Prince Philip

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Other creatures had reason to fear the president of the World Wildlife Fund. ‘We have no intention of campaigning against mousetraps or flypapers,’ the prince said.

  On a tour of South Africa, Prince Philip found himself in an earnest discussion about the reluctance of pandas to breed in captive. One of the guests maintained that a panda in a zoo becomes too attached to its keeper. The prince chipped in: ‘Well, then, the logical solution would seem to be to dress one of the pandas up as a zookeeper so that the other one fancies it.’

  Celebrating the 550th anniversary of Magdalen College, Oxford, Prince Philip joined the dons for lunch. After consuming a main course of venison, the prince noticed Magdalen’s much-prized herd of deer in the college grounds. ‘How many of those buggers did you have to shoot for lunch, then?’ he asked the bursar. Told no college deer had been slaughtered for the meal as their supply came from Kent, Philip quipped: ‘Well, don’t tell Charles because he likes everyone to buy local.’

  Prince Philip also has forthright opinions on farming. He told Shooting Times: ‘They are constantly trying to produce cattle that will produce more milk and less cow – like a hat-rack with an udder attached. They can’t really go on making such a travesty of an animal, there must be a limit to this. Even more ridiculous is the fact that milk is actually cheaper than bottled water. It seems quite bizarre to me.’

  When asked by a farming magazine if conservation were not too important to be left to conservationists, he said: ‘I would say that farming is too important to be left to farmers.’

  Prince Philips does not agree with Prince Charles over organic farming methods. ‘Organic farming is not an absolute certainty that it’s quite as useful as it sounds. You have got to be emotionally committed to it – but if you stand back and be open-minded about it, it is quite difficult to really find where it has been a real benefit.’ His son, patron of the Soil Association, did not agree with him and suffered some ridicule when he introduced organic systems in Highgrove in the 1980s. ‘It’s interesting now that it isn’t ridiculed to the same degree,’ he said. ‘I think people are beginning to realise that some of the chickens are coming home to roost and settle heavily in the genetically modified trees.’

  More than once Prince Philip has expressed a wish that, if there was such a thing as reincarnation, he could come back as a deadly virus. This has been used to tar him as a misanthropist. However, he has provided good reasons for his wish. In a forword to If I Were an Animal by Fleur Cowles in 1987, the prince wrote: ‘I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist... I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.’ Then in 1988, he said: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.’ He believes that people should limit their families to two children, though he has four himself. The prince has declared himself against mass sterilisation though.

  While Prince Philip was serious about conservation, ‘I’m not green,’ he told the BBC’s Fiona Bruce. ‘I’m not a bunnyhugger, one who simply loves animals. People are more concerned about how you treat a donkey in Sicily than conservation.’

  As head of the World Wildlife Fund, Prince Philip often expressed his concern about the fate of the tropical rain forests of Southeast Asia and their denizens. After accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991, he levelled his sights as his hosts, saying: ‘Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species.’

  At a speech in New York in June 1962, he condemned African poachers for killing off rhinoceros to export their horns to China. ‘For some incomprehensible reason, they seem to think it acts as an aphrodisiac,’ he said. ‘They might as well grind up chair legs.’

  In his book Men, Machines and Sacred Cows Prince Philip discussed more fully his attitude to the horse: ‘Some optimists tend to assume that once you have learned the lesson that horses bite at one end and kick at the other, there is nothing further to worry about. No such luck, I’m afraid. The horse is a great leveller and anyone who is concerned about his dignity would be well advised to keep away from horses. Apart from many other embarrassments there is, for instance, no more ridiculous sight than a horse performing its natural functions with someone in full dress uniform mounted on its back.’ He has been there on several state occasions.

  Prince Philip also said that lucky is the man who finds himself in ‘the ideal arrangement’ of having a wife who can be persuaded to ‘keep, groom and train their ponies.’ Fortunately, the Queen is an ardent horsewoman.

