Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  With advancing years, the Queen, too, began to lose many of her closest friends. Her cousin, Margaret Rhodes, died aged 91, in November 2016 and, two weeks later, Elizabeth Longman, another of her childhood friends and bridesmaids at her wedding, died, aged 92. In January 2017, Shirley, the Marchioness of Anglesey died. Until the death of the Marquess in 2013, the Angleseys were the only survivors to have both attended the Coronation, other than the Queen and Prince Philip. A generation was disappearing: an era was coming to a close.

  Both at Buckingham Palace and at Clarence House the talk was of a ‘gentle succession’. Prince Philip had long been responsible for the management of the royal estates at Windsor, Balmoral and Sandringham. (Take a look here for a list of some of the specific projects he oversaw on those estates.) In 2014, Philip ceded the management of Sandringham’s 20,000 acres to Prince Charles – knowing that his son’s approach to land management and farming were very different from his own. ‘He has his ideas and I have mine,’ said Prince Philip, ‘but I won’t be here for ever so he’d better get on with it.’

  Happily, relations between Philip and his son mellowed with the passing years. In his eighties and nineties I noticed the Duke of Edinburgh make many fewer waspish remarks about the Prince of Wales than he had done in his fifties and sixties. And Prince Charles, so much happier in his second marriage than in his first, stopped bleating about the travails of his childhood. Charles appeared more comfortable talking about his parents, and did so with respect (as ever) but with increasing affection. Prince Philip was especially happy when, in October 2016, Prince Charles visited the grave of his paternal grandmother, Princess Alice, in Jerusalem.

  Earlier in same year, for the Queen’s ninetieth birthday, Charles organised a private celebration for his mother at Windsor Castle and invited the theatre director Christopher Luscombe to provide the post-dinner entertainment. Knowing the Queen’s fondness for the songs of George Formby, I suggested to Christopher that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain might amuse Her Majesty. It did, along with magic (involving Prince Harry) and a ventriloquist (the brilliant Nina Conti). It was not a show that Prince Charles would have chosen for himself (which would have included Shakespeare and an operatic aria): it was a show entirely designed to please his mother. The day after the party Prince Philip called his son to congratulate him on organising a perfect family evening. Charles was touched and delighted to receive the call.

  How did the Duke of Edinburgh spend his retirement? He divided his time principally between Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate and Windsor Castle – his two favourite homes – where he read, wrote letters, dabbled with watercolours, harrumphed now and again at stories in the Daily Telegraph and invited friends to stay. He continued to make occasional public appearances alongside the Queen – at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, going to church at Sandringham on Christmas Day – but their 70th wedding anniversary on 20 November 2017 was a low-key affair. In the morning, the Duke took two of his nephews – Ludwig and Max of Baden – out for a carriage drive in Windsor Great Park; in the evening, there was a family dinner at Windsor Castle.

  The Queen wanted to honour her husband on their wedding anniversary. On his ninetieth birthday the Queen had made the Duke Lord High Admiral, the titular head of the Royal Navy. It was a title she had held and she handed it over to him, both because it seemed appropriate and because she had already bestowed on him almost every other available honour. In 2015, to mark ANZAC Day and the centenary of the Gallipoli landings, the Queen invested the Duke of Edinburgh with the Insignia of a Knight of the Order of Australia. In 2016, as her anniversary present, she appointed him a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. Prince Philip wasn’t entirely sure about this – most of the recipients of honours within this order are long-serving members of staff who have given personal service to the sovereign and, in any event, he already had the Royal Victorian Chain (given to him in 2007) – but he accepted it with a slightly grudging grace and was amused (and pleased) because it meant that he was the first person to be able to wear four orders of chivalry breast stars – alongside the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Thistle and the Order of the British Empire – since his uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

  In her Christmas broadcast that year, the Queen said she was ‘grateful for the blessings of home and family, and in particular for 70 years of marriage.’ She went on: ‘I don’t know that anyone had invented the term “platinum” for a 70th wedding anniversary when I was born. You weren’t expected to be around that long. Even Prince Philip has decided it’s time to slow down a little – having, as he economically put it, “done his bit”. But I know his support and unique sense of humour will remain as strong as ever, as we enjoy spending time this Christmas with our family and look forward to welcoming new members into it next year.’

