I once had an argument with Prince Philip.
It was November 2016, at a reception to mark the first year of the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy, an initiative aimed at preserving and restoring indigenous forests around the world.
https://www.royal.uk/queens-commonwealth-canopy-reception-held-buckingham-palace
Back in 2008 I did some work for Prince Charles’s Rainforest Trust, so I must still be on the palace’s list of tree people. Every few years I get a stiff, gilded envelope in the post, and off I go to an event, usually at St James’s Palace.
This time, the invitation was to Buckingham Palace. I felt sorry for the tourists, peering through the gates, hoping for soldiers in bearskins, having to make do with a bunch of men and women in business attire arriving for a reception.
Once inside, seated in a chamber with enough gold leaf make Donald Trump jealous, Sir David Attenborough gave a speech of thanks to Her Majesty (yes, I did get his autograph for my kids — or Ebay, if things don’t work out).
Then, one by one, 20 High Commissioners from countries that had dedicated projects to the initiative stepped forward to receive a certificate scroll from the Queen. I was enormously impressed - for an hour she welcomed each one to the stage, spoke with them, stayed 100% focused and attentive, never once sighed, looked at her watch or shifted foot to foot. Aged 90.
Ceremony over, we milled around, not knowing what would happen next. Suddenly some doors at the back of the room were thrown open and there stood the Queen again, Philip at her side, ready to shake hands with each member of the audience as we filed into another, even more gilded room. A couple of hundred of us - incredible stamina.
Hands shaken, photos taken (I have mine still), we milled around once more, this time fortified with wine distributed by footmen circulating with silver trays. I joined a little group of clean energy friends, and we stood around chatting and marveling at the strange wonderfulness of it all.
And then, without warning, there was Prince Philip. The Queen was working her way through the far side of the room, spending a minute or two with each group of guests, and Prince Philip was doing the same on our side of the room. He was not as tall as the portraits would have you think - I guess being 95 will do that to us all.
"So," he said, "who are you?" or words to that effect.
We introduced ourselves. To justify my presence in his house, his ballroom, I explained that I had founded a company selling information about clean energy around the world.
"What do you mean by 'clean energy’?" he asked, fixing me with gimlet eyes, rheumy with age but icy blue and piercing.
"Renewable energy, wind and solar - that sort of thing," I replied, as gamely as I could.
"Absolute rubbish!" he harrumphed. "Ludicrously expensive." Exactly the words the Daily Mail were using at the time whenever they wrote a story about the futility of efforts to reduce emissions or pollution, which was often.
"A decade ago," I ventured, "you would have been absolutely right to call them ludicrously expensive. But costs have dropped incredibly fast, to the point where onshore wind is now the cheapest source of new electricity capacity in the country."
"Nonsense. Says who?"
"Well, this is exactly the sort of research the company I founded does. It’s a team of 200 who look at the economics of clean energy and transport. I recruited them and I trained them."
"Ahah" he exclaimed. "What you’re saying is that you pay them and they tell you what you want to hear!"
I looked around at the little group of green energy folk, listening to our exchange. Some of them built renewable projects for a living, but none of them were inclined to back me up.
"Technically, Your Highness, you are quite right,” I said. “I do pay them, and they do tell me things I like to hear." Which was true, since I founded the company and I never tire of hearing about the improving economics of clean energy.
And with that, Prince Philip harrumphed again, turned on his heel and moved on to the next group of guests, accompanied by his attendants.
The story has a moral. I, a nobody, son of nobody, had had a public disagreement with the husband of the Head of State. I was not clapped in irons; I was not thrown in the Tower of London; my employers were not told to fire me; my family did not fear a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Precisely nothing happened.
What a great country we live in! And what a great ruling couple. Such stamina, such service.
For my overwhelming impression of Prince Philip was not that he was an old curmudgeon - which of course he was - it was that he was of a force of nature. There he was at 95, game as a fighting cock, talking to people, brandishing his wit, and supporting his wife, the Queen.
We have lost a great man.