Stephen McGinty: A prince always in position

For 60 years since his naval career ended, the Duke of Edinburgh has walked behind his wife, making the best of the role he had to assume

SINCE the coronation of his wife, Elizabeth, 60 years ago, Prince Philip has, during official engagements, walked several paces behind his beloved. Last week he was the one taking the first step forward. Unfortunately, it appeared to be towards the grave.

When the Queen recorded her Christmas Day message on the importance of family, she would not expect to feel such camaraderie for those with a loved one in hospital when it was broadcast. Seeing the Duke of Edinburgh rushed to hospital in a helicopter suffering from chest pains, where he underwent surgery to have a stent inserted to clear a blocked artery in the heart, must have been frightening for his wife and family regardless of how much the Buckingham Palace press office stressed the routine nature of the procedure.

Even if all at Sandringham was stoic calm, the atmosphere at the BBC was reportedly one of panic in case the Duke should choose this moment to strut regally off this mortal coil. There was a frantic search for black ties lest history repeat itself and the nation be informed of the death of a senior member of the Royal Family by a newscaster clad in a tie not of sombre black but burgundy. (In centuries past Peter Sissons would surely have been garrotted for his sartorial faux pas upon the death of the Queen Mother.)

While the black tie was unnecessary as the Duke’s robust health had him out of hospital in days, its thin shape continues to cast a slight shadow over the Queen’s husband. For, if not then, when?

By all accounts the Duke would have hated the fuss and attention his health scare attracted, particularly on the eve of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year. Yet, in one way, I think it is fitting that before the nation embarks on a year of celebrations for the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, we stop for a moment and ponder the life of another individual which changed dramatically 60 years ago in February.

On 31 January, 1951, King George VI came to London Airport to wave Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip off on an extended tour of East Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Frail with cancer, he stood in the rain as his eldest daughter stepped into the aircraft. Six days later, while on safari in Kenya, the couple had taken refuge from a large cow elephant in a treehouse. Prince Philip’s aide, Mike Parker, broke the news to the Prince that his father-in-law was dead and his wife was now Queen.

Parker later said that the prince “looked as if the whole world had dropped on him”. At the time, Prince Philip was commanding the frigate HMS Magpie after rising up the ranks during the Second World War and after, but there could be no going back to his Royal Navy service. Although he argued for the important symbolism of the Queen’s husband continuing at the helm of a ship in her navy it was not one he won.

Instead, Prince Philip watched as his wife became privy to every secret of the Cold War. The red boxes sent to “Reader No 1”, as the Queen is known in Whitehall, are stuffed with every significant cable or telegram received by the Foreign Office or issued by MI6. As head of state she knows everything, but says nothing, even to her husband.

Without a career, Prince Philip was given token roles. He was put in charge of the Coronation, but outmanoeuvred by more wily courtiers, and soon accepted his new role and place, six steps back.

Although the Queen insisted he was head of the family and the royal estates, some of his ideas backfired. The strict regime of Gordonstoun which he had found so bracing did not suit his sensitive eldest son, Charles. And, although he could not have predicted the ensuing media obsession with his family, it was Prince Philip who first invited television cameras to film the family at leisure.

So how should one feel towards “Phil the Greek”? The correct answer, of course, is that one should feel nothing. According to the Prince, feelings are for pansies. (Shortly afterwards his staff discreetly apologised to both the homosexual community and representatives of that particular flora.) He does not “do” feelings and shrinks visibly at the thought of another person’s feelings being wrapped, like a soiled towel, around him. Compliments are like kryptonite to him. When an interviewer praises a particular line of work, he immediately dismisses it. Anything he has done, to his mind, another could have done so equally well. He stands at a right angle to the current cult of the individual that has taken root in Britain.

Yet the reason, I think, for his demeanour is the loss he stoically endured 60 years ago when he relinquished a promising naval career to follow, literally, in his wife’s footsteps. Whatever his achievements – such as in the environmental movement, where as president of green group WWF he helped to unite religions so as to harness their own environmental outlook – he must surely look, in private, at what might have been. The battleships commanded; the camaraderie of his fellow officers; the weeks of grey horizons, salt water and sea spray. Instead he has endured a lifetime of making stultifying small talk on endless walkabouts.

There are those who love Prince Philip, who sing his praises in too high a key and turn the 300 public engagements in which he participates each year into a heroic achievement when it is patently not. It is, however, admirable and hard to imagine another 90-year-old with so demanding a schedule. Then there are those who hate him, who view his jokes as a symbol of an era that should have been swept away long ago.

The feeling, which is intellectually sound, is why have anyone on an elevated plinth towards whom one should bow and scrape simply by dint of their birth or judicious choice of wife? Prince Philip certainly lost admirers in Scotland 15 years ago, when, following the government’s ban on handguns in the wake of the Dunblane massacre he made a crass comment criticising the ban and speculating if cricket bats would be next to be banned should they become the weapon of choice of another psychopath. It was a foolish statement, a weak argument and cemented the image in many people’s minds of an aloof old man who had long since lost touch with those over whom his wife reigns.

Yet there is a middle ground in which, I would say, the majority of people sit (or, in his presence, stand) and that is one of grudging admiration and respect. The jokes he has made in Scotland about keeping the locals off the drink long enough to pass their driving test or, in China, pondering if visitors would return with “slitty eyes” are stereotypes, but humour of an older generation and typical of a man of his age and social status.

The Prince’s emotional restraint in public is welcome in an era of emotional incontinence and, certainly, to judge by recent biographies he was much looser in private. He wrote many warm letters to the late Diana, Princess of Wales in an attempt to soften her entry into “The Firm” – who better understood the difficulties of being an outsider?

There is a craggy, curmudgeonly authenticity to Prince Philip and I like the fact that, at 90, he still drives the London streets in the anonymity of his own black taxi, accompanied by security.

Among the many tales of the Duke’s gaffes, one of my favourites was aural rather than verbal. At a reception in Antigua, he asked what business one man was in. He replied: “Cocaine.” Shocked, Prince Philip set off to discover how an invitation had been extended to a drug dealer. When the guest’s wife heard him quiz staff, she stepped in: “No. Cookin’. We own a restaurant.”