Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  I am on the Duke’s side, but he was not above reproach. Charles may have whinged about his childhood now and then, but Philip could rarely resist firing cheap shots at his son’s expense. Indeed, he did it all the time. It was a habit. Gina Kennard, who knew him and his family all her life, said to me, ‘He just can’t resist coming out with these personal remarks. He can’t stop himself. He’s at his worst with Charles, but he could be quite sarcastic with Anne, too, you know.’

  That something went wrong in his relationship with Prince Charles is undeniable. Charles could be a sensitive flower. He was shy. He was uncertain. As an adolescent he bruised easily. The poet Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), only a little younger than Charles’s grandmother, met him when he was in his early twenties and thought, ‘That poor young man – anything I can do for him, I will do, because he is very lonely.’ The Queen Mother, not deliberately (though she was capable of mischief), but, effectively, made him feel that she understood him in a way that his parents did not. ‘He is a very gentle boy,’ she said, ‘with a very kind heart, which I think is the essence of everything.’ Queen Elizabeth offered Charles a safe haven and warm waters, away from the cool breeze of his mother and the harsh wind of his father. Gina Kennard told me, ‘When he was a little boy, there didn’t seem to be a problem at all, but, as he was growing up, I think probably the Queen was too tolerant, and Prince Philip too tough.’

  Countess Mountbatten, Philip’s first cousin and one of Charles’s godparents, said to me, ‘You can see it from both sides, can’t you? A resilient character such as Prince Philip, toughened by the slings and arrows of life, who sees being tough as a necessity for survival, wants to toughen up his son – and his son is very sensitive. It hasn’t been easy for either of them.’ Patricia Mountbatten paused and then added, with a dry laugh, ‘Anne, of course, as a natural tomboy, presented no problems.’

  Mabel Anderson, who was nanny to both Prince Charles and Princess Anne, said, ‘He was never as boisterous and noisy as Princess Anne. She had a much stronger, more extrovert personality. She didn’t exactly push him aside, but she was certainly a more forceful child.’ Anne is like her father. She will make no complaint of any kind about her upbringing. Father and daughter always got on well. They were alike in many ways: undertaking their public duties in the same brisk, no-nonsense fashion, competing with each other as to who could fulfil the more engagements in the year, vying with each other as to who had the more efficient private office. They had an easy, good-humoured, comfortable relationship. They didn’t brood about it: they just got on with it.

  Philip was separated from his mother throughout his adolescence, but refused – absolutely – to use that as an excuse for anything. He would not find fault with his mother, however hard you pressed him. Anne will not find fault with hers, either – whatever Charles may say. The idea that, as a mother, the Queen was remote and uncaring – an idea spread by Prince Charles via Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, and more recently fostered by anonymous courtiers quoted by Graham Turner in his Golden Jubilee portrait of the Queen – is flatly rejected by the Princess Royal. ‘I’m not going to speak for anyone else,’ she says, ‘but I simply don’t believe that there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest that she wasn’t caring. It just beggars belief. We as children may have not been too demanding, in the sense that we understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make, but I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think it’s extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true.’

  Anne found her father demanding in a way that was encouraging and her mother tolerant in a way that allowed her children to find their own feet. ‘If she’d been a disciplinarian,’ says Anne, with a wry smile, ‘and said “no” to everybody, we’d have all been psychoanalysed out of existence on the basis that we had too controlling a mother. We’ve all been allowed to find our own way and we were always encouraged to discuss problems, to talk them through. People have to make their own mistakes and I think she’s always accepted that.’

  ‘We are a family,’ Prince Philip said to me. In much the same way, Princess Anne adds, ‘Judging by some families, I think we are all on pretty good speaking terms after all this time, and that’s no mean achievement for quite a lot of families. I think we all enjoy each other’s company.’

