I know I pleased him once by saying to him, ‘You’ve got a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, but in fact you’ve been suffering fools willingly for more than fifty years.’ He grinned at me, nodded, and said, slowly and quietly, ‘I have suffered fools … with … patience.’
But he could be impatient. He could be irascible. He could be grumpy. Once I saw him bark sharply at a footman in Buckingham Palace. It was not a pretty sight. And the footman, of course, could not answer back.
When it came to unflattering and inaccurate stories about him in the press, Prince Philip could not answer back either. This he found frustrating. What exasperated him in particular, he told me, was that so much of the coverage of the Royal Family had become ‘so unremittingly negative’. Once upon a time, royalties (as they were called) could take a discreet and deferential press for granted. Not any more. I asked Prince Philip when he thought it started to go wrong. He said, without hesitation, ‘After [Rupert] Murdoch bought the Today newspaper from Eddie Shah [in 1987]. Day after day there was a derogatory story about one member of the family or another.’
It rankled. Prince Philip gave the impression of having a hide like a rhinoceros. It was an impression he cultivated. As I discovered, the impression belied the truth. The man was much more sensitive than he appeared.
When, once, I told him that I had made a list of the popular myths that existed about him, he asked immediately, ‘Tactless overseas? Is that on your list?’ He glanced at the notebook I was holding in my hand, saw the words ‘slitty eyes’, and sighed.
On 16 October 1986, in Beijing, when the Queen and the Duke were on a state visit to China, Prince Philip met a group of British students studying at the North West University in Xian. The Duke was particularly interested in the students because they came from Edinburgh University (he was Chancellor of four universities: Edinburgh from 1952) and chatting to them informally (with neither Chinese nor press present) he expressed surprise when he discovered that they were spending a whole year in China – long enough ‘to go native and come home slit-eyed’.
It was a joke, a bit of badinage, but, because one of the students later gave a friendly account of the conversation to a journalist, an inconsequential private aside was turned into banner headlines around the world. ‘The great wally of China,’ said the Mirror; ‘The Duke gets it wong,’ said the Sun. As well as depicting the Duke as gaffe-prone, there was the unpleasant implication that he was an old-school casual racist. Certainly, Prince Philip was no disciple of the politically correct, but in forty years I never detected a hint of racism in him. Indeed, he told me that two of his best friends at his first school in Paris, when he was a little boy of six or seven, were Chinese: the Koo brothers, Freeman and Wellington, sons of the Chinese Ambassador to Paris, V.K. Wellington Koo. At the school, Philip recalled that he was known as ‘the boy who had no surname’ and young Wellington Koo was known as ‘Ching Ching Chinaman’. ‘That’s just the way it was,’ he said to me. He was a man of his era. ‘If I did use the phrase “slit-eyed”,’ he protested, ‘I certainly didn’t use it offensively. Why would I?’
I was once with him at a private lunch party where, across the table, he stopped someone mid-sentence because they were attempting to tell a joke with a mildly racist overtone. Prince Philip was not a racist, but nor was he a disciple of political correctness. He would speak his mind, regardless of the consequences. When upbraided for making a comment about a fuse box that had so many wires hanging out ‘that it looked as if it had been put together by an Indian’, he retorted, ‘Have you ever been to India and looked at a fuse box there?’
‘How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?’ the Duke of Edinburgh allegedly asked a driving instructor in Oban, Scotland, in 1995. ‘You managed not to get eaten, then?’ he said, in 1998, to a student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea. To a Briton he met in Budapest, Hungary, in 1993, he remarked, ‘You can’t have been here that long – you haven’t got a pot belly.’ In Australia in 2002, at an Aboriginal cultural display, he enquired of his host, ‘Do you still throw spears at each other?’ The Duke knew that his so-called ‘gaffes’ would feature prominently in his obituaries and accepted that there was nothing much he could do about it – except growl in private.
In May 1999 he was particularly incensed when he was accused of mocking some deaf children at a pop concert in south Wales. He was reported to have jeered at them, ‘Deaf? No wonder you are deaf, listening to this row.’ A few days after the event, on 4 June, he wrote to me from Buckingham Palace: ‘You may have noticed that the tabloids were quick to suggest that I had made another ‘gaffe’ and ‘insulted’ some deaf children at Cardiff recently. Needless to say, the story is largely invention. It so happens that my mother was quite seriously deaf and I have been Patron of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf for ages, so it’s hardly likely that I would do any such thing. Quite apart from that, I have no recollection of meeting a group of deaf children at the event for the Prince’s Trust in the grounds of Cardiff Castle. There were young people milling all over the place and there may well have been a group of deaf children amongst them. What I do remember is that the noise from various stages and bands was quite deafening and I may well have said at some point something to the effect that if anyone were to sit too close to the loud speakers they would certainly be in danger of going deaf.’