  At dinner on the night before Trooping of the Colour in 2006, when he was eighty-five, he was asked where he would be riding in the procession the following day. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘The horse is too old.’

  The Environment and Overpopulation

  Prince Philip has fearlessly waded into the highly contentious issue of climate change, stressing the impact of population increase on the production of greenhouse gases. ‘People go on about this carbon footprint,’ he said, ‘but they fail to realise that the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere is entirely dependent on the number of people living on the earth. There are now sixty million people living in this country and we are about the same land size as New Zealand – this country had three million people in Elizabeth I’s day.’ He added: ‘I think that the greatest problem for the future is population growth. The population has quadrupled in my lifetime.’ Prince Philip is not quite as old as he thinks he is. The population of Great Britain was around forty-three million when he was born in 1921.

  In 1990, he gave a speech on the threat of overpopulation. Here, he attacks those who claim that the growth of the population in India was desirable because it had ‘stimulated agricultural output… anyone who believes that we can somehow push people out to find a new home on some other planet or some other solar system can only be a science fiction addict.’ In 1968, he advocated a ‘tax on babies’.

  Philip was for birth control to limit the number of children in a family, saying: ‘You can’t expect to go a on a bender and not expect a hangover.’ Addressing the vexed problems of Thais using multi-coloured condoms, he said: ‘They choose yellow if they are happy and black if they are in mourning.’

  Japanese businessman Eishiro Saito, chairman of the Global Infrastructure Fund told Prince Philip of his plan to beat world starvation. He would melt the Himalayan snow and ice to form a huge reservoir which would be used to green the African deserts. One official at the meeting said: ‘The colour of his [the prince’s] face changed and he became upset. He kept repeating “hopeless, hopeless.”’ Saito made clear he was looking far into the future, perhaps two hundred or three hundred years. The prince replied the human species might not even last another fifty years.

  The population crisis, he said, had been brought about by human genius: ‘There is no getting away from the fact that our planet is facing an ecological crisis, but it has not been created by human thoughtlessness. It was not brought about by the poor, the disadvantaged and the uneducated. The very opposite: it was brought about by human scientific and technological genius. It is the creation of the most highly educated and trained people the world has ever seen.... There can be no doubt at all about the facts. The human population explosion, sustained by human science and technology, is causing almost insoluble problems for future generations. It is responsible for the degradation of the environment through the pollution of the air and the water; it is consuming essential as well as nonessential resources at a rate that cannot be sustained and, above all, it is condemning thousands of our fellow organisms to extinction.’ However, the rate of population growth has been declining since the 1960s.

  After forty-five years of being pilloried by the press for speaking out of turn,
Prince Philip said in 2006: ‘I don’t have opinions about things I know nothing about.’ Nevertheless in 2011 he ventured that wind farms were ‘absolutely useless.’ He told Esbjorn Wilmar, the owner of a company making turbines, that they would never work and they were an ‘absolute disgrace.’ When Wilmar argued that they were one of the most cost-effective forms of renewable energy, the prince responded: ‘You don’t believe in fairy tales, do you?’ Wilmar then suggested that turbines should be erected on royal property. ‘You stay away from my estate,’ said the prince.

  Plainly Philip had grasped the whole thing. Ten years earlier, he had told the Royal of Society of Arts that he had his doubts about the efficiency of wind farms, saying: ‘But will they ever produce enough electricity to make the turbines go round?’ Then four years later, when talking about climate change, he said: ‘When they put up a whole farm of windmills off the northeast coast of Norfolk, which is on the main migratory route to Scandinavia, are we going to get sliced up ducks coming across?’

  At the Chelsea Flower Show in 2008, Prince Philip was admiring the gold-medal-winning garden laid on by Australian celebrity gardener Jamie Durie. ‘I do like your tree fern,’ said the prince. ‘Actually it’s not a tree fern,’ said Durie, politely correcting him. ‘It’s a member of the cycad family. It’s a Macrozamia moorei.’ ‘I didn’t want a bloody lecture,’ said the Prince, stomping off.

