Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Parker told me, ‘I decided to get back to London as soon as possible. We had been on this remarkable voyage, testing the newly commissioned Britannia, visiting Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, and goodness knows where, but all that was instantly forgotten. I’d become the story – and a liability to Philip.’ Surrounded by rapacious hacks (‘Literally – I think they bought every other seat on the plane’), Parker, unusually tight-lipped, and accompanied by his solicitor, flew from Gibraltar to London. At Heathrow Airport he found yet more of the world’s press awaiting him – together, surprisingly, with the habitually reticent Commander Richard Colville, the Queen’s press secretary, who had motored down from London, not to give the Duke of Edinburgh’s friend and secretary a helping hand, but to say to him this, and nothing more: ‘Hello, Parker, I’ve just come to let you know that from now on, you’re on your own.’

  Colville made this excursion to Heathrow on his own initiative. Parker was not ‘on his own’ as far as the Queen and the Duke were concerned. ‘The Duke saw me off at the airport in Gibraltar and the Queen was wonderful throughout,’ Parker told me. ‘She regarded a divorce as a sadness, not a hanging offence. Her Prime Minister at the time was a divorcee, after all.84 The Queen telephoned me and could not have been more sympathetic.’ Initially, Parker – and his employer – hoped he might be able to weather the storm. ‘But pretty damn quickly I could see it wasn’t going to be possible. It was going to take a year for my divorce to come through. I had to resign. I had no choice.’ The Queen was sorry to see him go and appointed him a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in recognition of his years of loyal service to her husband.

  Parker flew to London, but Philip remained on board Britannia. Since it was now the beginning of February and he had been away from hearth and home since mid-October, the Sunday Pictorial, for one, wanted to know why. The Royal Family, the newspaper reminded its readers, ‘is loved and envied throughout the world because it is a family’. Why wasn’t Philip at home with the kiddies? Anne was six and Charles was eight. ‘How can you expect youngsters to understand that Daddy is so near yet cannot come home?’

  The reason that Philip remained where he was was simple. It was convenient. And he was not about to dance to the Sunday Pictorial’s tune. As planned many months before, the Queen was scheduled to pay a state visit to President Craveiro Lopes of Portugal between 18 and 21 February and Philip was due to join her. He did. ‘But,’ as they sigh wearily at Buckingham Palace to this day, ‘why let the boring facts get in the way of the salacious innuendoes?’ Fairly or unfairly, the collapse of the Parker marriage, combined with Philip’s prolonged separation from his wife and children, created a flood of speculation – and eventually the dam burst. The Baltimore Sun – the premier newspaper of Wallis Simpson’s home town – broke ‘the story’, with the paper’s London correspondent reporting that the British capital was awash with rumour that the Duke of Edinburgh was romantically involved with an unnamed woman whom he met on a regular basis in the West End apartment of a society photographer. ‘Report Queen, Duke in Rift Over Party Girl,’ ran the headline.

  According to Mike Parker, ‘The Duke was incandescent. He was very, very angry. And deeply hurt. There was no truth in the story whatsoever.’ The Queen was equally dismayed, and, surprisingly (given her instinct to follow precedent and the unwritten rule that royalty never answers back), authorised the normally uncommunicative Commander Colville to issue an official and complete denial: ‘It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.’ Having received the Palace’s reassurance, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Mail, and Sketch did the decent thing and ignored the story altogether: if it wasn’t true it wasn’t to be reported. (Those were the days!) The Daily Express, Mirror, and Herald were less circumspect, however, and splashed the Palace’s denial on their front pages. On 11 February, from New York, for the Manchester Guardian, Alistair Cooke reported to his readers, no doubt accurately: ‘Not since the first rumours of a romance between the former King Edward VIII and the then Mrs Simpson have Americans gobbled up the London dispatches so avidly.’ Tongues were wagging, all over the world.85

