There was a dark, sad irony to the Harry and Meghan circus that cast a shadow over the final months of Prince Philip’s life.
In this spat between the Duke and Duchess of Wokeness and the stiff, unfeeling and allegedly racist Firm whose clutches they escaped, Philip was always depicted as the regressive old guard. They are the hip, aware royals, in touch with their feelings and fluent in the California-speak of therapy culture and critical race theory.
Philip, in contrast, was the patriarch of the ancien regime, the embodiment of white privilege. He was, to use Simon Jenkins’s term, a “pale, stale male” — the worst thing you can be these days.
Sure, Harry denied that Philip was the mysterious royal who had queried what colour skin his and Meghan’s children would have. That allegation against an unnamed royal, made by Harry and Meghan in their two-hour confessional with Oprah Winfrey, made waves around the world.
And virtually everyone presumed it must have been Philip who said it. Even following Harry’s insistence that it wasn’t Philip or the Queen, I was constantly having chats or receiving text messages in which someone would say: “Of course it was Phil.” After all, he was the gaffe-prone duke, the royal with a penchant for speaking bluntly.
That these rumours swirled around Philip at the end of his life was not only unfair; Harry should be ashamed for putting his grandfather and grandmother through the wringer of global speculation as Philip was heading toward his final breath and the Queen was preparing for widowhood.
No, it was, as I say, ironic too. Because when it comes to being an outsider in the royal family, Philip knew so much more than Meghan ever could. Indeed, when it comes to personal suffering and even racial insults, Philip’s life was on a different plane to Meghan’s and Harry’s. This alleged figurehead of the old elite went through things that would make Oprah say more than: “What … WHAT?”
Philip was the ultimate outsider when he got engaged to the Princess Elizabeth in the 1940s. Of course he was no commoner. In many ways he was more royal than Elizabeth. He was Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, blood-linked to Queen Victoria, tsars, kings, dukes and all sorts.
And he had wealthy, highly influential relatives in Britain — the Mountbattens — who took him under their opulent wing when his father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was expelled from Greece in the 20s. But around the very old, very traditional British royal family, Philip was an oddity.
Meghan complains that her wedding to Harry became a political affair over which she had little control. Well, Philip’s own flesh and blood were forbidden from attending his wedding to Princess Elizabeth in 1947. His three sisters were banned from the ceremony because they had been on the side of Germany in the war. They were considered part of the enemy.
When the establishment, from Winston Churchill downwards, forbade the royals from taking Philip’s surname, Mountbatten, Philip cried: “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.” (The double-barrelled name Mountbatten-Windsor eventually was adopted quietly, but it wasn’t used publicly until the birth of Prince Edward’s daughter Louise Mountbatten-Windsor in 2003.)
Then there’s the racism. Harry says someone in the Firm wondered out loud about what his offspring’s skin colour would be. We don’t know who this was, what exactly they said or even whether it was said with racial malice or simply innocent if old-fashioned curiosity. What we do know about Philip, however, is that he was subjected to genuinely prejudicial slurs when he took up with British royalty. As Private Eye magazine reported last month, Philip was referred to as “The Hun” and even as “Charlie Kraut” by senior royals and courtiers — a reference to his family’s German connections.
Others called him “Phil the Greek”. Even the adored Diana is said to have privately referred to him as “Stavros”, a slur used against people of Greek origin.
Did Philip do a long TV interview complaining about these barbs and jests? No, he just got on with things. Private Eye recounts the time Philip was sailing near the Isle of Wight one year when the skipper of another boat shouted: “Oi! Out of the way, Stavros!” To which Philip replied: “It’s not Stavros, and it’s my wife’s f. king water so I’ll do what I f. king please.” That’s the spirit.
As for suffering, Philip can be forgiven if he raised an eyebrow at Meghan’s wobbly-voiced chat with Oprah about all the “difficulties” she has faced. Philip’s early years were horrendous. As the BBC said last weekend, his childhood was “stalked by exile, mental illness and death”.
His family was exiled from Greece. His mother suffered a severe mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum. His beloved sister Cecile died in a plane crash in 1937. Philip is said to have never recovered from that shock. For a long time Philip was a man who felt lost. Even following his wedding to Princess Elizabeth he was known to put “no fixed abode” as his address. That’s enough to sadden even a republican like me.
So those who have embraced the woke fairytale of Harry and Meghan versus an uncaring establishment personified by Philip need to think again. Reality grates against your PC myth-making. Truth calls into question your self-satisfied moral narratives and thoughtless division of the world into Good (the woke) and Bad (the old, white establishment).
But here’s what was different about Philip and the generation he belonged to. He didn’t wallow in his pain. He didn’t make a public spectacle of his suffering.
Rather, he got on with life. He marshalled his inner moral resources to overcome his early difficulties and the emasculation he felt in the British royal family and did what he felt he needed to do: pursue a life of service to an ideal larger than himself — the crown.
In contrast with today’s fashion for seeing every slight and burden as an intolerable assault on one’s wellbeing that must be gabbed about endlessly in therapy or on Oprah, Philip said in response to an interviewer who asked him about his hard early life that it was just life. The question is how we deal with it.
So, requiescat in pace, Prince Philip. With his passing, the old era seems to be passing more and more, too. And even the republicans among us soon may miss some of the values of that disappearing era: stoicism, strength, and the belief that it is better to give oneself over to a cause rather than to ponder like Narcissus upon one’s own reflection and emotions.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked.
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