  Prince Philip rankled Prince Charles again in 2000, by opposing his stance on organic food. ‘Do not let us forget we have been genetically modifying animals and plants ever since people started selective breeding,’ said Philip. ‘People are worried about genetically modified organisms getting into the environment. What people forget is that the introduction of exotic species – like, for instance, the grey squirrel – is going to or has done far more damage than a genetically modified potato.’ ‘I hope he and the Prince of Wales will still be talking after this,’ said Harry Hadaway of the Soil Association.

  At the opening of Fasnakyle Power Station in the Scottish Highlands, Prince Philip said: ‘To suggest that the power station alone destroys the beauty of Glen Affric is being as fastidious as the fairy-tale princess who could feel a pea under fifteen mattresses.’

  Politics and Officialdom

  At a Buckingham Palace for rank-and-file MPs, Denis MacShane, member for Rotherham, said to the Queen: ‘Thank you for having me, Ma’am.’ Prince Philip asked her: ‘What did he say?’ The Queen replied: ‘He said, “Thank you for having us.”’ Prince Philip then said: ‘Ah, Harrogate. Nice place,’ leaving everyone puzzled. This was in 2001 and it was feared that the eighty-year-old prince was going deaf.

  On the other hand, Prince Philip had little time for most MPs. In Ghana he was told that they had just two hundred MPs. ‘That’s about the right number. We have 650 and most of them are a complete bloody waste of time.’

  He has little more time for government ministers, saying that you needed to buy a ‘gobbledegook dictionary’ to understand what they were saying and add ‘an arbitrary ten years’ to the promises they make. And he had a solution. He told the longstanding Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled the country with an iron grip from 1954 to 1989: ‘It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.’

  Prince Philip can give as good as he gets when it comes to MPs. At a reception for backbenchers at Buckingham Palace in 2002, the prince asked the member for Gloucester Parmjit Dhanda what he had done before he entered parliament. On hearing that he had been a student and trade union official, the prince said: ‘You didn’t do anything then.

  Formerly a national negotiator for the information-technology union Connect, Mr. Dhanda turned to turn the question back on him, asking: ‘What did you do before you were Duke of Edinburgh?’ The prince replied that he had been an officer in the Royal Navy and served during the Second World War. According to another Labour MP, the prince then flicked a V-sign at Dhanda. ‘It was unmistakable… bloody funny,’ said the MP. ‘I didn’t know he had it in him.’

  Attempting to laugh the whole thing off, Dhanda said the prince playfully raised one finger, not two. ‘He didn’t stick up two fingers,’ Dhanda insisted. ‘He pointed up one and said ‘there you go’, patting me on the shoulder before he went. He had a big smile on his face and it was very much in a sense of fun.’ A palace spokeswoman said: ‘The Duke of Edinburgh would certainly have no intention of making a gesture of that nature in Buckingham Palace or anywhere else to a member of the public, let alone an MP.’ And she suggested there was ‘obviously not a lot going on’ in the House of Commons if MPs were talking about whether the prince raised one or two fingers.

  Politicians generally are giving no quarter. In Men, Machines and Sacred Cows he said: ‘I have no sympathy with people who claim to know what is good for others.’

  The prince is just as forthright with middle-class mandarins. In 1970, he told Sir Rennie Maudsley, Keeper of the Privy Purse: ‘You’re just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you.’

  In 2004, Prince Philip found himself on a barge with Tony Blair demon spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, who asked him: ‘Could you drive one of these?’ Philip turned a withering eye on him and barked: ‘I was a bloody naval commander!’

