Ever since his wedding in 1947, the Duke has inevitably been likened to Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria (and the Duke’s great-great-grandfather). Perhaps, in time, the words ‘Elizabeth and Philip’ will just become part of the language, like ‘Victoria and Albert’; perhaps, indeed, there will one day be a building called the ‘E&P’ to rival the ‘V&A’. Yet Albert was in a very different situation, not least since he acted as Victoria’s Private Secretary, his own desk parked next to hers. From the outset, the Duke has been kept firmly on the other side of the constitutional door. In fact, he has had a good deal less access than his immediate predecessor as consort – Queen Elizabeth. When George VI turned his wartime audiences with Winston Churchill into lunches – or ‘picnics’ as the Royal Family called them – he would include his Queen. As William Shawcross has pointed out, she was included in some of the greatest secrets of the twentieth century including Ultra, the crucial wartime intelligence gathered at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. In retrospect, it was an act of enormous constitutional audacity by both the Monarch and the Prime Minister. During the current reign, no Prime Minister has found Prince Philip in the audience room. Nor have his fingerprints been found on state papers. He has voiced forthright views on everything from birth control to welfare but only ever in a general context. ‘In all the time I’ve been here, he’s stayed well out of anything to do with politics – well, well away,’ says his former Private Secretary, Sir Miles Hunt-Davis. ‘The fact is I’ve never heard him make any party political comment at all and that’s the way it’s got to be as consort to the head of state.’ As one of the Queen’s former private secretaries puts it: ‘I can give him an absolute clean bill of health constitutionally. I’ve never heard a Minister complain that he interfered.’ At the same time, the government has been very happy to use him as a diplomatic tool.
The Duke is the most widely travelled member of the Royal Family in history. No monarch has been to more places than the Queen. The Duke has not only been with her on all her travels but he has also circumnavigated the globe many more times on his own account. Sir Miles Hunt-Davis points out that whenever his former boss flew to a foreign country on charity business, the leader of that country would often want to see him. World leaders were not remotely bothered by the Duke’s lack of constitutional power. He was the Queen’s husband. Would he care to stop by for dinner? If he could, he usually would – to the delight of the local British ambassador.
It is sometimes asked why the Queen has never given the Duke the title of Prince Consort. No official answer has been given but the general feeling is that he never wanted it. ‘I don’t think he ever saw himself as Prince Albert and he resisted the idea of being declared Prince Consort because he did not want it thought he was modelling himself on Prince Albert,’ says one former Private Secretary. The late Lord Charteris described the Prince Consort title as ‘meaningless’. ‘Pretty early on, he decided he was going to do his own things and so he didn’t want the title,’ says a member of the Duke’s team. ‘But I think he quite likes coincidences with Albert – like the fact that they both became Chancellor of Cambridge University, that sort of thing.’ There may be another reason why he has never been Prince Consort. The Queen had some of the happiest years of her life as Duchess of Edinburgh – the only time she was known by her married name. During those four years and two months between the wedding (when Prince Philip was granted the Dukedom) and her accession, she came as close as she ever has to leading a ‘normal’ life. As the wife of a Royal Navy officer stationed in Malta, she could drive her little MG sports car around the island and forget protocol or official duties. If the couple suddenly decided they wanted to go out for a picnic or a night’s dancing, they could. Back in London, the Duchess could turn Clarence House into a family home. That all changed in February 1952. But at least her husband would carry on being known as the Duke of Edinburgh. Had he been renamed ‘Prince Consort’, that title and all its happy associations would have vanished into obscurity, just like the Duke’s courtesy titles – Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich. As the Palace explained when the Queen changed the family surname from Windsor to Mountbatten-Windsor in 1960, she was keen that her husband’s name should ‘enjoy perpetuation’. His ducal title has ‘enjoyed perpetuation’ too.
So when should the Duke be called Prince Philip and when is he the Duke of Edinburgh? He was Prince Philip of Greece until 1947 when he became a British citizen, was made Duke of Edinburgh and dropped his Hellenic title. Ten years later, he was made a Prince of the United Kingdom and so became Prince Philip again. He is now ‘HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh’. ‘Prince’ or ‘Duke’ are interchangeable – if there are a lot of other Princes around, it can be simpler to use ‘Duke’ – but the Palace observes a subtle distinction. ‘I say “Prince Philip” at the Palace in conversation and, outside, I usually say “The Duke of Edinburgh”,’ says Sir Miles Hunt-Davis. ‘I’d never write to someone saying “Prince Philip has asked me to write” unless it was a very close relationship.’
As with the royal estates, so the Queen also defers to the Duke in certain family matters. ‘She may be the Monarch but, in terms of her children, she takes the traditional view that a husband is head of the family,’ says one senior ex-member of her Household.
