With the turmoil around Brexit, the country is deeply divided. However, over the past couple of weeks, there is one person on whom some agreement has emerged: Prince Philip, 97, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband to Queen Elizabeth.
A photograph of the controversial Prince, driving without a seat belt on the Queen’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, England, last weekend — just two days after he had been in a car crash involving two women and a small baby — triggered outrage online and offline as well as a wider debate. Even the usually pro-Royal family Daily Mail was scathing. “It’s time the Queen gave her rude, stubborn, insensitive, arrogant and dangerous Duke of Hazard his driving marching orders,” declared its high-profile, right-wing columnist Piers Morgan in a piece that described the Prince as the “rudest human being” he had ever met.
The police’s response further deepened public indignation as Norfolk police said they had provided the Prince simply with “suitable words of advice” after the image of him without a seat belt emerged. Less than 24 hours after the crash, it emerged that a replacement Land Rover had been delivered to the Prince, who — according to U.K. press reports — had told the police that he had been momentarily dazzled by the sun. Adding to the furore was the apparent nonchalant way in which the situation had been dealt with by Palace authorities who insisted that messages “of support” had been sent to the two women in the minivan that had been hit. A family liaison officer had told them that the “Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would like to be remembered to you. That’s not an apology. Or even a well-wish,” one of the women, whose wrist was broken in the crash, told The Daily Mirror .
Back in the spotlight
The controversy has brought the Prince, who officially retired from public life in 2017, firmly back into the public spotlight. Born in Corfu in 1921 as Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, he moved to Britain and served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, marrying the then-Princess Elizabeth in 1947.
While acknowledged for some of the programmes he set up, he has a notorious reputation for making offensive remarks. In 1999, he was forced to apologise after pointing to an old, messy fuse box at an Edinburgh factory and remarking that it looked like it had been “put in by an Indian.” More than a decade earlier, during a visit to China in 1986, he had told British students that they could become “slitty-eyed” if they stayed in the country any longer. In 2009, looking at the name badge of Atul Patel, a prominent businessman, who was attending an event for British Indians at Buckingham Palace, he remarked that “there’s a lot of your family in tonight”. While many have condemned such remarks, others within the British media have often dismissed them as quips.
“Philip has long been given a free pass on bad behaviour. In part this is because he targets minorities, in part this is because there is a notion that amends need to be made to his masculine ego for the fact that he has come second to his wife in rank,” says Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at Cambridge University, who points to the role that dramas such as the popular television series The Crown have played in perpetuating this sympathetic perspective. “I think that this time, precisely because it doesn’t involve insults to ethnic or sexual minorities or women, there’s a much clearer sense of double standards at work. However, I don’t think it will last. Media culture in Britain, for one thing, is extremely subservient to the monarchy and there is rarely any meaningful criticism of the Royals.”
Vidya Ram works for The Hindu and is based in London.
