Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Sarah cannot speak too highly of the Queen. ‘She’s my icon,’ she told me, her eyes glistening. ‘I look up to her. I think she’s the finest woman I know. HM has got a wonderful sense of humour. She loves to sing. She is the widest-read woman in the world and yet she has this wonderful compassion and total and utter understanding. She is very forgiving. She doesn’t poke her nose in. She lets you have free rein, but she doesn’t miss a trick.’

  When they were small, Sarah made sure that her daughters were on their best behaviour when they went to see the Queen. ‘We have three sets of table manners,’ she explained to me. ‘This is very important. Table Manners C is for at home, when it’s just Andrew and me. Anything goes. Table Manners B is for in a restaurant. You can have fun, but always remember people are looking at you. I tell the girls always to smile – because it costs so little and it means so much. Table Manners A is for Granny – their granny – the Boss.’

  ‘And what does that involve?’ I asked.

  ‘If we go to tea at Windsor or Balmoral, we do it properly,’ Sarah explained to me, acting it out as she described the correct royal teatime etiquette. ‘We have our little napkin. We offer Granny the sandwiches first, before we take the whole lot on to our plate. We don’t take the raisins out of the scones halfway through a conversation – or flick them across the table. We don’t ask for ketchup when the Duke of Edinburgh is sitting there. We don’t say, “Oh, the Ribena tastes old”, which it probably is. We don’t say, “We don’t eat pâté sandwiches.” We just shut up and eat what we’re given. We can have fish fingers when we get home.’

  Sarah Ferguson is a huge admirer of the Queen – ‘If we’re voting for the best granny in the world,’ she says, ‘I have to tell you the Boss is the best granny’ – but she no longer has any time for the ‘repressed emotions’ that she found were part and parcel of life at the heart of the House of Windsor. She sees it as a generational thing. ‘They believe in the virtues of the stiff upper lip. I don’t any more.’ Sarah reckons that bottling up your feelings is positively harmful. ‘My mother’s generation said, “Don’t speak. Don’t say you’re unhappy. Don’t say you’re angry.” I think that’s all wrong. I say to my girls, “Go on, tell me. Are you angry with me? Have I annoyed you?” We sit down and talk. “Was that a grubby day? Why was it a grubby day?” Or I’ll make them stand in the middle of Sunninghill Park and scream – which is what I do.’ Sarah suddenly goes, ‘Aargh!’ for me. ‘I make them scream. They say, “Mummy, we can’t.” I say, “Why not? Who’s going to hear? Scream.”’

  The prospect of encountering his former daughter-in-law screaming in the middle of Sunninghill Park could have been one of the reasons the Duke of Edinburgh decided to give her a wide berth after her separation from his son. Prince Philip was not a screamer. He regarded reticence as a virtue and self-control as a quality to be admired. In 2011, in the week of his ninetieth birthday, the Oprah Winfrey Network in the US aired Finding Sarah, a six-part TV series in which the former Duchess of York shared her tears and her heartache with a TV psychiatrist and the viewing millions. The Duke of Edinburgh did not tune in.

  Prince Philip’s aunt, Princess Marie Bonaparte, was a noted Freudian; Prince Philip himself was fascinated by Jung; but he told me, ‘I’ve not spent much time psychoanalysing myself. I’m not sure how useful it would be.’ He told me he was in favour of ‘self-awareness’, but against ‘the endless introspection that seems to be so prevalent these days’. I came across a sentence by the writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch and showed it to him because I thought he would like it: ‘Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.’ ‘That’s it exactly,’ he said. ‘You can put that in your book.’

