Caveat: this is an opinion piece by an Ozzie writer, tongue in cheek so hope it doesn't offend..

Goodnight, sweet prince: Yes, Philip was also Danish, though not all that sweet

When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

No sign yet of celestial fireworks on the death of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh et al, but Shakespeare is always useful for poshing up a piece on royalty. Best to get in early before the baying pack of sodden tabloid fabulists falls all over it.

In truth, my knowledge of the Windsors is patchy. Working in London, I once had drinks at the Palace with Princess Anne: jolly good gin and canapés, Ma’am, and much angst at the sad decline of English village cricket. Mostly, though, we’re all stuck with the lying tabloid rags of what used to be Fleet Street. QUEEN’S GRIEF: ANDREW’S TEEN LOVER, etc.


Mon Repos Palace, where Prince Philip was born.

But diligent research reveals that Philip sprang from the usual bed-hopping crew of minor European bluebloods descended, inevitably, from the fecund loins of Queen Victoria. His mother, Princess Alice of Something-or-Other, bore him on the kitchen table in a crumbling villa in Corfu. A year later, with a junta of Greek colonels howling for his princely father’s blood, the wee mite was concealed in an orange crate and spirited away on a Royal Navy destroyer. From then on his mother largely ignored him, sent him to live with the English Mountbattens (née Battenburg), succumbed to schizophrenia and founded a convent of Greek Orthodox nuns. All very complicated. One of Philip’s brothers-in-law was an SS officer.

Explains a lot, really. After that it could only be up. If up is the word for a life of trailing your queenly missus, hands clasped behind your back, enquiring earnestly how long the lady mayoress has been making those delicious scones and do send the recipe to the Palace. Questions, always questions. Do you export many Morris Minors to Brazil? The worst gig, I suppose, was gritting the teeth to hobnob with some ghastly terrorist who two years before had been murdering your countrymen but was now the self-anointed president of some African hellhole where the Union Jack was being ceremonially lowered for the last time. Must we go, dear? Yes, Philip, we must.

No wonder the poor bastard got bored and lashed out. In what they used to call Fleet Street, an entire industry sprang up to report Philip’s gaffes. (The word is only ever used by journalists, and only in respect of His Royal Highness.) “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed,” he once told some British students in China.


If only Indigenous Australians had retuned fire on one of Philip’s notorious gaffes.

My favourite HRH gaffe actually lead-ballooned in Australia, when he asked a group of grizzled Indigenous elders “Are you lot still throwing spears ?” The retort should have been, “And are you lot still stealing our land, raping our women and poisoning the flour?” but, esprit d’escalier, nobody gets that lucky.

Philip first visited Sydney as an unmarried midshipman in a battleship in 1940 when, as one does, one cut a carnal swathe through the young ladies of the port. For years afterwards royal tour organisers lived in fear that some cash-strapped Old Girl from Ascham or Abbotsleigh would seize the timely moment to turn a handy buck from New Idea with PHILIP: OUR NIGHTS OF PASSION. All hell did break loose on the first royal tour in 1954 when husband and wife had a blazing row at a homestead in Victoria, the travelling hacks deliciously startled when a flustered Philip bounded out the door and onto the lawn, dodging an airborne tennis racket and sandshoes hurled at him by a shouting monarch. The press secretary swore the gang to silence on pain of The Tower.

For a chap who has every gong going, from The Garter to Ethiopia’s Grand Cross with Chain of the Order of the Queen of Sheba, to Mexico’s Collar of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the Australian knighthood so madly conferred on him by the Onioneater must have been a surprise.



Such an anti-climax when the Australia Post package arrived with the mail at breakfast:

What have you got there, Philip?

Apparently I’m an Australian Knight.

How lovely. Another gee-gaw to add to the collection. Do pass the marmalade.

Royalty is inherently ridiculous, as it can only be. The serfs expect you to lead a home life of exemplary virtue while never having to pick up the dog poo, file a tax return or paint the bathroom ceiling. You make your own fun, although I don’t think it’s true Philip was the hooded, naked waiter at those rollicking country house weekends at Cliveden in the 1960s as The Crown suggested. Incongruous is OK. Bizarrely, you can be president of the World Wildlife Fund and still spend the summer slaughtering grouse on an industrial scale on some blasted heath in Scotland.

Anyway. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Yes, Philip was also Danish, though not all that sweet. No better than he should have been but not nearly as bad as he might have been.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/ ... 575kf.html