To friends, the Queen did occasionally complain about her husband’s ‘pig-headedness’ and about the speed at which he sometimes drove through Windsor Great Park, but on the whole it is evident that she accepted him as he was – she never tried to ‘change’ him – and admired and loved him deeply for what and who he was. ‘He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments,’ she said in a speech at the Guildhall at the time of their golden wedding anniversary in 1997, but she continued, ‘He has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever know.’ In 2012, addressing the joint Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall for the sixth time in her reign, she said it again: ‘Prince Philip is, I believe, well known for declining compliments of any kind. But throughout he has been a constant strength and guide.’
By the time he died Prince Philip was getting a good press. It was not always so. In the 1990s one of the Duke’s alleged gaffes prompted the Daily Mirror to address him thus: ‘You are an arrogant, over-bearing, insensitive, tactless, patronising, boorish and now sickening fool.’
Less surprisingly, the Murdoch Sun took much the same line, describing the Prince as a ‘75-year-old aristocrat who is totally detached from reality’, and in the Independent Anne McElvoy opined: ‘Prince Philip, whose mind remains steeped in the casually ignorant racialism of his youth, is beyond redemption and can only be regarded as an asset on the days he is kept indoors.’
The Duke of Edinburgh endured this kind of press coverage because he had no choice. He told me, ‘I have become “the gaffe man” and there is nothing I can do about it. I say something in passing and it’s blown up out of all proportion, or taken out of context, or totally rephrased so it suddenly means something it was never intended to mean.’ He wrote to me from Buckingham Palace on 4 June 1999: ‘That is the trouble when the media give you a reputation. When we were in South Africa some years ago, I flew to Kimberley and was persuaded to take some people with me. On the way back, one of them said to my policeman that it had been a waste of time as I had not put my foot in it!!!’
In February 2002 the Guardian published an extended profile of the Prince by the journalist Sally Vincent. She portrayed the Duke as ‘a subscriber to the forlorn hope that the male of the species is, in some profoundly genetic and spiritual sense, superior to the female’. He was ‘a homophobe and a misogynist’, who was ‘not cut out to be a consort, since the concept of playing second fiddle to a female would have dismayed him to the point of self-disgust’. To anyone who knew the Prince at all this was so totally wrong (and so at odds with all the evidence) as to be almost comical, but Ms Vincent did not know her man. She saw him as a disappointed individual who had ‘covered his helplessness and anger with the rough-hewn mask of arrogance and began to self-destruct’. Her conclusion:
‘As the years rolled on, Philip grew increasingly disenchanted with his private and public role in life. In 1983, the Queen and Prince Philip were in California as the guests of President Reagan and his wife. According to American reports of the tour, Philip experienced the darkest night of his soul on the streets of San Francisco while sitting in the back of a limousine accompanied by Her Majesty, his wife. Already exasperated by what he took to be the excessive attention to detail of the US secret service agents assigned the task of protecting their royal persons, he lost his rag while waiting for Reagan’s car to lead the ceremonial motorcade. Reagan was a few minutes behind schedule. Philip demanded the chauffeur move the bloody car. The driver demurred. “Move this fucking car,” he screamed and, taking a magazine from the seat pocket, rolled it up and beat the driver across the back of his head. The Queen, meanwhile, sat impassively next to her husband, staring silently ahead.
‘And there, writ large in one unseemly episode, is the dynamic of the Windsor-Mountbatten alliance. If the health of a marriage can be defined by the flexibility of the balance of power between partners, this liaison has been set in stone, the scales immutably weighted as to who has the last word, the casting vote, the moral high ground. Her dignified silence outweighs his impotent wrath. Every time.’
That was the Guardian’s ‘take’ on Prince Philip on the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s Accession. To those who knew the Queen and Prince Philip it seemed as preposterous as it was inaccurate and insulting, but there it was in print, the perception of one observer, possibly shared by many others.
