My Lords, it is a peculiar honour to have a chance to pay a tribute to a great man in this House today. His was a historic life. History will record that the 99 and 10/12th years that he spent on the planet were ones of spectacular improvement in the lot of humankind. He was not, of course, responsible for that change but his life brilliantly illustrates how an individual can help to bring about such improvements. The very informality of his role was a great hurdle but he turned it into a great opportunity. He rose to the challenge of being a great leader, no easy feat, and in doing so challenged others to achieve great things.
To come as a refugee from a broken family, fractured by assassination, exile and mental illness, and to create a golden family of his own through a love match that lasted nearly three-quarters of a century was remarkable enough. But to do so while helping to steer the monarchy to its modern relevance and respect, and while nudging and cajoling so many institutions and organisations in his adopted nation into their modern shape—to do all this for 73 years and never put a foot wrong, never fail to bring a smile to the faces of an audience, never leave a meeting without learning something useful—is a record that no mere politician, businessman, bishop, judge, or general can hope to match in our ephemeral careers.
It is his work that will endure—for work it was, however much fun he had doing it, visiting every corner of the country and every possible community, listening, learning, advising, steering, rewarding and helping ordinary people. This is the stuff that gets almost entirely left out of the fictionalised television series but that is the real reason the monarchy is so loved. The vast majority of people who met him did so because he visited their projects and workplaces.
When I gave the Prince Philip lecture at the Royal Society of Arts 20 years ago, he chaired the question session after and a long, continuing conversation over dinner, cutting through platitudes and banalities to get at the substance of disagreements and fan them into flames. It was a tour de force and it left me exhausted. I can now reveal that four years ago, with the kind help of the Lord Speaker, my noble friend Lord Lawson and I smuggled Prince Philip into this building for lunch with the inventor James Lovelock, who is still alive today at the age of 101. The conversation between these two pioneering environmentalists was funny, feisty, fast and furious. The topics ranged from radiation physics to barbecue design. The Duke’s fascination
with how things worked—with technology and invention, which has already been mentioned here today—shone through, but so did his fascination with how the world worked, how ecosystems fitted together and how human responsibility for managing nature must not be ducked. There was not a backward glance from these two 90-somethings; it was all about the future.
I join in paying my humble condolences to Her Majesty and all the Royal Family on account of his death. But their sorrow and ours will surely in due course be eclipsed by pride and admiration on account of his life.
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