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slightest example of stupidity, incompetence or humbug leaving officials, politicians and
self-satisfied businessmen dismayed in his wake. On one occasion the mayor of a local
town was proudly showing him round a new housing development carefully zoned
according to price. ‘And that’, the mayor pointed, ‘is the lower income area.’ ‘Oh, you
mean the ghetto,’ said the Duke.
Philip’s abrasiveness with the media and his sensitivity to what newspapers say about
him have not helped the royal family. Criticism is met with anger, kind words ignored.
In the early days Mike Parker used to call up his fellow Thursday Club member Arthur
Christiansen for advice about his master’s bad relations with the press (and was
continuing to do so as late as 1963). ‘Usually, of course, when it was too late for advice
to have had any effect,’ Christiansen commented. 8 As early as 1955 during the
Margaret-Townsend furore, one of Elizabeth’s Private Secretaries admitted to Harold
Nicolson that ‘the Duke is beginning to get journalists on his nerves… and that [the
Palace] is always afraid of some outburst’. 9 The bad blood between Philip and the press
had begun with his eve-of-wedding party, and continued through such episodes as the
pelting of cameramen with nuts in Gibraltar, ‘mistakenly’ turning a hosepipe on
reporters at the Chelsea Flower Show, and telling a climbing photographer that he
hoped he would break his neck. Even his friendship with Christiansen did not prevent
him referring publicly to the Daily Express as ‘a bloody awful newspaper’. To be fair to
Philip, John Gordon of the Sunday Express was frequently provocative and went to
considerable lengths to discover things that might be discreditable to the royal family
and particularly to the Mountbattens and Philip. In 1961 he reported to Beaverbrook
that he was in hot water with the Duke of Edinburgh because he had found out that the
Duke was the only civilian helicopter pilot who was allowed to fly over the house tops
of London. ‘The safety rule applied to all others is that helicopters must not leave the
line of the river’; it was breached by Philip every time he flew his helicopter in and out
of Buckingham Palace. He also claimed that the ‘purple band’ (exclusion of all other
aircraft from the route of the royal plane) was unofficially applied to Philip’s helicopter
flights, disrupting other air services. 10
Elizabeth did what she could to mitigate the difficulties of her husband’s position.
Many men might have resented being permanently publicly relegated to second place.
Even in the midst of her family, Elizabeth is still the Queen, the ‘Lord’s anointed’. She
comes into the room last and if her husband happened to be late and enter the room
after her, he would apologize. While some men would find this a problem, for Philip,
born into a royal family himself, it was accepted etiquette, a part of life. He had greater
problems with the weighty traditions of the British court and its resistance to change –
the ‘men with moustaches’ who resented him as a foreigner. Elizabeth realized this and
to bolster up his position and compensate as far as she could for the hurt caused by the
controversy over the Mountbatten/Windsor name she had made several public gestures.
In September of the year of her accession she had granted him precedence next to
herself and in December she had informed the Cabinet that she wished her husband to be
appointed to the highest rank in each of the three services. He should be Admiral of the