Of course, even the Prince’s admirers must concede that he did not always help himself. Some of his unguarded remarks were unduly provocative for a sensitive age and his frustration and irritation in the presence of journalists worked against him. For example, in May 2011, his ninetieth birthday interview with Fiona Bruce for the BBC was scratchy, uncomfortable, and unrevealing – and the fault was his, not hers. His Royal Highness was not in a giving vein that day. Martin Palmer, who co-founded the Alliance of Religions and Conservation with the Duke, warned the BBC’s programme makers what they might expect. ‘Get him on a bad day and it’s quite hard work. Get him on a good day and you don’t want to be with anyone else. I hope you have a good day.’ They didn’t.
Mostly when I met him, I got him on a good day. I confess that when I sensed it was a bad day, I kept my distance. I recall a number of occasions – two receptions at Buckingham Palace, an evening at the Royal Academy, once after a service at Westminster Abbey – when I steered clear of him because I could see from his gimlet eye that he wasn’t in the mood for the likes of me. At the lunch I organised for his seventieth birthday I introduced him to Joanna Lumley and he took to her at once. ‘I love her,’ he told me later, at a dinner at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), where I was speaking and she was sitting next to him. It was her energy and intelligence and ‘spiritual awareness’ that he liked (a touch of the Sacha Abercorns), as well as her beauty, of course. Joanna summed up the experience of meeting Prince Philip rather well: ‘It’s extraordinary. You get the impression of meeting a bird of prey, a hawk or an eagle. There’s something absolutely penetrating about the eyes … You feel like you’re being scanned … You raise your game. You rather hope he’ll like you.’
Most of the things I learnt about Prince Philip I learnt incidentally – and many of them surprised me. For example, he was more knowledgeably interested in music and drama than I would have expected. He had met and rather liked Benjamin Britten. In 1958 he asked Britten to compose settings for the Jubilate and Te Deum for the choir of St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Dogs. He told me that he had dogs he had named after assorted British conductors. (‘Boult, come here! Sargent – down, boy!’) And while he might not have acclaimed his eldest son’s appearance in the title role of Macbeth, he was hugely supportive of the American actor Sam Wanamaker’s project to recreate Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. He put potential donors Wanamaker’s way and, in the words of the project’s administrator, ‘telephoned personally from time to time to hear of (the slow) progress and (frequent) problems’. Philip admired Wanamaker both because he was someone who was making something happen against the odds and because Wanamaker was an outsider – an American in London.
In my experience, the Duke of Edinburgh was a shrewd judge of character, though once in a while he would follow his inclination and favour the maverick rough diamond over the smooth Establishment figure and get it wrong. For example, he was for many years the active president of the national alliance of sports bodies known as the Central Council for Physical Recreation. He championed the cause of the independent CCPR over the government-subsidised activities of the Sports Council and he particularly admired the no-nonsense, cut-a-few-corners style of the CCPR’s general secretary, Peter Lawson. The more others voiced their reservations about Lawson, the more Prince Philip appeared to favour him. In 1998, when Peter Lawson, and his son (who also worked for the CCPR), were jailed for embezzling funds from the
sports body, it was a sad day all round.
In great things and small, Prince Philip’s contrary spirit burned bright to the end of his days. I recall an event at Buckingham Palace where the equerry introducing proceedings suggested that applause would be out of place, prompting Prince Philip to start the clapping. Even in his ninety-second year, the Duke was making mischief. In March 2009 the Prince of Wales warned the world that there were ‘less than 100 months to act’ to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change. Begging to differ, forty-eight months later, in March 2013, in his capacity as an honorary fellow of the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management, the Duke of Edinburgh invited the noted global-warming sceptic David Bellamy to give a lecture at Buckingham Palace.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s mind remained engaged and he stayed active almost to the last. ‘I’m falling to bits,’ he said, ‘but what can you do?’ At Sandringham at Christmas 2011, when he was ninety, he was airlifted to Papworth Hospital in Cambridge with chest pains. He had emergency surgery to clear a blocked artery and spent nine days in hospital. One of the doctors from the hospital told me that a patient of the Duke’s age with a heart in the condition of the Duke’s could expect to live for ‘about a year’. Nine weeks after his heart surgery, His Royal Highness was back on the box seat, holding the reins, doing a spot of carriage driving around Windsor Great Park.