  The Queen and the Duke did their best to rise above it. They were reunited at Lisbon’s military airport. The scene was a memorable one, and not at all as depicted in the Netflix TV series, The Crown. During part of the tour Philip had grown a full set of naval whiskers. Photographs of the bearded Adonis had found their way back to London. When Philip, now clean-shaven in anticipation of the state visit to Portugal, bounded up the steps of the Queen’s plane in Lisbon, he was greeted by an extraordinary sight: his wife and her entire entourage, sitting in their seats, all sporting false ginger beards! (This is a family that is fond of practical jokes.) Minutes later, when the royal couple emerged from the plane, both were beaming, and an eagle-eyed reporter, with a sentimental streak, was sure he spotted a telltale smudge of lipstick on the Duke’s cheek.

  Her Majesty decided to deal with the rumour-mongers’ cheek as well. In 1947, when Philip became a naturalised British subject, he ceased to be a Prince of Greece and, technically at least, a ‘prince’ of any kind at all. On his wedding day, 20 November 1947, George VI created him Baron Greenwich of Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, and Duke of Edinburgh. The late King had made his son-in-law a Royal Highness, but not a prince. In March 1955 Sir Winston Churchill, a month before his retirement as Prime Minister, proposed to the Queen, ‘in informal conversation’, that she might like to consider making her husband ‘a prince of the United Kingdom’. She agreed, but, at the time, did nothing about it. Two years later, in February 1957, Harold Macmillan, a month after his appointment as Prime Minister, put forward the same proposal. Her Majesty warmly welcomed the suggestion and, this time, took action. On 22 February, the day following their return from the state visit to Portugal, Queen Elizabeth II announced that, henceforward, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh would carry ‘the style and dignity of a prince of the United Kingdom’. This was not merely ‘in recognition of the great services which His Royal Highness has provided to the country’, but also – and pointedly – ‘of his unique contribution to the life of the Commonwealth, culminating in the tour which he has just concluded’.

  In 2011, when Prince William married Catherine Middleton, the press talked up the possibility that the Queen might make her grandson’s bride a princess on her wedding day. It did not happen – and, so long as the Queen is Queen, I do not believe it will until William and Catherine have been married for ten years. The Queen always uses the honours at her disposal carefully and to a purpose. On Prince Philip’s ninetieth birthday, for example, she found for her husband a unique honour that was singularly appropriate. It was a title she held herself until she transferred it to the Duke of Edinburgh: Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom.

  In 2013 Prince Philip spent his ninety-second birthday at the London Clinic, recuperating from an exploratory operation on his abdomen. A few days before, on 6 June, on the morning of his admission to hospital, the Queen presented him with yet another honour to add to his collection: the Order of New Zealand. (Well, what else do you give to a man who has everything?)

  The Queen gives honours to recognise achievement and service – and to silence critics. In February 2011 Her Majesty gave her second son, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, one of the highest honours at her personal disposal. She made him a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. The honour was a fifty-first birthday present for the Prince, a ‘thank you’ from his mother for the support he had given her and an acknowledgement of his work as un unpaid United Kingdom trade ambassador. The announcement of the honour coincided with both the Prince’s birthday and a barrage of bad press for ‘Airmiles Andy’ as the British media chose to dub him. At the time, Andrew was getting an especially rough ride in the British press because of his association with an American billionaire financier sent to jail and placed on the US sex offenders’ register after admitting soliciting teenage girls into prostitutio
n. At the end of March 2011, when Prince Andrew called on his mother at Windsor Castle to be invested with his new honour, the Daily Mail reported that ‘the revelations’ about Andrew’s ‘associations’ had led to questions in Parliament about his suitability as a representative of British industry abroad: ‘Critics argue that the Prince’s public profile has been fatally damaged. Matters have been made worse in recent weeks by further accusations that he has deliberately befriended rich and powerful foreign figureheads – particularly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East – for personal gain. This has always been vehemently denied by Buckingham Palace.’

  When the Queen honoured Prince Andrew in February 2011, she was showing her support for her son in as forthright and public a way as she could. It was the same – but only more so – when, in February 1957, she honoured her husband with ‘the style and dignity of a prince of the United Kingdom’. But the critics and the rumour-mongers were not silenced then, either.