  Iris Murdoch’s observation sums up much of Prince Philip’s philosophy and describes an attitude to life that, by precept and example, he fostered in his grandchildren. He admired Princess Anne’s children, Peter and Zara, because they had both taken Gordonstoun in their stride and ‘got on with it’. Peter played a good game of rugby and followed his grandfather in becoming head boy at Gordonstoun. After taking a degree in sports science at Exeter University, he embarked on a career in sports management, largely eschewing royal life. In 2008 he married Autumn Kelly, a Canadian management consultant he had met at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal. The couple caused some consternation within the family by selling a pre-wedding story with pictures to Hello! magazine, but otherwise they have kept a low profile and earnt Prince Philip’s admiration. ‘It can be done,’ he said. Their daughters – Savannah Anne Kathleen (born in 2010 and named after Peter’s and Autumn’s mothers), and Isla Elizabeth (born in 2012, the year of the Golden Jubilee, and named after the Queen) – are currently thirteenth and fourteenth in line to the throne, but they have no titles and their parents fondly hope they will lead normal, private lives. Peter Phillips’s younger sister, Zara, leads a public life, but as an achieving equestrian rather than as a royal. As a member of the Great Britain Eventing Team she won a silver medal at the London Olympics in 2012. The previous year she married former England rugby union player Mike Tindall. She is at the heart of the next generation of the Royal Family – as is her brother, who is particularly close to Prince William – but she does not play the ‘royal card’.

  Prince Andrew’s daughters do have titles. Their Royal Highnesses the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York may be the daughters of Sarah Ferguson but that does not seem to have diminished their paternal grandparents’ affection for them. Prince Philip (who could be deliberately perverse) appeared especially fond of them and was happy to see them set out on the road to becoming ‘working royals’.

  I asked Prince Philip what advice he had given his grandchildren. ‘I’m not in the business of giving anyone advice,’ he protested. ‘They are getting on very well without any interference from me.’

  However, he did acknowledge to me that he was particularly happy with the career paths chosen by Prince Charles’s two sons. Prince Harry, born in 1984, may have been sent to Eton rather than to Gordonstoun, but, as Prince Philip put it, ‘he was lucky – he knew what he wanted to do with his life’. Harry was not interested in going to university: after a gap year spent in Australia and Lesotho, he joined the army. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Blues and Royals of the Household Cavalry and completed his training as a tank commander. He served two tours of duty on the front line in Afghanistan. While his son was there, Prince Charles confessed that he ‘worried about him every night’ and the enemy let it be known that – because of who he was – they had Harry ‘specially in their sights’.

  Harry was a target of a different sort in August 2012. On leave and holidaying with high-rolling friends at a hotel in Las Vegas, he found himself being photographed naked in his £5,000-a-night suite during a game of ‘strip pool’. The pictures of the royal lieutenant ‘covering his privates’ while ‘romping with naked girls he’d only just met’ were taken on a mobile phone by one of the party-goers and swept around the world. ‘I was in a private area,’ protested the Prince, while ruefully accepting the reality of his position: ‘I don’t believe there is any such thing as a private life any more. I’m not going to sit here and whinge. Everybody knows about Twitter and the internet and stuff like that. Every single mobile phone has got a camera on it now. You can’t move an inch without someone judging you, and I suppose that’s just the way life goes.’

  It is. And, on the whole, the public judge Harry well. In Las Vegas, he conceded, ‘I probably let myself down. I let my family down. I let other people down. It was probably a classic example of me probably being too much army and not enough prince.’ By contrast, in Belize, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, earlier in the same year, representing the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee, the Prince did himself – and his family and his country – proud. I was in Jamaica and I can report that he delivered the goods right royally. Even the avowedly republican Prime Minister of Jamaic
a, Portia Simpson-Miller, was charmed.

  In Jamaica, Harry was outgoing, easy, interested – concerned when it mattered and playful when appropriate. The Queen and Prince Charles do what they do very well, but Harry as a public performer has inherited the apparently effortless ease with the public that was the hallmark of his mother and his paternal grandfather at their best.

  The only royal I have seen outclass both Diana and Prince Philip is Prince William. I have watched him at close range – at Highgrove, on the polo field, on the streets, and in the crowd. I have seen him with the aristocracy and everyday folk: he is comfortable with both and they are comfortable with him. He shows concern and empathy, in the way that Diana did but without those touches of self-consciousness and self-absorption that her manner sometimes suggested. William is natural, friendly, and completely easy with the people he meets – as Prince Philip was. But William’s sense of humour is gentler and his banter never borders on the hectoring, as the Duke of Edinburgh’s sometimes would.