It was the Duke who took the lead in shaping the children’s educations and careers; in steering their sons through the more muscular educational system of Gordonstoun in Scotland; in encouraging their daughter to be her own woman – and even, occasionally, man. When the Princess Royal was appointed a Lady of the Order of the Garter and, later, a Lady of the Order of the Thistle, she decided that she did not want to be a ‘Lady’, with LG and LT after her name. She wanted to be a ‘Knight’, like her brothers. She is thus the first (and probably last) woman in history to have the initials KG and KT after her name. The heralds at the College of Arms must have had an armorial fit. The Queen does not like any meddling with her personal Orders either. But the Princess must have had some influential backing to push it through. ‘She’s her father’s daughter,’ laughs one courtier by way of explanation.
At the Royal Family’s Way Ahead Group conferences (now discontinued), it would be the Duke who took control. ‘The Queen would sit on one side and the Duke on the other and the idea was that they were jointly chairing,’ recalls one of those present. ‘But it was always the Duke who took charge while the Queen might gossip with the Lord Chamberlain.’
It is a lazy media shorthand to describe the Royal Family as ‘dysfunctional’, which is to presuppose that they could ever be an ‘ordinary’ family in the first place. But the fact that much of their communication is via memos or letters or private secretaries does not make them ‘dysfunctional’. As the Queen has explained to one royal guest, she is not one for long chats on the telephone. ‘They can come and see me if they want,’ she has said.
‘There are certain things that we do differently that we find perfectly normal which everyone else thinks is completely mad,’ the Duke of York acknowledges. ‘For instance, if you ring one of your siblings, you just pick up the phone and ring. But actually we’re all quite busy so we have a mechanism with which to find the time to be able to speak to each other. It’s how we do things – not the fact that we do them or don’t do them.’
Even after (or perhaps because of) more than fifty years of being asked ‘what it’s like’ to be royal, there is a note of exasperation as the Duke explains that there was nothing odd about growing up in his world. After all, to a child always surrounded by world leaders, photographers, footmen, deference or Van Dycks, what was so abnormal about it? ‘To me, my life is entirely normal and entirely real,’ he says sternly. ‘To you, your life and your experience is entirely normal and real. I would have some difficulty understanding your reality in the same that you would have some difficulty understanding my reality. The constant issue is that there are more people speculating and trying to find out about our normality and reality than is somet
imes healthy. The family life that we have had has been as much a family life as your family life. It’s had its ups, it’s had its downs. It’s had its good times, its bad times. That’s the nature of the beast. And we make the most of family time that we can.’
He likens family reunions to some of the organisations he would encounter on his trade missions: ‘It’s rather like having a business which has a number of diversified subsidiaries. We do our own thing and we conduct our lives but occasionally we come back and talk to the boss of the parent company.’ Even then, he says, some people find the royal way of doing things peculiar. ‘We’re all off doings things and then there are moments when we get together in an environment where there are lots of other people and they suddenly notice that all of us are having a conversation because we haven’t actually been together for three months, four months. But that’s not because we’re not a family. It’s entirely because we are performing roles in support of the Monarch.’
Sometimes, those roles also need to reviewed, reassigned or else quietly abandoned. The Duke recalls the ‘upheavals’ involving hundreds of patronages following the deaths, in quick succession, of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother in 2002. ‘Now that was a case where everybody sat round a table and lists of organisations were produced and you started thinking: “How do we cope with this particular change and who is going to do what, where and when? How many of these organisations are we going to hang on to? How many are going to be relevant in the future?” They created a huge organisational vacuum.’ Here was another aspect of ‘ordinary’ royal life alien to the outside world.
Modish commentators who would not dream of criticising the most complicated or unorthodox modern living arrangements for fear of being thought judgemental are, none the less, still happy to scoff at a family whose members bow and curtsey to each other. It is not ‘normal’, of course, but nor is it ‘normal’ to be followed by cameras from cradle to grave or to be prevented from visiting a family burial plot without permission from the Foreign Office.* Royalty is different because we want it to be. ‘You’ve got to have a scarcity value if you’re a monarch,’ former Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home once said. ‘You mustn’t make the Queen an ordinary person.’
‘How do you describe it? It’s a vocational job, it’s there,’ says the Duke of York. ‘None of us can switch off and it’s particularly true for the Queen. I mean you can get time away from public life but you’re never going to be completely away. Which comes back to reality and normality. You’re trying to understand what it is that makes us tick. If you had that experience, you wouldn’t think it was odd.’ Understandably, the family find the ‘dysfunctional’ charge rather hurtful, none more so than the Duke of Ediburgh. It was he who expressed the couple’s public thanks to their children during their Golden Wedding anniversary: ‘Like all families, we went through the full range of the pleasures and tribulations of bringing up children. I am, naturally, somewhat biased, but I think our children have all done rather well under very demanding circumstances and I hope I can be forgiven for feeling proud of them.’ Spoken at the nadir of royal fortunes in the nineties, just two months after the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, these words had an even deeper resonance.
The Royal Family have their disagreements, like any other. But there is a common perception at large that the Duke and the Prince of Wales are always at loggerheads. Not true say those who know them both well. ‘If you see them together, they get on like a house on fire,’ says one. ‘It’s constructive tension. I think in many ways they’re on the same routes and it’s been helpful to them that they don’t always agree. They do approach things from different angles. That’s the way life is in families.’
