Philip: The Final Portrait

‘If you believe the attention is for you personally,’ he warned, ‘you’re going to end up in trouble. The attention is for your role, what you do, what you’re supporting. It isn’t for you as an individual. You are not a celebrity. You are representing the Royal Family. That’s all. Don’t look at the camera. The Queen never looks at the camera. Never. Look at who you’re talking to. Look at what you’ve come to see. Diana looked at the camera.’

When the Duke was critical of his wife, berating her for paying attention to the dogs when she should be listening to him, or wondering out loud why she was spending so much time on the telephone, or telling her she was wearing the wrong clothes for a shooting expedition, the Queen was quite capable of answering back, saying to him, ‘Oh, do shut up.’ According to family and friends, over the years she became bolder with him, and he gentler with her.

He wanted to make a difference where others, often, only make a noise.

By any standards, Philip has known a lot of loss in his young life and one way people deal with loss is with stoicism. To take on board the full throttle of what has happened to you is too painful, so you use your defence mechanisms well. You rationalise your experience. You don’t dwell on it. You don’t discuss it. Stoically, you soldier on.’

‘It’s simply what happened,’ is what Prince Philip had said to me. ‘The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.’

As one of her private secretaries said to me, ‘The Queen represents the very best of Britain, of its values and its heritage. In many ways, she represents the soul of the nation.’

When I told him I had found a constituency where I hoped to be the candidate, he gave me useful advice on how to make small talk with all and sundry. He offered the question ‘What’s keeping you busy these days?’ as an all-purpose opening gambit. (The ingenuity of the phrasing comes into its own when the person you are addressing is someone you have met before but have wholly forgotten.)

Certainly, if you suggested that he might have been personally frustrated that the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952 had brought his naval career to a premature close, he would deny it. ‘You have to make compromises,’ he said to me. ‘That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.’

Prince Philip was born in 1921 and brought up in the age when introspection equalled self-indulgence and a stiff upper lip was a virtue, not a disability. He made his marriage work, both because he wanted to and because, in his day, that’s what you did. ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’