How Philip ticked off the royal snappers

TO MARK Prince Andrew’s arrival, the Queen and Philip asked the photographer Cecil Beaton to take some private pictures — which were released much later for public view.

The baby was then one month old and Beaton’s diaries give a revealing and acerbic account of the event.

The bright red dress that the Queen had worn for the occasion was ‘better than most of hers’, he thought.

‘She seemed affable enough but showed no signs of real interest in anything...Not one word of conversation — only a little well-bred amusement at the way I gave my instructions in a stream of asides.’

Soon, Beaton had the feeling that no one was bothering to give his photo session the attention it merited.

‘The odds were ganging up against me...I clicked like mad at anything that seemed even passable,’ he wrote. ‘But the weight of the Palace crushed me.’ He was particularly irked by Philip — ‘this hearty naval type,’ as Beaton described him in the diary.

The Prince, ‘in that maddening royal way’, kept on butting in and making suggestions — one of which was that Beaton should take his photos from the top of a ladder.

Eventually, Philip decided to take his own pictures with his own camera — the ultimate insult to a professional.

He behaved in the same dismissive way with photographer Terry O’Neill at the christening of Prince Andrew’s younger daughter, Princess Eugenie, in December 1990.

While Terry, who works very quickly, was snapping the christening group at Sandringham, Prince Philip kept saying: ‘Come on! Come on! Haven’t we done enough?’

To cap it all, he added in a rude aside: ‘If he hasn’t got what he wants by now, he’s an even worse photographer than I thought!’