Philip of Edinburgh, prince of Greece and Denmark has died. At the ripe old age of 99, just two months earlier, he had a full century of life. Consort of Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth realms, she will go down in history, as well as being the unique and adored love of the longest-lived regent on earth, as a unmatched gaffeur.
Born in Corfu and a direct descendant of the first sea lord Louis of Battenberg, he renounced his Germanic titles by adopting the surname Mountbatten. In 1939, the same year in which he met the young Elizabeth on a visit to Dartmouth, he enlisted in the Royal British Navy, where he reached the rank of frigate captain in the 1950s, but never took part in fundamental naval battles during the Second World War. Tall, slender, blond and lovable in his sailor’s blazer, he entertained the then very young and future regent of the Kingdom so effectively, that he met a languid correspondence, then culminated in the official engagement in 1946, and, having renounced the titles of Prince of Greece and Denmark, in marriage to the princess.
At first he had to be content with the simple title of lord, later assuming the title of Duke of Edinburgh. Symbol of that distant and rebellious little island, passionate and skilled polo player yachtman, even Lord Grand Admiral since 2011, the elegant Filippo has always appeared as a taciturn ornament at court, while abroad he regularly went wild with gaffe memorable that in these hours are bouncing on the web; where many are discovering, perhaps too late, and passing down an example never to be followed in society – unless one sleeps in the same bed as the “mistress” of Buckingham Palace.
An astute diplomat, the handsome Filippo has always honored his interlocutors with pearls of candor as powerful as cannon fire, which in the long years spent wandering around the five continents have penetrated, demolished, sunk any label devoted to “politically correct”.
Lord Mountbatten never spared himself and he never spared anyone. From children just met, like thirteen-year-old Andrew Adams, whose desire to go to space was shattered by Filippo’s nutritional considerations: “You’re a little fat to be an astronaut, you should lose weight”; to the president of Nigeria, who welcomes him in the typical costumes of his country he was asked if he was “in pajamas.” Olimpionica was the gaffe addressed to his second child, Anna, an equestrian athlete who competed for the kingdom in ’76: “If something does not darken or eat hay, a you don’t like her, “he told reporters, certainly winning the acclaim of the weekly” Cavalli e Segugi. “Cinephile expert, not particularly familiar with modern technology, however, once it seems he asked Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett:” You work in the cinema ? Well, can you fix the DVD player for me? ”And there would be many others already inscribed in the legend, including the one addressed to the tender koalas of the British overseas lands: for him” iattoli that carry only diseases “.
Reputed several times to be truly the only one in the world to be able to say “Shut up” at his royal height (definitely an inconsolable trauma for Michela Murgia, who among other things will have hated the numerous medal and flaunted uniforms), three years ago he had retired to private life given the benefits he had granted to the world in long service. As a final official engagement he reviewed a Royal Marines parade, unit elite of the Navy. According to the statistics consulted by the experts, in his sixty-five-year career he attended “22,219 solo engagements, 637 official visits and gave 5,500 speeches”. Speeches that, however, will never be worth one of the battle horses that made him famous in the world; and that at the beginning of the great pandemic that has now haunted us for over a year – just when everyone was puzzling whether at the Whuan wet market it was a pangolin or a bat the delicious meal that made it possible spillover theorized by David Quammen – came back very topical: “If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has wings and it is not an airplane, or it swims and it is not a submarine, the Chinese eat it”. This diplomatic masterpiece, which in comparison the private chair from Erdogan to Ursula von der Leyen is a trivial matter, was delivered during a speech to the attention of the WWF, was a distant 1986.