  Both the Queen and her husband accepted that the focus was moving away from them and onto the next generation – and the ones beyond. The Queen scaled down her public appearances, handing over more duties to Prince Charles and Prince William, and spending more time in the company of her daughter, Princess Anne, and her favourite daughter-in-law, Sophie Wessex – the next Duchess of Edinburgh. She spent more time at Windsor and less at Buckingham Palace. Where Prince Philip would once have been at her side for the launching of a ship or a civic lunch, now Prince Andrew or the Princess Royal would be at her side.

  The Queen did not retire when her husband did, but she did reduce her workload. She maintained her interests, of course. She continued to ride into her nineties and to walk her corgis after lunch; she continued to phone her racing manager in the evening. (Her racehorses have won her some £7 million in prize money in the past thirty-five years, including £557,650 in a record-breaking 2016.) She and Prince Philip went out for dinner with friends and enjoyed weekends away together. She was often alone in the evenings (she was accustomed to that), watching television and having supper in her rooms, but frequently she saw friends and family – grandchildren and great-grandchildren – for afternoon tea. Her faith remained, her abiding comforter and her solace in times of sadness. (On a Sunday morning, she would often attend church twice – first, privately, for Holy Communion and then, later, dressed in an outfit in which to be photographed, for Matins with other members of the family. The press, as a rule, respected her privacy and photographs and footage were rarely taken of her first church visit of the day.)

  The ‘quiet succession’ became a little noisy in the summer of 2017 when Sir Christopher Geidt, for ten years the Queen’s private secretary, took early retirement and Samantha Cohen, number three in the Palace hierarchy, stepped down in support of her boss. The feeling was that Sir Christopher was manoeuvered out by Prince Charles (abetted by Prince Andrew) to improve relations between the secretariats at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. The Queen, usually averse to unnecessary change, accepted it in this case because it was what her sons wanted. (Prince Andrew felt that Sir Christopher had not supported him sufficiently when he was under media attack for his role as a UK ‘trade ambassador’ – and the Queen always had a particularly soft spot for her second son.) Sir Christopher’s departure (sweetened by the award of the GCVO – the honour Prince Philip received as an anniversary gift but rather felt was the preserve of staff – and a peerage and then another knighthood in the Order of the Bath a few months later) caused considerable fluttering in the court dovecotes. Prince Philip told me he had ‘kept out of all that’. From the time of the Queen’s accession in 1952 onward, he had always found internal Palace politics ‘frustrating and infuriating’. He was proud of the straightforward, stream-lined way in which he and his small team ran his office and implied that, had he been given the opportunity (as Prince Albert had been), he would have been able to ‘run the show with half the staff.’

  While, understandably, the spotlight moved away from Philip and Elizabeth and on to William and Catherine and their three children and to Harry and his beautiful bride Meghan (an actress, American
, divorced), the Duke of Edinburgh continued to make occasional headlines. Predictably, the Netflix television series The Crown reheated some of the rumours of the Prince’s alleged extra-marital romances from the 1950s and, more interestingly, a correspondence from 1981 emerged that surprised some people. It was between Fenner Brockway, a Labour peer and long-standing supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Duke. Lord Brockway wrote to Prince Philip presupposing that he was active Cold War warrior and enthusiastic supporter of nuclear might. With his letter, Brockway included a copy of a speech which Earl Mountbatten had delivered just months before his untimely death. It concluded with the statement: ‘As a military man who has given half a century of active service, I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils of the illusions they have generated.’ The Duke replied: ‘Dear Lord Brockway, Thank you for the copy of Lord Mountbatten’s Stockholm speech. I agree with everything he said. The arms race is ridiculous.’ The Duke also stressed he was in favour of ‘multilateral disarmament and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks,’ adding, ‘Security and peace depend upon being prepared for every eventuality, not in creating conflict where none is needed.’ Brockway evidently expected the Duke to adopt a hawkish, gung-ho stance and was taken aback by the thoughtful and measured response that he received. The Times got in touch with me to ask, ‘Does this accord with your knowledge of Prince Philip as a humane pragmatist, who is pained by the caricature painted of him as gaffe-prone and insensitive?’

