The fella who belongs to Mrs Queen

PRINCE Philip, who today celebrates his 94th birthday, confesses he is an expert in dontapedology, the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it. Few would disagree. From calling the Chinese ‘slitty-eyed’ and Hungarians ‘pot-bellied’ to condemning most MPs as ‘a complete bloody waste of time’, his most outrageous sayings have had us gasping and chuckling in equal measure.

Now author Nigel Cawthorne has put together an affectionate compendium, bringing together many less well-known stories about the prince alongside the public gaffes for which he is renowned.

Cawthorne argues it’s thanks largely to his blunt and forthright manner that Prince Philip, the longest-serving spouse of a British monarch, has grown into something of a national treasure, a monument to a vanishing form of humour we ought to celebrate. As one bemused spectator at a carriage-driving competition - where, red-faced and struggling to control his horses, the prince bellowed: “Come on you bloody idiots” – commented: “It was marvellous. He was just like his Spitting Image character.”

Indeed it has been hard, at times, to distinguish Philip’s public image from the blunderbuss-toting, expletive-laden puppet from the cutting satirical TV show of the eighties and nineties.

At the age of 21, the future Prince Philip wrote to a relative: “I know you will never think much of me. I say things out of turn," confessing, in later years: “I know I am rude. But it’s fun.”

Both a Prince of Greece and Denmark, after a turbulent childhood during which he was passed around family members, even marriage to the heir to the British throne in 1952 didn't give him the security he craved. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba, the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.”

He gave up a career in the Navy to join an unusual royal world where, in his own words, he ‘traipses around’ as a ‘fella who belongs to Mrs Queen’. In the intervening years, Philip has dedicated himself to being a loyal, if entertaining, consort, getting involved in organisations from the Royal Variety Club to the MCC, while setting up the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme.

He quickly came to the conclusion his main job was ‘not to get in the way’. But within the royal family ‘firm’ Philip saw himself as the sort of pragmatic facilitator and banger together of heads. “He dislikes intellectuals, bureaucrats, wafflers, wishy-washy lefties, romantics and, of course, journalists,” says Cawthorne.

And it’s probably fair to say he never felt a real affinity with the North. When he met two students, one from Liverpool, the other from Manchester, in 2012 he asked: “Do you fight?” Next, he came across a student with a Sheffield accent: “Do you understand each other?” he asked.

Nor did he ever take to Prime Minister and Sedgefield MP Tony Blair: “Bring back Mrs T, that’s what I say,” he remarked. When Blair was re-elected in 2005, Philip was characteristically blunt: “Well bugger me with a ragman’s trumpet.”

Blair shouldn’t have been so surprised when Philip did the cooking while Her Royal Highness washed the dishes at a barbecue at Balmoral. After all Philip did tell the Scottish WI in 1961: “British women can’t cook.” Another North-East Labour MP, Chris Mullin, got short shrift when he asked, at the opening of the new GCHQ building: “Would Charles approve?” “Charles who?” the prince replied.

The prince has made it plain being liked has never bothered him, which is just as well : “It’s safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.”

In the Sixties, he complained about society’s pervasive laziness, exemplified in the North-East’s own perennially unemployed working class cartoon figure, Andy Capp: “I dare say there will always be a number of Andy Capps in the community. But more leisure, education, mobility and money are going to make matters worse ,” he said.

And he won’t have had many fans in the region at the height of the 1981 recession when, revealing a remarkable lack of insight into the lives of ordinary working people, he announced: “A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now everybody’s got more leisure time, they’re complaining they’re unemployed. People can’t seem to make up their minds what they want.”

On one memorable trip to the North-East, Philip stormed out onto Newcastle Airport’s tarmac in his Field Marshal uniform, bellowing: “Where’s my bloody plane?” Air traffic control had to politely inform him he had arrived half an hour early.

His memory, he admits, is going. Now entering his 95th year, he says: “I don’t spend a lot of time looking back. I reckon I’ve done my bit. I want to enjoy myself for a bit now.”

But he dismisses longstanding rumours of his womanising tendencies: “For the past 40 years I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me. How the hell could I get away with anything like that?” he told one interviewer in 1992.

To Philip, duty is all: “My job, first, second and last is never to let the Queen down.”

I Know I Am Rude But It Is Fun by Nigel Cawthorne (Gibson Square, £8.99)