Royal News Blog

Note: This article is from the Guardian.

This article titled “Prince Philip at 90: still sees no need to apologise, or explain, or emote” was written by Stephen Bates, for The Guardian on Thursday 9th June 2011 20.00 UTC

It is a fair bet that the Duke of Edinburgh, celebrating – or, more likely, enduring – his 90th birthday on Friday morning, will not settle down with a copy of the Guardian to read this article.

Accosted once by Polly Toynbee at a Windsor Castle reception and asked whether he ever read the paper, he snorted: “No fear.”

It is not just us. He does not like any media. He believes it went to pot when Rupert Murdoch landed.

“It is almost pathological,” says the broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, who is a friend.

“And yet he was the first royal to give an interview on television, trying to be innovative. He thinks it has become all negative, all about his gaffes. He says it doesn’t bother him, but it annoys him and leaves him contemptuous.”

Broadcasters have sent the most innocuous representatives to interview him for this anniversary – Alan Titchmarsh and Fiona Bruce – and they have both been barked at, their most genial questions batted back with exasperation.

Brandreth said: “Here is a man of 90 who still does 300 engagements a year and in 60 years, has never been late, never gone to the wrong place, never dressed in the wrong uniform and there have been five occasions in all that time when he has cried off because of illness.”

And yet, compared with all that, adds Brandreth, the pile of cuttings about his gaffes is head high.

Ah yes, the gaffes. It is true: it is a long list, some clearly magnified in the telling.

There was him, 25 years ago, telling a group of British students in China that they would end up slitty-eyed; the suggestion that an old-fashioned fusebox must have been put in by an Indian; and the question to an Australian aboriginal leader in 2002, asking whether he still threw spears.

Three weeks ago in Ireland, the local press fell into earnest discussion about whether his remark after someone made a convoluted explanation (“that sounds very Irish”) constituted another gaffe. They decided it did not.

The endless recycling makes him cross, particularly the alleged remark to a group of Cardiff schoolchildren standing next to a steel band in 1999: “Deaf? If you stand near there no wonder you’re deaf.”

He points out he never said it: his mother was deaf and he is a long-term patron of the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), so instinctively it is not the sort of thing he would ever say. Too late: it is in the press cuttings.

What he is, say friends, is questioning. Not for him the platitudes and passivity of the Queen. After 60 years, he wants a conversation: to provoke answers; to fill dumbstruck, awed silences; to ward off tedium.

Vicars, called to preach before the royal family at Balmoral, report daunting lunchtime conversations afterwards, with the duke beadily dissecting the flaws in their sermons.

His study library, containing 11,000 books, includes works of comparative theology and other more surprising texts: the poetry of TS Eliot. “Don’t tell anyone,” he barks – but he’s read them.

Friends say those who tend to be put out by his brusqueness are from the officer class, who face a grilling they are not expecting, not the ratings.

He does not see the need to apologise, or explain, or emote. It is generally not what people of his generation do, and resilience and emotional reticence was something he learned early.

Born on Corfu in 1921 into the Greek royal family – christened Philippos, though he, like the rest of them, was of Danish and German ancestry – he and his family fled when the monarchy was overthrown the following year.

As they were rowed out to a British ship, as a Guardian letter-writer noted this week, the baby was placed in an orange box.

A peripatetic and lonely childhood followed: abandoned by his father, who went to live in the south of France, his mother confined to an asylum following a breakdown and out of contact with him for many years, his older sisters marrying Nazis, he was shuffled between relatives, educated in spartan boarding schools in Germany and Scotland and then trained for the British navy, in which he served through the second world war.

Asked by an interviewer once about his childhood at home, he retorted: “What do you mean ‘at home’? You get on with it. You do. One does.”

He will be used to the sneers about Phil the Greek, but his initiation into the British royal family in the aftermath of the war was demeaning.

He was, the courtiers thought, no gentleman and, worse, little better than a German; the diplomat Harold Nicolson noted him down as “rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and … probably not faithful”.

A bit too Teutonic, it was said. A footman gleefully reported that his naval valise contained no spare shoes – his only pair was holed – or pyjamas, or slippers.

A new biography says he did not feature in Queen Elizabeth’s first 11 of suitors for her daughter.

Then, once married to his besotted bride and with his career as a naval officer taking off, he was forced to give it up when his wife ascended the throne, becoming the new Queen’s consort and pledging at the coronation to be her “liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship”.

He was condemned to a lifetime of walking a few paces behind, making conversation, shaking hands, inquiring politely, not making waves, avoiding controversy.

He could not even pass his surname to his children. He was, he said, “nothing but a bloody amoeba”.

He has stuck at it and developed his own interests: the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme to encourage young people to volunteer for community service and engage in teamwork and outdoor strenuousness, which has had 4 million teenage participants over 55 years (he still attends many of the ceremonies to give out gold awards); president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for 15 years and of the National Playing Fields Association and of many others.

These are not perfunctory duties. Peter Westgarth, chief executive of the award scheme, says: “He does not suffer fools gladly. You don’t make flippant remarks. He will challenge you. But he supports you too – he’s helpful and positive and knowledgable.”

David Nussbaum of WWF UK, of which the Duke is still president emeritus, adds: “He questions to provoke and to get spice into the conversation. If you have that lively a mind at 90, you are doing well.”

His birthday will be a working day, with a reception for the centenary of the RNID at Buckingham Palace in the morning, a dinner for the colonels of the Household Division in the evening.

On Sunday there will be a family celebration and service at Windsor. The Queen says he has been “my strength and my stay all these years”. But for how much longer can he keep it up?

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