Gyles Brandreth says that the Duke once explained it all to him as follows: ‘Prince Charles is a romantic and I’m a pragmatist. And sometimes a romantic thinks that a pragmatist is unfeeling.’
‘It’s just the classic eldest son and father thing – always seeking approval and always wanting to do things differently,’ says a member of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle. ‘He’s not like Philip physically,’ the Duke’s sister, Sophie, Princess George of Hanover, once remarked, ‘but very like him in his ways of laughing and his quick way of saying something.’
Others point to the Prince’s Trust as an example of shared interests pursued in different ways. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is a global success, having helped more than six million young people in 120 countries.* Since 1956, it has encouraged young people to set and achieve challenges for themselves. Two decades later, when the Prince of Wales, came to leave the Royal Navy, he used the contents of his pension fund to create the Prince’s Trust and give disadvantaged young people help in turning their lives around. It’s now one of the giants of the charitable sector. There are many similarities with the Duke’s Award but it is neither a copy nor a rival. ‘They are complementary,’ explains Elizabeth Buchanan, former Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. ‘The Prince’s Trust helps a lot of people who might be missed by the awards, people who have been forgotten. So you get the Trust and the Award working very well alongside each other. What the Royal Family don’t like to do is bump into each other and operate in the same area. It is not a good use of resources.’
Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, is the one whose professional life has most closely followed that of the Duke – career Royal Navy officer and then globetrotting trade promoter. He gave up the trade role for regular royal duties in 2011. There had been complaints about his robust diplomatic style, his encounters with certain dubious regimes and his friendship with an American financier convicted of sex offences. The Duke of York’s supporters have pointed out that he was simply a vigorous champion of British interests and that his meetings with unsavoury regimes were in the line of his (unpaid) duty as a business ambassador, for the British Government. Furthermore, they say, we all have embarrassing friends.
But it is Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, who has taken on many of his father’s duties, notably the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. These days, it is the Earl and Countess of Wessex who see most of the Queen and the Duke – accompanying them to church at Windsor on Sunday, dropping round for weekend tea, hosting the annual private party for the Queen’s birthday. It is also the Earl who will ensure that the Duke of Edinburgh title continues to ‘enjoy perpetuation’. It goes against all the rules of the hereditary peerage but it is the Monarch who sets the rules and she made this one on Prince Edward’s wedding day in 1999. Amid all the excitement, most people overlooked the announcement that, following the deaths of both Prince Philip and the Queen, the title of Duke of Edinburgh would pass to Prince Edward and his heirs. Otherwise, it would have followed the usual route for a hereditary title and gone to the eldest son, in which case it would simply have been absorbed into the Prince of Wales’s extensive collection of titles.
It is often said that, of all his children, the Duke is closest to the Princess Royal, although the fact that she is an only daughter may have something to do with it. What can be argued with a greater degree of certainty is that it is the Princess who most closely resembles the Duke. Her workaholism, absence of vanity, briskness, coolness under fire (literally, in the case of the 1974 attempted kidnapping), loyalty to staff, contempt for flatterers and ditherers and her love of the sea are all ducal characteristics which seem particularly pronounced in the Princess. Tony Blair was immediately struck by the likeness. In his memoirs he recalls the day his wife met the Princess for the first time at Balmoral. When Mrs Blair attempted some ‘Call me Cherie’ informality, the Princess replied: ‘Actually, I prefer Mrs Blair.’ None the less, Mr Blair retains an abiding respect for the Princess: ‘I always liked her. I doubt the feeling was mutual. She is a chip right off the old man’s block. People think Prince Philip doesn’t give a damn about what people think of him and they are right. Anne is exactly the same. She is what she is and if you don’t like it, you can clear off. It’s not a quality I have but I admire those who
do. The unfortunate thing is it stops people seeing the other side of their character.’ In fact, in the most trying situations, the Duke can display great sensitivity entirely at odds with his media persona. One of the less predictable disclosures of the six-month inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was the correspondence which showed the extent to which the Duke had tried to help and reassure his daughter-in-law during the breakdown of her marriage. Perhaps the Duke’s own experience of being up against some of the old Palace hierarchies, of being simultaneously inside and outside the royal loop, help him to identify with others struggling on their royal pedestals.
If there is one concern which even good friends of the family are prepared to voice it is that the Duke’s paternal advice to his younger children has pushed the ‘be yourself’ mantra too far. ‘The Duke has encouraged them to be too like him and not enough like her. They do need to be a bit more like the Queen,’ says one close ally. ‘He has told them to follow their instincts and be their own people and not be bossed around like he was when he arrived at the Palace. While that’s admirable, it has led to things like It’s a Royal Knockout. It’s why we get the Duke of York sounding off to a room full of senior businessmen about whatever he thinks.’ But the same friends are also quick to point out that what makes the Duke of Edinburgh’s attitude entirely understandable – and his achievements so remarkable – is his own extraordinary childhood. His is a story which would today be classified as a borderline case for social services. Yet it produced an uncommonly determined, cheerful, self-starting, intelligent young man who would win the heart of the most eligible young woman on earth. Is it any wonder he has raised his own children to follow their instincts rather than dwell on their frailties?
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