I’d been expecting a standard, “Have you come far?”, but I now see that this was a very Prince Philip-style question,
speaking to action, practicality and purpose. I was able to tell him that I’d actually spent a good part of the day
painstakingly stringing a set of Christmas lights in the monkey puzzle tree outside my front door. “Bloody prickly
things, aren’t they?” he said approvingly, before elaborating on the tree’s genus (araucaria), its original homeland
(Chile, or possibly Argentina), and the propensity of the female tree’s cones (was mine a female tree? Yes, it was)
to explode and spray their seeds across a wide blast zone. “Good luck, and try not to get cut to ribbons,” was his
parting shot, as the orchestra broke into an Abba medley and he turned his attention to the sea of expectant faces
ahead of him.
This was the Duke of Edinburgh playing the role he’d honed to perfection over decades of unstinting service: ‘first
gentleman’, tireless consort, or, as he once wryly put it, “warm-up man for the main event”. Responsibility had
fallen early on his shoulders — he was 30, and Princess Elizabeth 25, when they were told of her father’s sudden
death, “and he looked”, recalled his aide and friend Michael Parker, “as if you’d dropped half the world on him”. I
was among millions who could attest that he’d borne it with vigour, flair and esprit de corps, if occasionally
displaying the irascibility and impatience of the frustrated man-of-action. (When a man once introduced his wife as
the PhD in the family, saying “she’s much more important than I am”, Philip replied, “We have the same problem in
our family”.)
For many, including Tobias Menzies, who has played Philip in the past two seasons of The Crown, it was the internal
skirmishes that made him a fascinating figure. “There were a lot of different forces at play within him,” he told
The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast. “He was someone who was very wary to show his feelings, and yet he was
abrasive, challenging, funny. He took this kind of non-role and applied a huge amount of energy and inventiveness to
it, and I think the institution itself benefited from that. He helped to open it up, demystify it and modernise it.”
For her own part, the Queen was unequivocal. “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments,” she said on her
golden wedding anniversary in 1997, “but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and
his own family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever
know.”
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