But the gaffes weren’t the worst of it. Over the years, he was distressed as well as infuriated by the steady stream of newspaper and magazine stories about his supposed extramarital love life. Around the world, over many years, journalists and publishers – and documentary film-makers and book writers – peddled unsubstantiated tittle-tattle about him and, mostly, got away with it because what, realistically, could he do about it? As he saw it, suing was not the answer: ‘It’s a cumbersome and costly process and gives more coverage to the libel. “Queen’s husband in court” – oh, yes? No smoke without fire …’
In 1994, when I was an MP, I was the victim of a tabloid ‘sting’. A prostitute told a Sunday newspaper that I had visited a ‘massage parlour’ in my constituency. I had done no such thing and I resented the suggestion that I had. Happily, because there was no truth in the story, it was not published, but the experience of being pursued by the newspaper (and being told that the newspaper had secured ‘signed affidavits’ from the prostitute) was a nasty one and I decided to clear the air by writing an article for the Daily Telegraph describing the experience.
My article prompted a letter to me from Prince Philip. He typed it himself. The letter illustrates his feelings about, and his experience of, the modern media, and the way in which, when faced with a problem, the Duke always tried to come up with a solution.
BUCKINGHAM PALACE
18 May 1994
Dear Gyles,
I enjoyed your article in the DT this morning. It is about time that something was said about this particular form of harassment by the tabloids. However, it is not the only way in which journalists enjoy venting their spleen on those in the public eye. I have had fairly extensive experience of that sort of treatment over the years! For the last few years, it is regularly predicted that Kitty Kelley is writing a book about me.
It is a relatively new phenomenon. I don’t think any newspaper – tabloid or broadsheet – was quite as vicious or carping 40 years ago as they have become today. There are probably many reasons for this, but I would like to suggest three: –
1. The introduction by Murdoch of Australian tabloid standards. I was out in Australia during the war and I well remember being struck by the sheer viciousness of their tabloids such as ‘Truth’.
2. The development of TV has meant that newspapers are no longer the purveyors of news. Whatever they print is bound to be out of date. Therefore – apart from the sports pages – they have to compete as entertainers and there is no doubt – whatever anyone says – that ordinary people love gossip and they seem to love reading dispa
raging things about public figures that give them a glow of self-righteousness.
3. All journalists have a very high regard for themselves, even if others do not have to share that view. I suspect that being rude about public figures, or making them look ridiculous, makes them feel more important – it boosts their egos … ‘look at me, I have just spat in this important person’s eye and he is too frightened of me to do anything about it.’
You suggest that there is nothing that should be done about this except to invite them to change their attitude. I rather doubt whether anything will change while the present circulation war continues in a declining market. Indeed, I think it will become even more desperate as circulations drop still further.
I would like to put forward just one idea. At the moment any paper can print stories as rumours and they can print what they claim are quotations, very often in inverted commas which imply that the words were actually uttered by the person concerned. The victim is then left to deny the rumour of the quotation, but the damage has been done while the journalist merely claims that it came from an impeccable source. It seems to me that the ‘boot should be on the other foot’. It should be up to the journalist to produce proof that the story – even if it is said to be a rumour – has a basis in fact, or some convincing evidence that a statement was actually made by the victim. In other words, it would give the victim the right to say ‘prove it, or pay up’.
Incidentally the tabloids are not alone in this sleazy business. Not long ago I was interviewed for one of the broadsheet magazines. It may interest you to know that, among several questions, the interviewer told me that it was commonly believed, and wanted me to say whether, I had any illegitimate children, my second son was fathered by someone else and I had a homosexual relationship with Giscard D’Estaing!!
Yours sincerely,
Philip
Kitty Kelley’s book, when it appeared in 1997, was called The Royals and did not devote very many of its seven hundred and fifty pages to Prince Philip and his alleged peccadilloes. However, it did carry an account of the interview His Royal Highness had given to Fiammetta Rocco for the Independent on Sunday. She was the journalist who had asked him whether his second son had been fathered by someone else. He greeted the question with an uncompromising silence. According to Kitty Kelley, ‘he sat as impassive as stone’. However, when Ms Rocco put it to the Duke that he had once enjoyed an affair with the former French president, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, Prince Philip apparently responded with a laugh, ‘Oh, Giscard is a delightful old boy, but I never stayed at the Elysée Palace when he was president. I would stay there when [Vincent] Auriol was president [1947–54], and he was a frightful buggerer.’
A few days later, a message came to Fiammetta Rocco from Prince Philip: ‘Do not use the Auriol anecdote on your tape.’ She didn’t. According to Kitty Kelley: ‘Afterward, Philip said he would never give another interview to a British reporter. But by then his personal life, once off limits to the press, had become vulnerable. The Independent on Sunday reported that he and the Queen slept in separate bedrooms. Vanity Fair said he kept a mistress. The New Yorker said it was a “succession of actress-mistresses who regularly appeared on television, prompting viewers in the know to smile and say, ‘She’s one of his.’” For those not in the know, the Tatler published “The Royal Collection”, which provided the names, biographies, and photographs of thirteen women described as the “Duke of Edinburgh’s fan club”.’
