fields Association’s ‘President’s Certificates’ to assorted supporters of the cause. I arrived a little late for the ceremony and explained that I had been delayed because I had been judging a charity Knit-a-Teddy-Bear competition and there had been 1,300 entries. The Duke looked at me pityingly. ‘And I thought I had to do some damned stupid things,’ he said. Then he handed out the President’s Certificates, as planned, shook hands with the recipients, chatted amiably, and, duty done, nodded to the assembled company and wandered on his way. He had seven similar engagements that day. ‘I think I’m with the clockmakers next,’ he said to me as I walked with him to the door. ‘I like to be a bit on the late side for them.’ He was a funny man. He liked to laugh – and to make others laugh.
And now he’s gone, I miss him. What do I miss most?
I miss his energy.
Even in old age, Prince Philip crackled with energy. In 2011, the year he turned ninety, he undertook 330 official engagements. The following year he managed 347. In his prime, he was a dynamo. At sixty-five, the age at which most men retire, the Duke of Edinburgh was the active founder, fellow, patron, president, chairman, or member of at least 837 organisations – as well as a Colonel or Colonel-in-Chief, Field Marshal, Admiral, and Air Commodore forty-two times over. During his long life he endured more than sixty-five years of royal flummery: parades, processions, receptions, launches, lunches, dinners – upwards of 25,000 official engagements. He made speeches, he unveiled plaques, he handed out certificates. He measured out his life in handshakes and small talk. And to maintain his sanity, alongside the surface stuff, the meeting and the greeting, the waving and saluting, (‘It’s necessary, unavoidable,’ he said. ‘I know that’), he got ‘stuck into’ a range of particular projects where in-depth involvement gave him the satisfaction of achievement. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, as just one example, has touched the lives of millions of young people around the world in a multiplicity of positive ways. He did not just turn up, he made things happen.
I will miss his sense of humour. Even in his nineties the banter did not stop. On the last two occasions when he and I were speakers at fund-raising events at Buckingham Palace, throughout each of my speeches His Royal Highness kept up a barrage of barracking designed to disconcert me and entertain the crowd. ‘Get on with it,’ he’d call out. ‘We’ve heard this story before – and it isn’t true. Don’t believe a word he says. What on earth’s he going on about now?’
The Duke’s reputation for curmudgeonliness came about not simply because of the kind of banter that sometimes came my way, but also, and more so, because, in conversation, he was deliberately challenging. He questioned, he argued, he played devil’s advocate, he answered back. Whatever you’d say, his automatic response was, ‘Yes, but—’ He did it, I believe, both to show an interest and to maintain his own interest. When you meet scores of people in a day (and some days he met hundreds) it would be easy to let everything that’s said wash over you. However briefly, the Duke of Edinburgh tried to become engaged in whatever he was doing. He had an enquiring mind. ‘I suppose I challenge things to stimulate myself,’ he told me once, ‘and to be stimulating. You don’t have to agree with everyone all the time. It would be a dull world if you did.’
He was more thoughtful and much kinder than the common caricature of him would suggest. For example, when I told him that I hoped to become a Member of Parliament but had never attended the State Opening of Parliament, he sent me tickets. When I told him I had found a constituency where I hoped to be the candidate, he gave me useful advice on how to make small talk with all and sundry. He offered the question ‘What’s keeping you busy these days?’ as an all-purpose opening gambit. (The ingenuity of the phrasing comes into its own when the person you are addressing is someone you have met before but have wholl
y forgotten.) When, in 1992, I was elected as MP for the City of Chester and the Queen and the Duke happened to pay an official visit to my constituency (for the Queen to distribute the Royal Maundy in Chester Cathedral), His Royal Highness broke away from the formal procession – abandoning the Queen and the Lord Mayor – to say hello to me. The effect on those around me was noticeable – and gratifying.
Prince Philip went out of his way to perform small kindnesses – and to put people at their ease. He knew that he was portrayed in the press as ‘a cantankerous old sod’ (his phrase, not mine), but protested: ‘I don’t think I have ever got up to make a speech of any kind, anywhere, ever, and not made the audience laugh at least once. You arrive somewhere and you go down that receiving line … I get two or three of them to laugh. Always.’
Meeting royalty is not a comfortable experience. It’s oddly nerve-racking. Prince Philip would make a crack to break the ice. But Michael Seward, when canon treasurer at St Paul’s Cathedral, was one of those who complained about the Duke’s manner. ‘You never know if it will be a snort, a snub, or a merry laugh,’ he said. I think it was only ever banter. Prince Philip knew he must say something, because if he stayed silent that would have been interpreted as him being surly. He couldn’t win.
From my limited experience as an MP, I reckon one of the most wearisome aspects of public life is the requirement to be genial all the time. If you are the Queen’s consort, you will not remember everyone you meet, but everybody you meet will remember you, and how you seem, and what you say. The Duke admitted this much: ‘Occasionally I get fed up, going to visit a factory, when I’m being shown round by the chairman who clearly hasn’t got a clue, and I try to get hold of the factory manager but I can’t because the chairman wants to make sure he’s the one in all the photographs.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 2