At the beginning of June 2012, after four hours spent standing in the rain on the royal barge for the jubilee pageant on the Thames, he was admitted to hospital in London with a bladder infection. Five days later, on the eve of his ninety-first birthday, he was discharged. On 15 June, with the Queen he was hosting a reception for the Sultan of Oman at Buckingham Palace. The next day he was on parade for Trooping the Colour. The next week he turned up every day for Royal Ascot. At the end of June he joined the Queen for an historic two-day tour of Northern Ireland, followed by the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial in London. Then came jubilee visits to Scotland, to the West Midlands, to the North-East, to Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, as well as a lunch in Downing Street and half a dozen official events connected with the London Olympics. In August, with the Queen he hosted a garden party for 3,000 guests at Balmoral and then, on his own, flew down to the Isle of Wight, as Admiral of the Royal Yacht Squadron, to attend Cowes Week. On 15 August he was flown back to Balmoral by helicopter and, taken ill again, admitted once more to hospital – this time the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
In 2011 he undertook 330 official engagements; in 2012 he upped it to 347. On the day in 2013 when he saw members of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation and representatives of Chinese cultural traditions and met a team from the Naval Review and turned out as Colonel-in-Chief of the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, I said to him, ‘Why are you still doing all this?’ He replied, ‘What else am I going to do?’
He did what he did for more than sixty-five years, and beyond saying to me, ‘I hope some of it was useful’, claimed no special credit. He read both the first and the second drafts of this book, but the only corrections he offered were to ‘facts’, not ‘opinions’ – and he always focused on detail. For example, of one of the ships on which he had served during the war, I had written: ‘HMS Wallace was one of the destroyers on convoy duty on the British east coast, constantly moving up and down “E-Boat Alley”, as it was known, from Sheerness to Rosyth and back.’ He corrected me: ‘Wallace was a member of the Rosyth Escort Force based at Rosyth, so it would be more accurate to say “from Rosyth to Sheerness and back”.’
He was right, of course. He almost always was. I recall having a heated exchange with him about the address of the London headquarters of the old British Railways Board. I insisted it had been at Marylebone. I was sure of it. He was certain it had been at Euston. The ding-dong between us lasted several minutes. His equerry looked on in amazement. Prince Philip won the argument with the killer line: ‘I should know. I opened the place, dammit.’
I asked him if there were aspects of his life and character that he thought I should write about more extensively. He shrugged unhelpfully. I asked him if I should have written something about his many improvements to the royal estate. Following the fire at Windsor Castle, from 1992 to 1997 he chaired the Restoration Committee. ‘Yes, well, people can see what we’ve done.’ I reminded him that the conversion of the chapel to the picture gallery at Buckingham Palace was his doing. I mentioned how he had built log cabins at Sandringham and demolished the dry-rotten Victorian addition to Abergeldie Castle at Balmoral. I said that perhaps people did not know of his interest in gardening. He planted avenues of trees, created water gardens, laid out borders and beds.
‘Do you want a list?’ he asked.
The question was not sarcastic. The Duke of Edinburgh was a man who believed in lists – in detail, in facts, in order. Indeed, a psychiatrist might say that his need for order and control in his everyday life was a direct consequence of the insecurity, confusion, and lack of order that were the defining characteristics of his adolescence. Whether he accepted it or not, he had a chaotic childhood, with neither a settled home nor proper parenting. As an adult he imposed order on everything he did.
George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury between 1991 and 2002, told me about a service that Prince Philip had attended marking the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Channel Islands. ‘I preached the sermon and afterwards the Duke came up to me and remarked that during the service the word “reconciliation” had been used 109 times. He said the word was overused and repeating it 109 times did not make it any more likely. I said, “Were you counting?’ He said, “Yes.” His approach to everything was scientific and quite meticulous.’
