Prince Philip to step down from royal duties: Well, he was all Greek to us anyway
With Prince Philip stepping down from public duties, one is tempted to repeat Dorothy Parker’s famous comment when Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the US, died: How can they tell?
Indeed. What a yawning gap in British social fabric will be left by the absence of Prince Philip, who at 95, had ceased to perform even his most basic public service — to humour Britain and indeed the Commonwealth of nations with his gaffe-a-minute public appearances.
His plain speaking was so legendary that even Matt Smith’s portrayal of him in the Netflix series, The Crown, as a dashing Naval officer chosen for the young Elizabeth by her uncle Lord Mountbatten (yes, that villain of India’s Partition again) has done nothing to change his image as Prince Duffer. No, not even the sight of Smith’s quite delectable bare bum and Elizabeth’s all-loved-up look in the early episodes.
His blunders are legendary — such as the one about deaf children being hearing impaired because they were sitting near a Caribbean band he did not like: “If you’re near that music it’s no wonder you’re deaf."
Or when, in the pre-Snapchat and pre-internet days — he was touring an Edinburgh electronics factory, and said that a fusebox that was bursting with wires looked like it was “put in by an Indian”. If he said that now, the entire monarchy would have been banned.
But to a foreign field forever England — which is some parts of the Empire that still listen to BBC Radio and read The Sun (which lived up to its wonderfully goofy tradition by announcing he was dead) — he will always be the man who could never measure up to The Queen.
Hi @TheSun. Not sure that's supposed to have been published... pic.twitter.com/bBJHuA0iWl
— The Sun Apologies (@SunApology) May 4, 2017
In the days Prince Charles was considered cool (pre-Diana, of course), he was always the slightly aloof father who sent off the prince to the grinding discipline of Gordonstoun because he thought he wasn’t tough enough. Prince Charles, of course, proceeded to prove his father right by talking to plants and wanting to be Camilla Parker Bowles’ tampon.
Prince Philip was the not-so-amiable idiot who had to temper down his foreign-ness, much like Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert (who was German to Philip’s Greek and Danish origins). But he could never quite achieve either Albert’s iconic status or his hard-won popular appeal.
In public memory, he will always be the silly man walking three paces behind The Queen (in fact, his most memorable lines from Peter Morgan’s 2006 movie, The Queen, if I recall, were these: "Your tea is getting cold," and looking at the guest list for Princess Diana’s funeral: "A chorus line of soap stars and homosexuals"). A bit like the royal equivalent of Dennis Thatcher without the decency to keep his mouth shut.
But I say, in the age of Perfect Prince William and his even more perfect wife, one is almost nostalgic for the era of offence. Remember Prince Philip saying, during a trip to China, that: "If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed," or asking a Scottish driving instructor, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"
Ah. Makes one long for Diana’s malevolent never-ending revenge and Princess Margaret’s never ending scandalous love affairs.