You’d never guess it from those risque quips, but Philip’s the ULTIMATE New Man

LAST week, I was asked on stage to reveal the biggest risk I had ever taken in my life. I answered instantly. ‘Getting married,’ I said, and explained that it was far harder and far longer than anything else so far (it’s OK – my husband was in the audience and he agreed he would have answered the same).

Then came the Prince Philip retirement news, and it struck me with force. Forget me and forget you and forget all of us. When it comes to mega-risk, it was the tall, young, blond Adonis whom the Queen Mum called ‘the Hun’ (and not in sense of, ‘you OK, hun?’) who took perhaps the biggest marital punt in history.

Before he married Princess Elizabeth, the future Duke of Edinburgh is said to have asked a relative: ‘Am I being very brave or very stupid?’

Phil the Greek was the ultimate alpha-male: tall, distinguished and handsome.

Yet he had to give up his Naval career, his name, his independence, his own personal sovereignty, his hopes of running the Navy like his Uncle Dickie – he had to give it all up to marry the woman he loved, and become a full-time and supportive ‘plus one’.

In many ways, the potential Playboy of the Western World became the first, the most visible, and most uxorious ‘New Man’ in British history – a role he has executed without ever losing his masculinity and… unique brand of humour. The 70-year Royal marriage therefore serves as an unexpected role model all subjects might do well to inspect, and emulate.

THE Queen and Duke of Edinburgh show that there is no right way or wrong way of being a couple, for the pair subverted traditional roles right from the moment they returned from his Naval posting in Malta in 1951.

On her accession, the young Queen put him i/c domestic duties while she did her everlasting day job of being part human, part divine, and Her Majesty, which she continues to this day.

He ran the household, the houses, arranged children’s education; when Windsor Castle burnt down, he brought the refurb in under budget and on time. In other words, as the Royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith says, ‘now we would call him a house-husband’.

For her part, his wife promised to ‘obey’ him in her wedding vows, and allowed him to advance his own causes and interests as far as she could, knowing that men are like sailors and come in with the tide. And now, just as Prince Philip stands down when he can no longer stand up, along comes an academic study to show that he played it just right from the start.

According to a journal called Organisational Science, the ‘societal norm’ is still that the husband has a more important job than the wife. But when she outranks him, in order for the marriage to thrive he has to provide more than emotional support, he has to be more than the Everest of rocks: the man has to provide tangible support too, in the shape of hands-on help around the house.

Now, I’m sure Philip doesn’t put on a pinny and do the hoovering, but he never shirks his unpaid domestic duties, and he’s played second fiddle and walked two steps behind his wife in an age when males are still the main breadwinners and mostly operate the main levers of power.

In my book it takes a very big man indeed to carry that off with such pep and zip for so long. And as you can tell by the Queen’s face every time she looks at him, Philip’s still got it, even at 95.