  The family grew in the early 1960s. Prince Andrew, now Duke of York, was born on 19 February 1960. Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, was born on 10 March 1964. (There is a lovely, informal photograph, taken in June 1964, of the Queen carrying baby Edward in her arms on their way by train to Balmoral. She looks anything but unmotherly.) Martin Charteris told me that, when Andrew was conceived, ‘the Queen and Prince Philip had been trying for another baby for quite a while.’ ‘How on earth do you know?’ I asked him. ‘Because Her Majesty told me so,’ he chuckled. ‘She wanted me to pass it on to President Nkrumah, you see.’ I didn’t see, so Lord Charteris, beaming broadly, obligingly explained, ‘In late 1959, the Queen was due to visit Ghana. It was going to be a big thing. In May she discovered she was pregnant and realised that the Ghana trip would have to be put off. She knew that Dr Nkrumah was a sensitive chap107 and might take offence unless he knew the whole story, so I was dispatched to Accra to put him in the picture – which I did. At first he was appalled, then he decided that if the Queen couldn’t come to him, he’d go to her – at Balmoral – which he did. I have to say, she has a way with these Commonwealth leaders. They trust her. Absolutely.’

  In due course, without any interference from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Andrew and Edward followed Charles to Gordonstoun – and survived. In 1979, aged nineteen, exactly forty years after his parents’ celebrated encounter there, Andrew enrolled at Dartmouth Royal Naval College. At twenty-one he qualified as a helicopter pilot and joined 829 Naval Air Squadron, flying Sea Kings from the carrier HMS Invincible. In April 1982 Invincible sailed for the South Atlantic with the British naval task force to recapture the Falkland Islands from the invading Argentines. He put his life on the line.108 ‘Prince Andrew is a serving officer,’ said Buckingham Palace in answer to suggestions that the Queen might want to keep her son out of harm’s way, ‘and there is no question in her mind that he should go.’ When Port Stanley was liberated and the conflict over, Andrew telephoned home. ‘My mother was in,’ he said, ‘it was about the right time of evening.’ She told him that she was relieved he was safe and how proud his parents were of him, and then, immediately, she asked him ‘to pass on how proud she was of everyone and to say how marvellously the troops had done’.

  In June 1986 Prince Edward, having graduated from Cambridge (with a degree in history), joined the Royal Marines, notoriously the toughest billet in the armed services. Given his slight build and his reported ambition at the time to be an actor, it seemed an odd choice for the twenty-two-year-old to make, but he had signed up before going to university and was determined to make a go of it. He tried, and he failed. It was the psychological as much as the physical demands of the training that overwhelmed him. And, apparently, the attitude of his commanding officer was unsympathetic. In January 1987, with the acquiescence of his parents, Edward resigned his commission. His father (Captain-General of the Royal Marines) was disappointed, but coped. Martin Palmer, a friend of the Duke’s, told me how he happened to be having dinner with Prince Philip ‘the week after all this’. Prince Edward came into the room and ‘Prince Philip got up and gave him the most enormous hug and brought him to the table. Yes, they’d had a humdinger of a row, but it was over.’

  Philip, in my experience, spoke of Edward with an ease and warmth that was not in evidence when he talked of the Prince of Wales – who, of course, having secured his own, adequate, degree from Cambridge (BA Hons, Class II, Division II), went on to serve in Her Majesty’s armed services for six not unchallenging years. A
t the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, in Lincolnshire, Charles showed immediately that he shared his father’s aptitude for flying. He then followed his father to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and served in a series of warships: Norfolk, Minerva, Jupiter, and Hermes. At the time of the Falklands conflict, Charles expressed regret that he had not been ‘tested’ in action as Andrew had been, but, throughout his years of service (1970–76) – culminating with a stint as a helicopter pilot in the Fleet Air Arm – he was as gung-ho and courageous as any father could wish. There was, however, something perverse about Prince Philip. He was not always easy. He liked to be contrary and, perhaps, just because nobody would expect it, he seemed to prefer Edward, who flunked the Royal Marines, to Charles, who served in the services with distinction and pushed himself to the limit. Gradually, Edward took on more and more of his father’s commitments, notably as the front man for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and then the Queen let it be known that, when Prince Philip died, Prince Edward would succeed his father as the new Duke of Edinburgh. Edward’s first-born, Louise, became the first royal child to bear the surname Mountbatten-Windsor.

