Mon Repos Palace,where Prince Philip was born.
But diligent research reveals that Philip sprang from the usualbed-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.Credit:AP
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 fromNew 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.