Whatever was the truth about Prince Philip’s alleged extramarital relationships – and in Chapter 11 I will tackle the issue in full and head-on – what no one is going to deny is that the Queen’s husband enjoyed the company of intelligent, articulate, and attractive women. Indeed, to mark his seventieth birthday, I organised a ‘ladies only’ lunch in his honour at the Savoy Hotel. The room was filled with good-looking younger women – and several were actresses. The actress Jane Asher baked the birthday cake. I placed another attractive actress, Joanna Lumley, and my own beautiful wife, Michèle Brown, either side of His Royal Highness. By several accounts (I was not there: it really was ladies only, apart from the Prince) a happy time was had by all.
Prince Philip was attractive to women. He had the gifts of the charmer: he listened to you, he looked into your eyes, he took you seriously, he made you feel he wanted your company. He never glanced over your shoulder to see if someone more interesting was coming along. Dame Norma Major – who, as the Prime Minister’s wife in the 1990s, often found herself in conversation with the Queen’s husband, and whose own husband, John Major, is no slouch himself in the charmer stakes – told me, ‘I am a huge fan and have always enjoyed his company on the numerous occasions I have been privileged to sit beside him at dinner.’ Joanna Lumley said to me, ‘Prince Philip is just the best dinner companion, the best.’
This book came about because, having got to know Prince Philip, and admiring him, liking him, and respecting him as I did and do, I felt he deserved to be better understood. My first thought was simply to write his biography. In 2002, as part of the official celebration at the Royal Albert Hall in honour of his eightieth birthday, with his approval and involvement, I wrote a short account of his life. Researching it, and talking with him, I was particularly fascinated by his family history, his unusual childhood, and his impressive wartime career in the Royal Navy, but, looking at his story overall, I had to accept that, since 1947, he had only led the life he had because he married the woman he married. In our world, even in the twenty-first century, few men’s lives are defined by their wives’ roles. Prince Philip as an individual is interesting because he was an interesting and unusual man. He is doubly interesting because he was the Queen’s consort – and the longest-serving consort in the thousand-year history of the British monarchy.
Over a number of years in a number of roles – as chairman of a national charity of which the Queen is patron and the Duke of Edinburgh was president, as an MP and government whip, and as a journalist and broadcaster – I have been able to observe the Queen and the Duke at close range. Watching the pair of them – two sharply contrasting characters, with wholly different natures – I decided to write a biography of them both. I called it Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage and this book is based in large part on it.
The phrase ‘portrait of a marriage’ was used by the writer Nigel Nicolson as the title for his moving and revelatory account of his own parents’ relationship – and relationships. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson led unusual and, to some extent, exotic lives. The Queen and Prince Philip, also, led lives that are and were, by any standard, out of the ordinary.
Different marriages work (or fail) in different ways, and different people (and generations and classes) will have different expectations of what marriage has to offer. To begin to understand this particular royal marriage, we need – obviously – to understand the natures of the couple in question: what they are and were like as individuals, and how consequently they related to each other as they did. Much of this book concentrates on the background and childhood of Prince Philip and the Queen because where they came from tells us so much about what they became. As the novelist Angela Carter put it, ‘The destination of all journeys is their beginning.’
Some will regard aspects of the book as unnecessary and intrusive. Prince Philip complained to me more than once, ‘The media have turned us into a soap opera.’ It was ever thus. As Shakespeare reminds us at the beginning of Twelfth Night (first performed before Elizabeth I more than four hundred years ago), ‘What great ones do, the less will prattle of.’ Prince Philip said much the same to me in that letter from Windsor Castle: ‘Ordinary people love gossip.’
In 1947, the year in which Philip and Elizabeth were married, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Member of Parliament and diarist, witnessed the royal unveiling of a statue of George V, who had died eleven years before. ‘The ceremony itself was over in twenty minutes,’ Channon noted, ‘but then followed that interminable pause whilst the Roy
alties greeted each other, interkissed and chatted. It is only in England that a crowd of several thousands can stand happily in the rain and watch one family gossip.’ We are especially fascinated by this one family, not only because its story has all the essential romantic and melodramatic ingredients of a soap opera, but also, and principally, because the central characters are royal.
The hold of royalty on the public imagination is extraordinary. Several million cheering people filled the streets to salute Elizabeth II on the occasion of her Diamond and Golden jubilees. They did not know her personally – and yet they had known her all their lives. She was part and parcel of the fabric of their lives. As one of her private secretaries said to me, ‘The Queen represents the very best of Britain, of its values and its heritage. In many ways, she represents the soul of the nation.’
When Prince Philip died many in Britain were surprised by how much they felt his passing. He had always been there – and now he wasn’t. And in the immediate aftermath of his death, and watching his funeral on television, millions sensed the Queen’s loss and were suddenly moved by the realisation of how much her husband had meant to her and how lonely for her the rest of her reign would be.
It is not really surprising that a royal death touches us in the way it does. Members of the Royal Family feature in our newspapers and on our television screens almost daily, but our relationship with royalty is neither fleeting nor superficial. The Queen is on our postage stamps and coins and banknotes. But she is more than head of state: she is at the heart of our national identity – and for a reason. Elizabeth II – from 10 September 2015 the longest-reigning monarch in our history – is the latest in a line of sovereigns that links her directly to King Edgar, Richard III, Henry VIII, George IV, Queen Victoria. She is the embodiment of our nation’s story. Her presence links us to our past.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 3