  Perhaps inevitably, the youngest of the royal children was the most indulged. In June 1987, a year after he joined the Royal Marines, Edward, aged twenty-three and settled on a new career in entertainment, joined forces with the BBC and John Broome, then owner of the Midlands-based visitor attraction Alton Towers, to present a spectacular royal version of the slapstick-and-games TV show It’s A Knockout! According to Edward, ‘Both the BBC and John Broome positively drooled at the idea.’ Of course they did! Edward persuaded his sister Anne, his brother Andrew, and Andrew’s new wife, Sarah Ferguson (who needed little persuading), to dress up in mock-Tudor costumes and lead teams of celebrities – Rowan Atkinson, Les Dawson, and Barbara Windsor among them – as they competed in a series of silly fun and games loosely disguised as a medieval joust-about. It was well meant, and useful sums were raised for charity, but It’s A Royal Knockout did nothing for the dignity of the House of Windsor or the standing of the new generation of young royals. Everyone at Buckingham Palace at the time (from the private secretary to the press office) claims to have been against it, but Edward was determined (utterly determined) and the Queen did not have it in her to say ‘no’. The embarrassment of the spectacle itself was compounded by Prince Edward’s post-show press conference. The attendant hacks, hot and weary after a long day, not satisfied with the access they had been given to the ‘royal celebrities’, failed to show any enthusiasm for what Edward hoped the world would regard as his finest hour. Faced with the media’s indifference, he made a couple of sarcastic remarks and stalked out of the press tent. ‘Edward Storms Out After Game Show,’ ran one headline; ‘It’s a Walkout,’ ran another.

  The press for the young Prince did not improve much as the years went by. Journalists were relatively gentle with him when he worked as a backroom boy and production assistant for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, but when he turned his attention to television film-making, and founded his own production company, Ardent, the gloves were off again. The films were rubbished; he was accused of exploiting his family name to get them made; Ardent was repeatedly reported to be making losses – losses of almost £2 million over seven years, according to the Guardian. The knock-out blow came in April 2001 and was delivered by the News of the World. (No wonder Philip was close to Edward: they shared a loathing for Rupert Murdoch’s brand of tabloid journalism. Philip, you will recall, dated the decline in the tone and standards of Britain’s popular press to Murdoch’s arrival in the United Kingdom.)

  In June 1999 Edward, aged thirty-five, had married Sophie Rhys-Jones, aged thirty-four, a pretty, wholesome, blonde public relations executive who appeared to have a sensible head on resolute shoulders. Appearances can be deceptive – as Sophie, now Countess of Wessex, found to her cost when, in the spring of 2001, on behalf of her PR company, she took a meeting with a potential ‘client’, an Arab ‘sheikh’, who turned out to be an under-cover reporter for the News of the World. Sophie’s small talk, as recorded by the ‘sheikh’, was hardly treasonable, but it was unfortunate. She referred to the Queen as ‘the old dear’ and the Queen Mother as ‘the old lady’ and described the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles as ‘number one on the unpopular people list’, only likely to be married after the death of ‘the old lady’. She was not discreet. She mocked the Prime Minister, calling him ‘President Blair’; she poured scorn on the Prime Minister’s wife, calling her ‘horrid, absolutely horrid’; and she described the Leader of the Opposition (William Hague) as ‘deformed’. Most damagingly, she let slip that, while her company’s prestige and royal connections were not officially for hire, ‘that is an unspoken benefit’.