  At a reception for the 2014 Diamond Jubilee, then-Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who had been Culture Secretary overseeing the 2012 London Olympics, decided to tell the Queen a joke about the opening ceremony. He said: ‘I read about a Japanese tourist who said afterwards how wonderful our Queen must be to take part in that, as they would never get their emperor to jump out of the plane.’ The Queen grimaced, shrugged her shoulders and moved on. Next on the scene was Prince Philip. ‘Who are you?’ he asked Hunt. The unfortunate minister explained that he was now Health Secretary, but had been Culture Secretary at the time of the Olympics. ‘They do move you people on a lot,’ Prince Philip said, and moved on to the next guest.

  In 1963, Prince Philip said: ‘All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury.’ It was true. The top rate of income tax hovered around 95 per cent in the 1960s. In 1966, The Beatles sang in the song Taxman: ‘Let me tell you how it will be. There’s one for you, nineteen for me.’ Things had improved by 1978, but the prince still rued that crime was the only way to beat the taxman. However, the royal family did not pay income tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax until the Queen volunteered to do so in 1992.

  At the opening of the new City Hall in 2002, Prince Philip told the members of the London Assembly who were debating the introduction of the congestion charge: ‘Of course, the problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. They block the streets. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion.’ Tourism brings in about an eight of the capital’s GDP and its success is often attributed to the presence of the royal family.

  The chairwoman of the Assembly’s tourism committee, Jeanette Arnold, was quick to find fault. ‘He seemed to be taking a rather rarefied view of London,’ she said. ‘It is clearly the sort of view only held by those who travel around in limousines.’ But the prince would not be shaken on the point. On a state visit to Slovenia in 2008, he told Dr. Maja Uran, the professor of tourism at the University of Primorska: ‘Tourism is just national prostitution. We do not need any more tourists. Tourists ruin cities.’

  Prince Philip said of Tony Blair: ‘He promises education, education, education but never delivers… Bring back Mrs. T, that’s what I say. There’s no one quite like Mrs. T.’ After being informed of Tony Blair’s re-election in 2005, he said: ‘Well bugger me with a ragman’s trumpet.’ A lot of people felt that way, but would not have expressed it so colourfully.

  At a Buckingham Palace reception in 2004, Prince Philip told Euro MP Michael Cashman that the European Union was ‘all balls.’ ‘We should be like the Icelandic people and patrol our waters with gunboats,’ Philip continued. When Cashman turned away, the prince grabbed h
im by the arm and hissed: ‘I’m not finished with you yet.’ Cashman promised to write a pamphlet about fisheries policy and sent it to him.

  Asked by a teenager if he was ever nervous about meeting so many heads of state, he said: ‘Well, it’s surprising how you grow out of it.’ Well, yes. But not so surprising if you are married to one.

  Theology and Religion

  Prince Philip has impeccable credentials when it comes to religion. Archbishop of York John Sentamu remarked: ‘Not everyone is aware that His Royal Highness has a keen interest in theological questions. Bishops who are invited to stay and preach at Sandringham face a barrage of serious theological questions over lunch, and there is nowhere to hide. He listens appreciatively but never uncritically. In my case, the sermon was based on Jesus turning water into wine at Cana of Galilee. The duke suggested many possible explanations for the miracle, including a Uri Geller-type explanation, and he produced a spoon which Uri Geller had bent for him. To my rescue came that still small voice of calm from Her Majesty the Queen, saying: ‘Philip and his theories…’’’ The Queen, as head of the Church of England, had the last word.

  Sentamu was lucky he was not subjected to more than questioning. At a dinner party in Sandringham in 2003, Prince Philip made a mitre out of a paper napkin and made the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wear it.

  Baptised into the Greek orthodoxy church, Prince Philip was required to convert to Anglicanism before his marriage. ‘I take an interest in comparative religion,’ he said. ‘But if I talk about it I’m labelled a religious crank.’

  Archbishop Sentamu recalled when the Bishop of Norwich paid a pastoral visit to Sandringham, the prince asked him: ‘Are you happy clappy?’ ‘No, I’m smells and bells,’ the bishop replied. After that, they got on fine, Sentamu said.