When King Charles sat down with his official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, in the early ‘90s, he divulged more than Prince Philip thought was appropriate, according to one royal author. Gyles Brandreth, who has been a friend of the Royal Family for decades, shared that the late Duke of Edinburgh wasn’t thrilled about some of the comments the then-Prince of Wales allowed Dimbleby to publish—specifically about Charles’s childhood.
Brandreth worked alongside Prince Philip for years at one of the royal’s first charities he took on, Fields in Trust, and wrote that the late duke found Charles to be “self-indulgent” and thought his eldest son complained too much. “He felt he spent too much time thinking about himself, feeling sorry for himself, brooding about how tough it was to be the Prince of Wales,” Brandreth added.
Discussing the Dimbleby biography, Philip thought Charles took his “brooding” too far. Brandreth wrote that Prince Charles allowed the biographer “to reveal that the Prince felt ‘emotionally estranged’ from his parents and, all his life, had yearned for the kind of affection that, in his view, they were ‘unable or unwilling to offer.’”
The comments “hurt his parents,” according to Brandreth. “The Queen, of course, said nothing, but I know—because Prince Philip told me—that it “saddened” her,” he added.
As for the duke, it made him “bloody angry,” the author wrote, explaining that Philip “reckoned it was unfair” and “thought it was ‘bloody stupid’ of the Prince of Wales to air his grievances in public.”
The late Queen and Prince Philip were busy working royals when their first two children were young, much like Prince William and Princess Kate. But when Elizabeth became Queen, their schedules became even more frenzied, and as Brandreth noted, the “standards of their class and generation” meant that children were generally raised by nannies, seeing their parents only a few hours per day.
“All that Prince Philip would say to be on the record about his and his wife’s parenting skills was, ‘We did our best,’” Brandreth wrote.