  Prince Philip told me that he was aware that ‘from the earliest days’ of his marriage there were those who were convinced that he was what used to be termed ‘a ladies’ man’, one of those husbands who, publicly, support their wives, while at the same time, albeit discreetly, managing to play the field.

  Prince Philip was sensitive to this. I know because he raised the issue with me. I did not bring it up: I would neither have dared nor presumed to do so. He raised it himself and did so repeatedly. You might think that, after all those years in the public eye, and knowing how people love to gossip, and seeing the way the press behaves, he would have simply shrugged his shoulders and laughed it off. To an extent he did. In 1995, for example, when a German newspaper reported that His Royal Highness had twenty-four illegitimate children and that this had been confirmed by Buckingham Palace, he did laugh. It transpired that the newspaper had misinterpreted ‘godchildren’ as ‘love children’. But, as a rule, he did not consider the widespread speculation about his alleged love life – in print and private – to be any kind of laughing matter. These stories ‘damage your reputation’, he said, ‘chip away at it insidiously’. I came to realise that the Duke was both more sensitive and more vulnerable than he seemed.

  What really surprised me was that he kept copies of some of the most offensive material. Once, he sent me a photocopy he had made of ten pages from an Australian magazine, Woman’s Day, which on its front page promised readers a full exposé of ‘Prince Philip’s torrid sex life’ with ‘famous lovers named’. Inside – under the banner headline ‘Philip’s Outrageous Affairs’ – Australian readers were offered a ‘sizzling extract’ from a book ‘they daren’t publish in Britain’. The book’s author, Nicholas Davies, purported to reveal ‘a shocking world of royal adultery, passion and betrayal’ and stated – as fact, not surmise – that the Duke of Edinburgh’s liaisons with his cousin, Princess Alexandra, with the film star Merle Oberon, and with the Duchess of York’s mother, Susan Barrantes (among others!) were the reason ‘why the Queen banned her husband from her bed’.

  ‘It’s the most terrible tosh,’ I said to Prince Philip.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but it’s out there, in print, between hard covers, and available to one and all. And some of those who read it, may believe it. And those who don’t believe it all, may think, “Well, there’s no smoke without fire …”’

  The book itself is not published in the United Kingdom, but, via the internet, of course, it is available worldwide, and, internationally, it has enjoyed wide circulation. In the United States, according to Publishers Weekly, the initial print run was 50,000 copies.

  What could Philip do about it? He wanted to do something. He wrote to me from Windsor Castle: ‘I am sure you will appreciate my dilemma. My only defence would be to sue for libel, but that is a ponderous and expensive business and might well involve me in giving evidence. Either way, it would be valuable publicity for the book! Furthermore, the problem for any individual suing for libel in such a case is that they have to specify which are the statements claimed to be libellous. This means that if any statement is not complained about, it could be taken as being true!!’

  Typically, Prince Philip offered me his own practical solution to the dilemma: ‘It would be so much easier, and fairer, to be able to draw the attention of some sort of complaints tribunal to the publication of unsubstantiated statements about the behaviour of individuals of this, or of any other, nature. It would then be up to the author to satisfy the tribunal that there was sufficient acceptable evidence to prove the truth of the statements. Needless to say, quoting unsubstantiated reports in the media ought not to be considered acceptable evidence.’

  In 1995, when I was an MP and parliamentary private secretary to Stephen Dorrell, then Secretary of State for National Heritage, I took the minister to see Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace to hear the Duke’s views on privacy and the press, among other things. The minister listened sympathetically and said, frankly, there was not much he could do. Given the beleaguered state of John Major’s government at the time, and the number of stories of ‘sleaze’ sloshing round its ankles, action of any kind that could be interpreted as restricting the freedom of the press was not likely to find favour. Sixteen years later, when Lord Justice Leveson was appointed to head a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practice, and ethics of the British press, the Duke of Edinburgh followed its proceedings with interest, but was not optimistic that the new, independent body that Leveson proposed to replace the existing Press Complaints Commission would either ‘have teeth or make much difference’.