  In fact, by the time the obituaries of Prince Philip appeared the caricature had been replaced by a fuller, fairer portrait. He was recognized as a remarkable man: as an individual, progressive, challenging, thoughtful, pragmatic, unexpected; as the Queen’s consort, uniquely supportive from start to finish. If we regard the Queen’s uniquely long reign as a success – and I believe most of us do – the joint author of that success has been the Duke of Edinburgh. In 1997, at the time of her fiftieth wedding anniversary and in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a speech at the Banqueting House in Whitehall the Queen acknowledged that it was sometimes difficult to fully understand ‘the message’ of the people, ‘obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion’. She said, ‘I have done my best, with Prince Philip’s constant love and help, to interpret it correctly through the years of our marriage and of my reign.’ Theirs was an extraordinary partnership and the worldwide coverage of the Duke’s death acknowledged the fact.

  Some myths, of course, were hard to put to rest. Most of the obituaries repeated the line that Princess Elizabeth first met Prince Philip when she was thirteen and, from that moment on, had eyes only for him. Not so, as we know. From the letters she sent to her cousin, Diana, in 1943, we know she regretted that Andrew Elphinstone was also her first cousin because he was ‘just the sort of husband any girl would love to have.’ In 1945, when Lilibet was nineteen, she wrote to Diana about another young man who took her fancy, describing him as ‘a devastatingly attractive young giant (with fair hair and blue eyes, of course) from Skye called Roddy Macleod!’ The twenty-six year old 6ft 4ins tall Eton-educated Cameroon Highlander, assigned to the royal guard at Balmoral, danced with the young princess and took her out to the theatre, but the fun evenings did not develop into a full-blown romance.

  When I tackled Prince Philip about how and when he came to woo his future wife, he was not particularly forthcoming. He and Princess Elizabeth were cousins; they became friends; they got to know one another better; they became closer; in due course, they became engaged. ‘That’s about it, really,’ he said to me, with a shrug.

  Interestingly, the Queen’s own account of her engagement to Prince Philip tallies very much with his own – and, surprisingly, I can share it with you. In 1947, in the run-up to the royal wedding in November, an author by the name of Betty Shrew contacted the 21-year old princess with a request for accurate background information for a souvenir book about the royal wedding. Princess Elizabeth was happy to oblige. She said the first time she remembered meeting Philip was at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939. ‘I was 13 years of age,’ she wrote, ‘and he was 18 and a cadet just due for leave. He joined the Navy at the outbreak of war, and I only saw him very occasionally when he was on leave – I suppose about twice in three years.We first started seeing more of each other when Philip went for a two-year job to the RN Petty Officer School at Corsham [after the war] – before that we hardly knew each other. He’d spend weekends with us, and when the school was closed he spent six weeks at Balmoral.’

  The young princess was ready to supply the enquiring author with details of her engagement and wedding rings: ‘The wedding ring will be made of Welsh gold, but not from the Craigwen mine. The engagement ring was made by Antrobus [jewellers of Bond Street]. Princess Alice took it in as Philip obviously couldn’t but he designed the ring.’

  Elizabeth told her correspondent: ‘We both love dancing – we have danced at Ciro’s and Quaglino’s as well as at parties. Philip enjoys driving and does it fast! He has his own tiny MG which he is very proud of – he has taken me about in it, once up to London, which was great fun, only it was like sitting in the road, and the wheels are almost as high as one’s head. On that one and only occasion we were chased by a photographer which was disappointing.’

