As Britain’s longest-serving consort, Philip outlasted 14 prime ministers and carried out a staggering 22,000 solo public engagements
Prince Philip played a pivotal, yet often underestimated, role in ensuring the survival of the modern British monarchy. His self-confidence and irreverence served as an invaluable foil for the young Queen Elizabeth, enabling her to overcome her natural shyness and giving her the confidence and stability to reign so calmly and irreproachably for such a long time. As Britain’s longest-serving consort, he outlasted 14 prime ministers and carried out a staggering 22,000 solo public engagements, joking shortly before his retirement from royal duties in 2017 that he was probably the world’s most experienced plaque-unveiler. When the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah told the prince how sorry he was to hear he was standing down, Philip riposted in characteristic fashion: ‘Well, I can’t stand up much longer!’ Prince Philip’s achievement was all the more remarkable given that his overtly masculine, forthright and restless character did not obviously equip him to play second fiddle. Yet ever since the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952, he had been required to address his wife as ‘Ma’am’ in public and to bow whenever she entered a room. I first had the idea of writing his biography when he was in his late eighties, around the time he broke the record set by Queen Charlotte, George III’s consort from 1761 until her death 57 years later. However, my inspiration was not so much the thought of his extraordinarily enduring public service but rather a story I had read about the prince once asking his equerry to go and meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing, west London. Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, the said equerry, had been on the prince’s staff from 1952 until 1955, before climbing to great heights in the RAF. ‘Oh God,’ exclaimed an official at the Ministry of Defence, when the equerry’s memoirs came out in 1987, ‘How unfortunate that the public will learn that the man who had his finger on the button of Strike Command was seeing little green men.’ The public also learned that for several years in the early 1950s, Prince Philip had enthusiastically exchanged reports of UFOs with his uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a fellow subscriber to the Flying Saucer Review, and kept himself informed about all the latest developments in the field.