  Lies were told about Prince Philip’s private life and he did not like it.

  ‘I want my book to tell the truth,’ I said to him.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  What was the truth?

  Was the Duke of Edinburgh a philanderer?

  And, if he was, why do we need to know? Is it any of our business? As the great Cervantes puts it in Don Quixote: ‘Suppose they were lovers, what’s that to me? Plenty of people expect to find bacon where there’s not so much as a hook to hang it on.’ Surely, as Dr Johnson insists, even in death (perhaps especially in death) ‘a man is to have part of his life to himself’?

  Well, yes. And no. Prince Philip was in a special position. He was the Queen’s consort, and Her Majesty is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. At her Coronation, he knelt before her, placed his hands between hers, and vowed, ‘I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth will I bear unto you …’ I do not believe that he took that vow – or, indeed, his marriage vows – lightly. It was at his insistence that, in 2011, his biography on the official Buckingham Palace Royal Family website included the sentence: ‘The Duke is a committed Christian.’ And although he instructed me not to ‘bang on’ about his interest in religion, when in a draft of my book I said that his shelves contained 634 volumes on religion, he corrected the figure in his own hand to 670.

  Prince Philip was a committed Christian who disapproved of his eldest son’s adultery. He said it was ‘wrong’. Prince Philip was also a role model – especially to the young and those in the armed services. He was founder of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and patron of the Outward Bound Trust. He was a Colonel or Colonel-in-Chief, Field Marshal, Admiral, and Air Commodore forty-two times over. He took these appointments seriously. Honour, duty and example counted with him. But was he a hypocrite? Did he criticise his son for doing what he had done himself? Did he betray the Queen?

  I believe we can take it as read that the Queen remained faithful throughout her married life. There are those who persist in believing that Prince Andrew’s natural father was the Queen’s racing manager, Henry Porchester, ‘Porchey’, 7th Earl of Carnarvon, suggesting the conception occurred at some point between 20 January and 30 April 1959 when Philip was away on another of his long sea voyages in Britannia. Never mind that the dates don’t stack up (Andrew was born on 19 February 1960, a happy by-produc
t of the Queen and Philip’s post-Britannia reunion): the idea of the Queen committing adultery is simply preposterous.

  I asked Geordie, 8th Earl of Carnarvon (and one of the Queen’s godchildren), if his father and Her Majesty knew of the rumour and what they made of it. Were they amused? ‘They knew all about it,’ Geordie told me, ‘and were not in the least amused. They were angry. My father was very annoyed by it, and embarrassed. It was dreadful.’ The Queen and Porchey were best friends. They had known each other all their adult lives: they shared a passion for racehorses and a sense of humour. They may even have been a little in love – in the nicest possible way – but the idea of a romance between them is risible. ‘Both my parents were friends of the Queen and Prince Philip,’ Geordie told me. ‘Obviously my father saw a lot of the Queen throughout the year, but in October he used to invite them to Highclere [Castle, near Newbury in Berkshire, the Carnarvon family home, now familiar to television viewers around the world as the setting for Downton Abbey] for a shooting weekend – partridge shooting. Prince Philip sometimes came, not always. He’s an extremely good shot. And the Queen, of course, has always been good at working dogs. On Saturday night, my mother would do dinner, the best of English country house cooking, using old recipes of my great-grandmother’s. And on Sunday my father and the Queen might walk round the stables or visit Highclere stud. The Queen adored going on the gallops early in the evening. It was just a perfect, relaxing weekend.’ Porchey died in 2001, but two years later the family reinstated the weekend. ‘The Queen came again,’ said Geordie, ‘and Prince Philip, too. Without my father it couldn’t be quite the same, but it was very jolly.’ In 2012, when I visited Highclere at the height of its Downton Abbey celebrity, I was pleased to see from the visitors’ book that the Queen and Prince Philip were maintaining the tradition.