  Prince William has the charm and good manners of the Old Etonian, but he has had ‘real life’ experiences, too. He went to the University of St Andrews, where he met his wife-to-be, Catherine Middleton, an indisputably middle-class English girl. He spent parts of his gap year in Chile, Belize, Tanzania, and Kenya. He took Kiswahili studies at universities in Kenya and Tanzania. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals (serving briefly with Prince Harry) and, two years later, earnt his wings by completing pilot training at RAF Cranwell. In 2009 he was promoted to flight lieutenant and underwent helicopter training in order to become a full-time pilot with the Search and Rescue force based in Anglesey in north Wales, where he and Catherine managed to live a relatively normal young officer’s life – in its way not dissimilar to the experience enjoyed by Philip and Elizabeth when the Duke of Edinburgh was a young officer serving in the Royal Navy in Malta sixty years before.

  William is set to be a sovereign and father to a sovereign. Hours before his wedding he was created Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn, and Baron Carrickfergus. One day he will be Prince of Wales. In time he will be William III. Between now and then, he will continue to fulfil an increasing number of royal duties while doing what he can to keep the press both on side and at bay – providing interviews and photo opportunities and taking robust legal action against the media (usually French or Italian) who attempt to invade his wife’s privacy by taking long-lens photographs of her on holiday, either naked or nearly so.

  Prince Philip told me he was not party to William’s legal action against intrusive media, but he thoroughly approved. He conceded that he might have helped Catherine with her shooting, but would take no credit for the successful way in which Catherine has merged into the Royal Family – becoming a star, but somehow managing not to behave like a celebrity.

  When Prince Philip was ill in the summer of 2012, as vice-president of the National Playing Fields Association I spent a day in attendance on William and Catherine. I watched them ‘doing their thing’ on a playing field in Nottingham – meeting and greeting, walking and talking, making a speech, playing with some children, managing a crowd – and they did not put a foot wrong. At all times their focus was entirely on the people immediately in front of them. Not once did either of them play to the cameras – or even acknowledge them. Occasionally, Prince William put out a hand to touch his wife’s fingers or elbow or shoulder and she reciprocated with a smile. You would only have noticed these fleeting signals of mutual support if you had been on the lookout for them – which I was. And I noticed, too, that just as the Duke of Edinburgh, in more than seventy years of royal duty, never once put himself above, before, or ahead of his wife and sovereign – in the best sense, he knew his place – so Catherine, it seemed to me, was careful, in the best sense, to know hers. The crowds were not there for Catherine Middleton: they were there because Catherine had married the prince who is heir to the heir to the throne. She did not take the adulation for herself. She did not play to the gallery. She appeared to have learnt all the lessons that Prince Philip could have taught her.

  I reported all this back to the Duke of Edinburgh. He nodded.

  ‘It was a wonderful day,’ I said.

  ‘I was sad to miss it,’ he said, simply.

  ‘And I think Prince William and Prince Harry have given us a million pounds from their charitable foundation.’

  The Duke raised his eyebrows appreciatively. (In my experience, the senior royals give substantial sums to a range of good causes, but usually anonymously or without the amount being advertised.) ‘And William made a lovely speech – mostly in your praise.’

  ‘Was anyone listening?’

  ‘I was. It was out of doors and a bit windy. But it was on the one o’clock news. And it was a good speech – a tribute to you and your sixty-five years with the Playing Fields Association. A tribute to the Queen, too – for all you’ve done, for the example you’ve set.’

  His Royal Highness took a deep breath. He was never good at taking compliments. ‘I am sorry I missed it.’

  PHILIP & ELIZABETH

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationships – a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression, in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.’

  Anthony Storr (1920–2001), The Integrity of the Personality

  In March 2004, on the day, as it happened, of the funeral of the late Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, Queen Elizabeth II hosted a private party in London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her Coronation. The party took place a year later than originally planned. It had to be postponed from 2003 because of the war on Iraq. The Duke of Edinburgh attended the party, of course, but he arrived a little later than scheduled – not on account of his age (he was then eighty-two), but because he had spent the day in The Hague, on duty, representing the United Kingdom at Queen Juliana’s funeral.