  When Sophie discovered the truth about the sting, on advice from Buckingham Palace she sought to bury her indiscretions and buy off the News of the World by giving them ‘a personal interview’ – and promptly fell between two stools. Rival newspapers tumbled over themselves to publish edited highlights of her secretly recorded conversation with the ‘sheikh’ (leaked to them – goodness knows how!) and the News of the World carried a sensational interview that was as personal as anyone could hope for. ‘My Edward Is Not Gay,’ ran the headline, above a story in which the Countess denounced the rumours of her husband’s homosexuality and revealed that they were determined to have a baby and were even contemplating in-vitro fertilisation in order to be able to do so.

  And the consequence of all this was … well, you can see for yourself by checking out the official Buckingham Palace website at www.royal.gov.uk: ‘The Earl of Wessex announced in 2002 that he and The Countess of Wessex had decided to concentrate on supporting The Queen during the Golden Jubilee and beyond, and helping the Royal Family shoulder some of the increasing workload into the future. They therefore withdrew from their respective companies, Ardent Productions and R-JH, in order to focus their energies more into supporting those organisations, charities, individuals and companies who deserve to be recognised for their effort, initiative and entrepreneurship.’

  Prince Edward features in a number of other, less dignified websites, where he is listed, variously, as a ‘celebrity gay’, ‘a royal gay icon’, and ‘the Queen’s queen’. He is not homosexual and never has been, though the rumour was rife in London throughout the 1980s. At the time, I was working at the breakfast television station TV-am, where, despite the assurances of Edward’s best friend at the station (James Baker, son of the newsreader Richard Baker) and the close (and charming) attention paid by Edward to our beautiful young weather girl, Ulrika Jonsson, we would not accept that the seventh in line to the throne was anything but a closet screamer. There was something about his mouth, his manner, his handshake, his hairline, his record – leaving the Marines, that petulant performance after the royal It’s A Knockout! – that convinced us he was homosexual. Had he been, I believe his parents, born and brought up long before the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private (which only happened in 1967), would nevertheless have coped – and coped quite well. The Queen is a devout and traditional Christian, the Duke of Edinburgh was very much a man’s man, but neither ever betrayed the least hint of homophobia. She is and he was instinctively tolerant, accepting others as they found them, as a rule. In the case of their children, and their children’s choice in partners, the Queen and Prince Philip did their level best not to interfere. It was not always easy.

  Princess Anne was the first of the royal children to be married. As far as her parents were concerned, she was free to marry anybody she chose. She chose to marry Lieutenant Mark Phillips, born 1948, educated at Marlborough and Sandhurst, a guardsman (The Queen’s Dragoon Guards), the soldier son of a soldier, and, more to the point, an achieving equestrian: a key member of the British three-day-eventing team that had triumphed in the World Championships in 1970, the European Championships in 1971, and the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. Anne, too, was an
achieving equestrian: in 1971 she won the individual European Three-Day-Event at Burghley; in 1976 she would be a member of the British Olympic Team in Montreal. On 14 November 1973 (Prince Charles’s twenty-fifth birthday), at Westminster Abbey, before a congregation of a thousand and a television audience of many millions, Anne and Mark were married. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if their children are four-legged,’ the Queen is supposed to have remarked.

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, the only daughter of the Queen of England would have been expected to marry a prince of some kind – or, at least, a high-ranking aristocrat. There were sound reasons for this: he would know the rules, he would know his way around the court, he might even have land and money enough to keep the royal daughter in the style to which she was accustomed. The twentieth century changed all that. Gradually, over several decades, the rigid British class structure – so clear, so certain, in its own way, so helpful, when Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria, had married Prince Philip’s grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, in 1884 – began to collapse. The Great War changed much, the Second World War changed more. The invention of the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the dishwasher, the 1944 Education Act, the arrival of television, the advent of the Pill, the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Harold Wilson – they all played a part. At the beginning of the Queen’s reign, at royal investitures, as Her Majesty passed, everybody bowed or curtsied to the ground. Now, nobody does. The age of deference is dead. Old money has given way to new money. Meritocrats outrank aristocrats, and celebrities outclass them both.