Phil, the Basil Fawlty of the Royal Family
Before I start this column, would you move your head just a little bit to the left? And just a little bit lower? Lovely! Now, could I ask you to take your right hand out of your pocket, and then perhaps cross your arms? Great! And then look ever so slightly to your left! Wonderful!
fantastic! Now, we’re all set! But first — sorry about this! — would you take your jacket off? Super! Here goes! Actually, while we’re about it, could you try moving your head just a touch to the right? And just a little bit higher?
Small wonder that Prince Philip lost his patience with a photographer who was faffing around before a group shot of Battle of Britain veterans. ‘Just take the f***ing picture!’ he snapped.
He is now aged 94, so his time is precious. How many hours, days, weeks, years of his life have been lost looking into the middle- distance while photographers nancied around, adjusting the lighting, changing cameras, altering poses and making their endless little tweaks?
Prince Philip is often portrayed as the Basil fawlty of the royal family, ranting and raving and generally going berserk while the Queen takes on the Sybil fawlty role, picking up the pieces and beaming heroically while reassur-ing the guests that normal service will shortly be resumed.
Yet it is Basil, not Sybil, with whom most us identify. We may raise our eyebrows and tut-tut when Prince Philip says: ‘Just take the f***ing picture!’ But we know exactly what he means.
The British like to condemn others for characteristics they admire in themselves. This phenomenon might best be conjugated like this:
I speak my mind.
YOU speak out of turn.
HE puts his foot in it.
or:
I am frank.
YOU are outspoken.
HE is just plain rude.
It is the fate of members of the royal family and their relations always to be linked to a single word. These words range from high to low, or from ‘duty’ for The Queen and ‘playboy’ for Prince Andrew to ‘pushy’ for Princess Michael of Kent and ‘bottom’ for Pippa Middleton. But the word associated with Prince Philip, at least for the past half century, is ‘gaffe’.
Sometimes, this epithet is merited. for instance, during the royal tour of China in 1986, when he was asked his opinion of Beijing he replied: ‘Ghastly.’ This may have been true, but, in diplomatic terms, it must be judged a gaffe. Anyone who has ever written a thank-you letter knows that tact is allotted the driver’s seat, with truth sitting quietly in the back, sucking on a boiled sweet.
Similarly, it would probably have been more tactful if, on his trip to Canada in 1976, he had not snapped: ‘We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.’
And, sometimes, like a lot of slightly deaf people, he speaks a touch too loudly, unaware that there are people eavesdropping.
‘I wish he’d turn the microphone off!’ he was overheard saying when elton John was performing at the royal Variety Show in 2001.
But one man’s gaffe is another man’s ice-breaker. In his wonderfully sharp biography of the royal couple, Philip And elizabeth: Portrait of A Marriage, Gyles Brandreth made it clear that Prince Philip’s way of kick-starting a conversation with strangers, who may well be over-awed and nervous, is to say something deliberately jokey or controversial.
This gives them a licence to reply in a similarly sparky fashion, and thus the conversa-tion catches fire.
Meanwhile, the Queen settles for something bland such as: ‘ Have you come far?’, which guarantees an equally bland reply.
Philip’s remarks, or ‘gaffes’, are, more often than not, against contemporary opinion.
In 1995, he said of soldiers receiving stress counselling: ‘We didn’t have counsellors rush-ing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking: “Are you all right — are you sure you don’t have a ghastly problem?” You just got on with it!’
SHOCK! Horror! But those who contrived to feel upset forgot that Prince Philip himself came from the most stressful of backgrounds: his father was a sozzled playboy who died on a yacht in Monte Carlo, and for two and a half years, while the young Philip was at boarding school, his mother was locked up in a psychiatric clinic as a paranoid schizophrenic.
According to a reliable biographer, Sigmund freud himself examined her, and proposed artificially reducing her sexual appetite with X-rays.
Prince Philip’s matter-of-fact view of the world must surely be a reaction to this profoundly rackety upbringing. And his bluntness does get results.
Look at the video of him barking: ‘Just take the f***ing picture!’ His intervention may be blunt, but it is also effective: the photographer immediately scuttles away and gets down to business.