  The behaviour of photographers continued to be a disappointment to the royal couple as the years went by. Prince Philip did his best to protect the Queen from their excesses, barking ferociously at them when necessary. He always did what he could to safeguard her person and her dignity. He hated to see her taken advantage of in any way. One year, at the Royal Variety Performance, one of the stars performed a routine directly at the Queen. Prince Philip was incandescent and descended on the producer in the interval: ‘I’ve been coming to this for 50 years. It never ends on time. The jokes are lavatorial. And now you insult the Queen!’ As Philips’s friend, the eccentric baronet Sir Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield (who was at Gordonstoun a few years after Philip) put it not long ago: ‘The Queen would have such a miserable time if she didn’t have him to play with. And if people try to take advantage of her, he’s on them like a whippet.’

  That about sums it up. Prince Philip protected the Queen and made her laugh. He was her ‘liege man of life and limb’ for more than seventy years. He was there when she wanted him – even if he might have preferred to be somewhere else. At Royal Ascot, he would drive with the Queen along the course, help Her Majesty out of her carriage and then discreetly jump into a waiting car to be driven swiftly back to Windsor Castle to watch the cricket or work on correspondence before returning to the race course to be with the Queen again for tea. When the Duchess of Cornwall had difficulty alighting from her carriage at Ascot, she is happy to let a coachman lend her a hand to help her down. The Queen would only accept help from Prince Philip. And now he’s gone.

  The end began by accident – literally so. On Thursday 17 January 2019, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, Prince Philip was driving his Land Rover near the Queen’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. Pulling out from a side road onto the A149, he was momentarily blinded by sunlight and involved in a collision with another vehicle. The other car was a Kia, containing two women and a nine-month-old baby boy. The prince’s vehicle was overturned in the crash, but he was pulled out alive, ‘very shocked’ but apparently physically unharmed. Happily the baby was unharmed, too, though both the women travelling in the Kia needed hospital treatment for minor injuries before being discharged.

  Had any of those involved in the accident been seriously injured, it might have been a major tragedy. For the prince, in some ways it was. It meant that his driving days were over – though he did not realise it at once. His Royal Highness’s immediate response to the collision was typical: he returned to Sandringham and ordered a replacement Land Rover. It arrived the next day and the
prince, 97 and defiant, took to the wheel again. But, within days, reality dawned. On the advice of the police (and to avoid the possibility of prosecution) he gave up his driving licence voluntarily.

  For many older people their car provides them with their last bit of independence. In your car, you are your own master: you can go where you please, when you please. You are not dependent on others. The Duke of Edinburgh was a realist all his life and a pragmatist to the last. After a few days’ consideration, having written to apologise to the driver of the Kia, he accepted that his motoring days were done – on public roads, at least. It was another sign that his world was shrinking and it was not easy. He had been driving for eighty years and was accustomed to living life in the fast lane.

  Prince Philip had always enjoyed speed. He began driving in the 1930s. In the mid 1940s, when he was in his twenties and courting the young Princess Elizabeth, he owned the celebrated MG sports car that was his pride and joy – and, yes, had involved him in a couple of minor prangs. Once he became Duke of Edinburgh, he was able to graduate from an MG to an Aston Martin. He had it ‘improved’ to his own specification, installing an extra vanity mirror so that his wife could more easily check her make-up and adjust her hat. He equipped the car with a radio telephone which he used to make prank calls to the young Prince Charles. (The royals have always been hot on goonish practical joking.)

  In 1954 he acquired a Lagonda 3 Litre Drophead Coupé. It was made to order, finished in a shade of Edinburgh Green with grey leather upholstery, and earned Aston Martin its first Royal Warrant. The convertible served as Prince Philip’s personal car for seven years. He had it loaded on to the Royal Yacht Britannia so that he could take it to the opening of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and his controversial tour of the Commonwealth. Its non-standard extras included a power hood and floor-change gearbox. It boasted a 3-litre engine, allowing acceleration from 0-60mph in 12.9 seconds, and a top speed of 104mph. Philip enjoyed fast cars – the Lagonda was succeeded by a 1961 Alvis TD21 Drophead Coupé – and was fascinated by how they worked. He used to drive at speed, but always with due care and attention. In the 1960s, when he was President of the Automobile Association, and my father was the AA’s legal adviser, Prince Philip summoned my dad to Buckingham Palace to deal with an alleged motoring offence – but, as I recall, it was a parking issue not a speeding one.