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The night I watched the Full Monty with the Duke of Edinburgh
I knew I was giving too many interviews about the Duke of Edinburgh when, towards the end of one of them, I heard myself enthusiastically retelling the very story I had told at the beginning of the selfsame interview – word for word.
‘It’s such a great story, it certainly bears repeating,’ said the interviewer from Radio Leeds, obligingly.
In retrospect, I realised I had told that story 17 times to 16 different radio stations in the space of just two hours.
It is a good story. It’s the one about the Duke at the Royal Variety Performance discovering that the Act One finale was going to be an excerpt from The Full Monty and assuming it would be a tribute to Field Marshal Montgomery and the Battle of El Alamein.
When 18 strapping lads took to the stage and began to strip off, he sighed, I blanched, but the Queen did not flinch. The Duke then leant towards me and muttered, ‘You needn’t worry. She’s been to Papua New Guinea – she’s seen it all before.’
I told the story for the last time on The One Show on BBC1. I tried it out first at the rehearsal and it went down well, but I won’t be telling it again because, on transmission, there was a complaint. A viewer found the story ‘culturally inappropriate’ because it implicitly makes fun of the dress and form of traditional dances among people of the islands of the South West Pacific.
I am happy to drop it from my repertoire, not only because I have rather overtold it, but principally because I know Prince Philip was much more sensitive to this kind of thing than people might imagine.
When representatives of the Kastom people from the villages of Yaohnanen and Yakel on the South Pacific island of Tanna, in Vanuatu, who worshipped the prince as a god, last came to London to meet him, he agreed to see them at Buckingham Palace, but only in private.
If the press took a picture of him with them, he felt it might make them open to mockery and he did not want that – for their sakes, not his.
Prince Philip was embarrassed to be revered as a deity by anyone. That said, I reckon he may have had a hotline to the Almighty.
Thanks to the pandemic, he got the no-fuss funeral he prayed for – and in weather that was truly heavenly. And the following morning, when I was appearing via Zoom on BBC Breakfast to talk about it, mid-anecdote the line went down. Twice.
‘Divine intervention,’ said my wife. It was the Duke, I’m sure: ‘For God’s sake, shut up, man. We’ve heard quite enough from you, Brandreth.’
As the Duke’s biographer, I was contracted to the BBC for ten days from ‘the moment of the announcement’.
Consequently, I did everything I was asked, from the two-hour local-radio stint to Songs of Praise, via A Week in Westminster where I found myself involving Prince Philip posthumously in the Cameron-greensill lobbying debate. I revealed that, in the 1990s, when I was an MP, I had taken the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to Buckingham Palace, so the prince could pitch to him his ideas for curbing the worst excesses of press intrusion.
As happened with Mr Cameron, the minister listened to the Duke’s proposal politely and then ignored it.
The upside of my commitment to the BBC was having a ringside seat inside Windsor Castle on the day of the funeral.
It was a moving and historic day and I felt both blessed and honoured to be there, as the Queen and her family bade farewell to our nation’s longest-everserving consort, a quite remarkable man who led a most extraordinary life.
Prince Philip’s first journey by car was on the island of Corfu nearly 100 years ago when he was taken to his christening at a Greek Orthodox church in an old Mercedes that had once belonged to the German Kaiser.
Almost a century on, he made his last journey to St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in a Land Rover hearse built to his own specification. The commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards, who was one of the eight pall-bearers escorting the hearse, told me it was ‘quite a grumpy vehicle, rather noisy and not built to travel at 2 mph’ – not a bad description of the Duke in certain moods.
Are you on a hearse or in a hearse, I wonder?
I ask because when I showed Prince Philip the first draft of my biography of him, he reprimanded me for writing that during the war he had served on HMS Ramillies. ‘But you did serve on HMS Ramillies, sir,’ I insisted. ‘You showed me the logbooks.’
‘I did not serve on HMS Ramillies,’ he said. ‘You did,’ I protested. ‘I didn’t. I served in HMS Ramillies, not on HMS Ramillies. You don’t live on your house, do you? You live in your house. Don’t you know anything?’
Philip: The Final Portrait by Gyles Brandreth is published by Coronet