His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Richard Graham Excerpts

Monday 12th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

As he was famously uninterested in what others thought about him and perhaps not much given to self-reflection, I doubt that His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh would have approved much of these deliberations on him. In truth, we have all learnt so much about him and this great long life so well lived that I hope that other members of the royal family will take great solace and pride in understanding the volume of the tributes from around the country today. The main reason for that is that the Duke’s intense curiosity about the world around him, perhaps excepting the occasional human tendency to bellyache or sit on the fence, struck home to millions of people not just in our country but around the Commonwealth and in the wider world.

I saw that at first hand, particularly on issues to do with the Commonwealth, and I am grateful for the comments from the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), who rightly highlighted that, too. It was after I had created the all-party parliamentary group for the Commonwealth. The Prince’s great encouragement was not to talk about things but to do them, and time and again all of us who had meetings with him saw that. It was almost as if, although Churchill coined the phrase “action this day” during world war two, that was the driving motto for his life. That came through in all our constituencies, too. In his two visits to Gloucester with Her Majesty the Queen in 2003 and 2009, he made it clear that he thought that there was still plenty to be done to repair the cathedral and regenerate the city. He was absolutely right on both points.

Sometimes, of course, his great knack for getting straight to the point could bruise some and amuse others. At the state banquet for the Indonesian President SBY in 2012, I was let off quite lightly, but when George Osborne was introduced to the President as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a phrase that the President may not have come across before, the Duke intervened to clarify. He pointed at George Osborne: “He’s the chap who is in charge of the money, only we haven’t got any at the moment.” This ability to lighten what could be a formal or even pompous occasion was something that many in this House have seen in action.

The Prime Minister and others touched on the grand themes of the Duke’s life, celebrating above all our greatest ever consort’s duty and service. We all have family or constituents who have benefited from the great confidence-building of the DofE Award. We now recognise even more than before his groundbreaking interest in the environment and nature, but perhaps the vast accumulation of anecdotes from so many people touched by his interest and wit leave us another legacy. Life is a gift, but there is plenty of hard work and sadness involved, and it is made more tolerable by being amused by its absurdities and intended or unintended moments of fun.

His Royal Highness was a refugee, a man of no fixed abode, let alone a home, until he married. I doubt that any refugee has ever given greater service to his or her adopted country. In that spirit and on behalf of all my constituents in Gloucester, may I offer my grateful thanks for the Duke of Edinburgh’s immense work for our monarchy, our nation, the Commonwealth and beyond and for the great sense of fun with which he approached it?