  Queen Juliana was an interesting woman. She reigned from 1948 until 1980, when she abdicated in favour of her eldest daughter, Crown Princess Beatrix, who, in due course, in April 2013, abdicated in favour of her son, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander. In her day Juliana was Europe’s richest reigning monarch, but she eschewed pomp and ceremony, and abolished the curtsy, among other court formalities. She was kindly, deeply religious, devoted to her four daughters and her people (in that order), and married, for sixty-seven years, to Prince Bernhard, a German princeling whose way with women and money did him little credit and, on more than one occasion, came close to toppling the Orange throne.

  Bernhard and Juliana each had their foibles. In 1956, for example, it came to light that, for the previous eight years, the Dutch Queen had been relying heavily on the spiritual services of a faith healer named Greet Hofmans. Hofmans, apparently, used her position to obtain posts at the palace for her friends and tried to influence government policy. She also persuaded the Queen to move from her quarters ‘because the earth waves were not right’. In 1959 the Queen and the Prince invited a self-styled American ‘professor’ (and former hamburger vendor) named George Adamski to visit them privately to report on what he described as his flight around the moon in a spaceship from Venus. More seriously, in 1976, Prince Bernhard was accused of soliciting money from the Lockheed Corporation of America and found – by the official inquiry into the case – to be a man ‘open to dishonourable requests and offers’.

  We have had none of these embarrassments with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. I wonder if we appreciate how fortunate we have been. Elizabeth II is neither eccentric nor quixotic, and her husband was as honest and straightforward as the day is long.

  If there is one word that sums up Elizabeth II, it is ‘dutiful’. Her life has been driven by duty. She was a dutiful daughter. She has been a dutiful Queen. Beca
use I have met her – because, at close quarters, I have observed her as she carried out a range of her official duties – people sometimes ask me, leaning forward, narrowing their eyes, ‘What’s the Queen really like?’ My answer disappoints them. ‘She’s seems very nice,’ I say. ‘Rather normal, actually; quite straightforward; much as you’d expect, in fact.’

  The truth is, the Queen is wholly predictable. On 30 April 2002, in Westminster Hall, I watched her as she addressed the joint Houses of Parliament on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. In the outfit you would expect (peacock blue, matching hat, smashing pearls, lovely brooch, black gloves, spectacles firmly in place), in the voice you recognise (Gainsborough Studios, circa 1947), she said all the things you knew that she would say. The speech – brief, balanced, well phrased – reflected both the moderate and modest nature of the monarch, and the decent, enduring values she holds dear. As she concluded with her pledge to continue to serve her country in the years to come, the journalists sitting around me twitched with excitement. ‘She’s staying,’ hissed one. ‘That’s our story,’ whispered another. In the following morning’s newspapers it was, indeed, everybody’s lead story, but it was hardly news.

  Anyone who has had five minutes – let alone fifty or sixty and more years – to consider the Queen knows that when, as Princess Elizabeth, aged twenty-one, she said, ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service’, she meant it. At her Coronation she made a commitment to God as well as to her people, and her faith sustains her in all she does. She is God’s anointed monarch. ‘Be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated Queen over the Peoples, whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern …’ were the words addressed to her by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the most solemn moment of her Coronation – and she has not forgotten them. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands abdicated in favour of her daughter, Queen Beatrix, just as her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, had abdicated in her favour, but the Dutch way is not the British way. Pope Benedict XVI might resign the papacy on grounds of frailty, but Elizabeth II is made of sterner stuff. Her Majesty will never abdicate, not – as some commentators suggest – because she does not want to see her son become King, but because her faith, her sense of duty, and her heritage mean that abdication is simply not a possibility. Her Uncle David abdicated and his is not an example she would want to follow. And a commitment made before God is an absolute commitment so far as the Queen is concerned. ‘It’s a job for life,’ she says. ‘It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing and accepting the fact that it’s your fate, because I think continuity is very important.’