THE DUKE OF HAZARD?

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It was “the closest the Prince Consort has got to killing another human being since the Second World War”, said Sean O’grady in The Independent. Last week, while driving near the Sandringham Estate, Prince Philip was involved in a collision with a car that was carrying a baby and two women, one of whom suffered a broken wrist. “I’m such a fool,” the Duke of Edinburgh is reported to have said, as a passer-by pulled him from the wreckage of his overturned Land Rover. The accident, which took place as he turned onto the busy A149, could have been very serious, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. Mercifully, “catastrophe was avoided”. And yet, over the following days, “royal officials and Prince Philip himself” contrived to turn what should have been a “happy escape” story into a “rather discreditable” tale that will, at the very least, have “puzzled some members of the public”.

First there was the “almost instant” delivery to Sandringham of a replacement Land Rover; then an “unrepentant prince” was pictured driving it without a seatbelt on a public road. To make matters worse, the woman injured in the crash revealed that, days later, she had still not received an apology, only a poorly worded expression of good wishes. The whole business has the makings of an entirely avoidable “PR disaster”, said Harry Mount in The Daily Telegraph. Rather than leaping back into his car, the Duke should have lain low at Sandringham, while relying on a chauffeur. And whatever palace advisers might have said, he should have picked up the phone to the woman injured and said sorry himself.

Police are investigating the incident, said The Guardian. In the meantime, the Duke’s family, and others, will be wondering if the time has come for this famously keen motorist to “hang up the driving gloves”. But although age has been a factor in some well-publicised accidents, the evidence suggests that if any one group is particularly dangerous on the road, it is not the old: “young male drivers were found by one study to be four times as likely to crash as the over-70s”. Still, the Prince, having been an excellent driver for many years, is now 97, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. It is hard for people as they age to give up their independence – and generally, they should be left to “get on with what they love doing”. But with driving, “there are third parties” to consider. As a naval officer during the Second World War, he is thought to have “saved many lives”. It would be “tragic” if, in his last years, he did the opposite.