Prince Philip was a man who kept control by keeping count. He ordered his thoughts. He ran his office and his life with precision. His books and papers were carefully catalogued. His clothes were correct in all respects: check out the line of the breast-pocket handkerchief in each and every photograph of him. It never varied. His wardrobe was catalogued, too, but ‘not for the sake of it,’ he insisted, ‘– to a purpose’. For example, in 2012 he went to the Isle of Wight for Cowes Week and sported a double-breasted yachting jacket with distinctive gold buttons. The buttons bore royal crests dating back to the reign of William IV. The jacket itself appeared to be a little on the small side for the Prince – and it was. It had belonged to Sir Eric Penn, sometime Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. When Sir Eric died in 1993, his widow offered the Duke of Edinburgh the buttons. He asked her for the jacket and told her he would like to wear it on occasion to remember his old friend. Whenever I met him for a National Playing Fields Association event, he was always wearing the NPFA tie.
I told Prince Philip that, in my experience, readers like some human detail alongside the facts. He was not convinced. ‘People misremember things,’ he said. In 2005 I sent on to him a letter I had received from a Commander Colin F. Douglas RN, who had served on the Royal Yacht Britannia. Commander Douglas shared with me a delightful recollection of seeing Prince Philip and the Queen on deck together and in nostalgic and romantic mood on a return visit to Malta, and an anecdote about the naval review marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic during which Prince Philip had kept his hands warm while taking the salute by plunging them into a bowl of hot water. From Sandringham House on 22 January 2005, His Royal Highness wrote to me: ‘I think Douglas would have made a good journalist. He can’t resist elaborating on a story. We most certainly did not fall into each other’s arms on sailing into Malta, neither did the Queen burst into tears! As to the story of the Battle of the Atlantic Review, most of it is accurate, but I have no recollection of plunging my hands into a bowl of hot water. It may be a good idea, but it never occurred to me! In any case, although it was blowing a real gale, I don’t think it can have been as cold as all that as I can’t remember wearing a greatcoat.’
On another occasion, when I asked the Duke to elabo
rate on his own experience of the Battle of Cape Matapan, ‘just sticking to the facts’, he was reluctant. ‘I don’t remember the detail. I really don’t.’ He was not being difficult. Later, in 2012, he provided a foreword to a history of the battle published by the University of Plymouth Press and confessed, ‘All these events took place seventy years ago, and, as most elderly people have discovered, memories tend to fade.’
Knowing that I was writing about him, more than once the Duke warned me to beware of ‘faction’ – that dangerous mix of facts and fiction. He allowed me to ask him anything I liked and if it was a ‘matter of record’ he would do his best to provide a detailed answer; if it was a matter of ‘mere recollection’ or me hoping for ‘a bit of colour to spice up your book’, he would just look at me balefully and say nothing. He did not like talking about himself. It was as simple as that. Prince Edward summed it up when he said, ‘My father plain and simply is very modest about himself and doesn’t believe in talking about himself. One of his best pieces of advice he gives to everybody is talk about everything else, don’t talk about yourself, nobody’s interested in you.’
In 2012, in the lead-up to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a portrait of the Queen and the Duke from the ‘cutting edge’ German photographer Thomas Struth. His experience of meeting Prince Philip was typical. ‘I felt very nervous,’ he recalled of his session with the couple at Buckingham Palace. He asked them to sit side by side on a sofa. ‘I knew the Queen was much smaller than him, and since she was the main person in the portrait, I tilted the sofa just slightly so that she would seem bigger in the picture than she actually is. The Duke went, “Oh, really?” – he seemed a bit irritated that they would be positioned like this. He is like an old eagle: he has very sharp eyes. I was surprised by how much energy he has, and how alert he is. People says he’s bizarre or awkward, but I found him quite impressive – though I was surprised when I asked him to move his hand and he reacted a little grumpily. He is eccentric – he tried to crack a few jokes during the sitting. But I felt they have a good relationship.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 48
