Better in their words…

He began with the inevitable nod to the two nations’ divergent histories, noting that some time earlier, in their great wisdom, his compatriots had decided to go it alone.

“Oh yes!” cried the prince from a sedentary position, fortified, no doubt, by a couple of glasses of the embassy’s very good wine. “And how’s that working out for you?”

It was a good question then, and it’s more apt than ever now given America’s current predicament. The people that once boldly threw off the tyranny of a distant monarch now seem to be meekly submitting to the diktats of a regnant class and ideology that tolerate less independence of thought and action than King George III did.

The prince’s death last week, two months short of his centenary, presents a timely paradox for the modern United States. Forgive me for saying so to this staunchly republican nation, but what America desperately needs these days is a Prince Philip.

Not, I hasten to add, the sonorous titles, the silly costumes or the hereditary rule—though the U.S. probably now has more of a functioning nepotistic aristocracy than Britain does.

Nor, on this occasion, do I mean the spirit of service and duty he personified for seven decades as the (mostly) uncomplaining loyal lieutenant—though we could surely use more of that in the public life of the nation.

If the American vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit, in a gentle paraphrase of one of its more self-aware incumbents, imagine being the semi-invisible second-in-command to a ceremonial leader whose principal daily responsibilities involve opening schools and smiling politely as some behatted guest fumbles with the sandwiches at a garden party. Then imagine doing it every day, not for four years or eight, but for 69.

The Prince Philip America needs is the man who was completely unafraid to say the unsayable.

As the prince did at that dinner, he had an unerring capacity to ask awkward questions, speak inconvenient truths and challenge polite orthodoxies.

When we are obligated to toe an increasingly stultifying conventional line, the queen’s consort was the human antidote to the virus of verbal oppression that has us in a death grip. You’d search a very long time to find a less woke individual than the duke of Edinburgh.

“It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons,” he said once, on being shown some indescribable work of primitive Ethiopian art.

“That’s about the right number,” he told an interlocutor, who had explained that the Parliament of some foreign country he was visiting had only 200 members. “We have 650 and most of them are a complete bloody waste of time.”

Or how about just, “Ghastly”—his reply when asked what he’d made of his first visit to Beijing, in 1986.

It’s easy to portray the late duke as a human gaffe machine; an old buffoon mouthing the prejudices of a colonial age from the comfort of a gilded sofa.

But he wasn’t some clownish figure constantly saying rude things about foreigners and socialists. He was acutely conscious of his role as an iconoclast cheerfully smashing the revered verities of progressive modernity.

“Fashion is not restricted to clothes, and when ideas become fashionable they are just as resistant to objective criticism as the length of skirts,” he told the (unfashionably Thatcherite) Institute of Economic Affairs in the early 1980s. “That is why all economic ideas need to be freely discussed and judged against the facts of real life.’ ”

He could be offensive, of course. If the fragile little adolescent minds that now control most of our media and cultural institutions are “triggered” by an ugly word, God knows what they would make of an outspoken’ duke’s taxonomy.

But he understood well something we have lost—that being offended is part of life.

Fortunately for him, as the monarch’s husband, there was no canceling Philip.

At least not in the modern sense. As a proper European aristocrat, he knew there are worse things that can happen to you than having to listen to something you don’t want to hear. “I would very much like to go to Russia,” he said at the height of the Cold War, “although the bastards murdered half my family.”