Prince Philip (1921-2021)
April 10, 2021
IT IS announced that Prince Philip, the Queen’s cantankerous consort, has died at the tragically early age of 99. The news and social media websites are flooded with talk about duty and devotion. Britain goes into full tribute mode, with an entre night’s TV - including the new series of Have I Got News For You - replaced by hour upon hour of eulogy to the deceased Duke and praise for all the thankless “service” he provided to the country for the past seventy-odd years.
The BBC clearly hasn’t learned from past mistakes: fawning royalists now constitute only a small (and diminishing) share of the British population and not everyone wants to watch the same old lavish, lachrymose tributes played in a loop on two separate channels for a whole evening. Some people were especially irked by the decision to shut down BBC4:
Dear BBC, Next time you sneer at North Korea TV for its slavish devotion to the Dear Leader just remember how you're behaving right now.
But really, the BBC couldn’t win. Normally accused of being insufficiently patriotic, it has been castigated over the last day because its sombre reverence failed to reflect the opinion of a proportion of the population that doesn’t like royalty. The corporation, which hand-wrings with the best, even set up a website allowing people to complain about the excessiveness of its coverage, which was in turn criticised by the anti-BBC zealots.
This probably goes to show how divided Britain has now become. For years, the BBC’s patriotism deficit was actually a source of pride for the majority of British citizens. Now, as the country’s self-confidence is sapped still further, a growing number of people seem to think it has an obligation to fluff and cheerlead.
Still, elsewhere on Twitter, celebs have been climbing over one another to spew out their own sycophantic recollections of a ten-second conversation they had with Philip twenty years ago, from which they almost invariably deduced that he was “charming” and “fiercely intelligent” and “eternally curious”. They all seem to have perceived a twinkle in the old sod’s eyes.
Philip’s youngest son Edward put out a statement which seems to suggest that all the “gaffes” made by Philip over the years were merely a consequence of his sense of humour, and were more often than not misunderstood or taken out of context by the “media”. Presumably that includes the time he warned British students in Beijing that they would contract “slitty-eyed disease” if they stayed there too long.
Private Eye, April 16, 2021
But I suppose now is not the time to be cynical. I watch a tiny bit of last night’s coverage on the BBC - a small enough portion to avoid feeling sick - and even this hardened, hostile republican started to feel moved by the recollections of this redoubtable man’s long and remarkable life. He was clearly more than a mere royal consort, and some have even described him as the ultimate outsider and interloper: an obscure, penniless Danish-German aristocrat evicted from Greece, where he had somehow been made a prince, who transformed himself into a blustering Colonel Blimp and comedy xenophobe, still racing his car like Mr. Toad well into his nineties. Even his gaffes - which were more a reflection of his hostility to received opinion - gained cult status. In Unherd, Ed West writes:
There was the time that Philip accepted a gift from a local in Kenya, telling her she was a kind woman, and then adding: “You are a woman, aren’t you?” Or the occasion he remarked “You managed not to get eaten, then?” to a student trekking in Papua New Guinea. Then there was his World Wildlife Fund speech in 1986, when he said: “If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” Well, he wasn’t wrong.
