Prince Philip king of the politically incorrect

AP -Prince Philip, who died yesterday at age 99, spent more than seven decades in the shadow of his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, with great loyalty and a propensity to show little respect for political correctness.

“It is better to disappear than to reach the expiration date,” he had said a few years ago with his particular sense of humor.

Admirers of the British monarchy brought flowers and words of comfort to the royal residences at Windsor and Buckingham. Among the hundreds of bouquets of flowers that were piled up in front of the castle gates were some drawings of children. ‘Dear Queen Elizabeth, I am sorry for your husband Prince Philip,’ said one of them, full of hearts and flowers. For more than a year, the royal couple had been secluded in Windsor Castle due to the coronavirus pandemic.

If his wife, who came to the throne in 1952, broke all longevity records as monarch, Philip was the consort who held that honor the longest. It was since 2009 when it surpassed Carlota, the wife of George III.

“It is my rock. It has been my strength and my support ”, the queen once said, not inclined to show affection in public.

In 2017 he retired from public activities after having participated in more than 22 thousand official acts, but his main value was being “the only man in the world to treat the queen as a human being, as an equal,” he once explained. Lord Charteris, former private secretary of the monarch.

Tall and stiff, always behind the queen as required by protocol, Felipe assumed his secondary role with a better or worse disposition.

It took him years of apprenticeship, he admitted, to find his place in the shadow of Elizabeth II and in the heart of the British, but then he enjoyed a high popularity rating, as did his wife.

He often tried to get away with it but came to his senses.

Like in January 2019, when a traffic accident revealed that he was still driving at 97 years old. Despite criticism, he took the wheel again two days later and without wearing a seat belt. But three weeks later, he gave in to pressure and handed in his driver’s license.

A Vanuatu tribe came to venerate him as a divinity linked to the spirits of the Yasur volcano.

His temper was effectively volcanic, with no regard for political correctness, although in recent years he has calmed down.

“Have you managed to keep them from being eaten?” He asked a young British man who had just traveled from Papua New Guinea in 1998.

“You have mosquitoes, I have journalists,” he said in Dominica in 1966. Then he would compare journalists with the monkeys of Gibraltar.

On another occasion, a boy confessed to him that he wanted to be an astronaut and the duke replied that he was too fat to fly.

When asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union, he said: “I would love to visit Russia, even though those bastards murdered half my family” (alluding to the fate of the Romanovs).

His environment heard him curse his luck a thousand times, growl against the loss of values ​​or against the follies of his four children in the 1980s, and even against the queen’s “damn dogs”, always sticking to her legs.

“People have the impression that Prince Philip does not care what they think of him and they are right,” said former Prime Minister Tony Blair in his memoirs.

Of German descent, the Duke was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on June 10, 1921, on the Greek island of Corfu. He was the fifth child of Alicia de Battenberg and Andrés de Grecia. The family fled months later when the Hellenic republic was proclaimed and took refuge near Paris.

His father was a regular at the Monte Carlo casinos. The mother, depressed, entered a convent. Felipe was 10 years old. Left in the hands of distant relatives, he attended schools in France, Germany, and Great Britain until he ended up in an austere Scottish boarding school.

He then joined the Royal Navy (RN)and actively participated in the fighting during World War II in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.

He was a handsome 18-year-old when he met Isabel before the war. Lilibet, as her mother nicknamed her, was 13 years old and fell in love. They were married eight years later, on November 20, 1947. Philip, appointed Duke of Edinburgh, had to renounce his previous titles of nobility and his Orthodox religion.

In February 1952, the premature death of his father-in-law, King George VI, marked the end of his career as an officer in the Navy and inaugurated that of prince consort that followed him for the rest of his life.

The death of Prince Philip is a particularly hard blow for Queen Elizabeth, already very affected by several family crises.