Prince Philip: Flying and fun were fine - but Sarah Ferguson was beyond the pale

Philip enjoyed flying and polo but he could never forgive Andrew’s wife Sarah Ferguson after she went ‘beyond the pale’ with her toe-sucking incident.

Prince Philip and Sarah Ferguson last saw each other at Princess Eugenie's wedding.

It could be summed up as the Duke of Edinburgh’s views on the three Fs: fun, flying and Fergie [Sarah Ferguson, former wife of Prince Andrew. The first two he approved of, after a fashion: the third he resolutely did not.

A new biography of the duke has revealed his innermost thoughts on subjects ranging from whether he thought his life was worthwhile to whether he was afraid of death.

However, it took a determined effort by its author, Gyles Brandreth, to get the duke to admit if he had ever had fun. In the book, serialised in the Daily Mail, Brandreth recounted how he asked Philip over a drink in Buckingham Palace whether his life had been fun.

Brandreth wrote: “ ‘Fun?’ he snorted. ‘I don’t think I think much about fun. Do you think much about fun?’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now and again.’

“ ‘Really? I suppose the polo was fun,’ he conceded. ‘Playing cricket was fun, in the old days. The carriage driving is fun - when you don’t fall off the box seat. Then it’s just bloody painful.’ ”

Prince Philip playing polo in 1950. Picture: AFP.

Prince Philip loved flying among his other sports.

Brandreth asked whether his life had been enjoyable. ” ‘My life? Enjoyable?’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘I enjoyed flying. I enjoyed flying very much. I sometimes think I should have joined the air force instead of the navy.’”

Asked if it had been a good or worthwhile life, Philip said: “I don’t know about that. I’ve kept myself busy. I’ve tried to make myself useful. I hope I’ve helped keep the show on the road. That’s about it, really.”

In one conversation, undated, the duke said that he was not afraid of death. “Death is a part of life,” he told Brandreth. “You’ve got to face it. You’ve got to accept it - with a good grace.” He laughed. “When you get to my age, there’s a lot of it about.”

He was “quite ready to die”, he said. “It’s what happens - sooner or later.” He added: “I certainly don’t want to hang on until I am 100, like Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother]. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

A picture of Sarah Ferguson standing beside Prince Philip at the wedding of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank was seen as a sign of reconciliation between the two. Picture: AFP.

After the 2012 Diamond Jubilee, the duke told Brandreth why he and the Queen had not sat on the throne-like chairs provided during the river pageant. He said: “We’d have looked like Mr and Mrs Beckham, wouldn’t we?”

After the Duchess of York was shown in a newspaper photograph topless as a lover sucked her toes in the south of France, Philip regarded her as “beyond the pale”. Brandreth asked why he refused to see her. “I am not vindictive, but I don’t see the point,” he said.

- Philip: the Final Portrait by Gyles Brandreth will be published by Coronet on April 27

The Times