Countdown to the royal divorce - part 4

I have been requested by a reader – a Mrs Trellis of North Island – for more up to date news of our favourite family.

Much of what I hear and see must remain confidential, even on so private a medium as the internet, and I am sure that no one would like me to be indiscrete or display evidence that I am incapable of keeping a secret.

Philip was on television this weekend, being interviewed by that prize wally Mark Nicholas, and managed to keep a straight face while saying nothing of any interest for 10 minutes, during which he managed to give the most boring and evasive answers to all of the questions. A remarkable achievement for someone who is well over 80, and is often accused of being neither use nor ornament. Phil is patron of the Lords Taverners, and shows a passing interest in cricket, but I fell about when he said, deadpan, that he was unable to play cricket because polo was his summer sport. “You old bugger,” I joshed, when I tracked him down at Winston’s Reggae Club in Willesden, “I bet that Nicholas chap hasn’t the slightest idea what you really got up to in the summer”. “Well, I mentioned show business enough times to give the soft sod a clue”, he chortled, “you can take a horse to water, but you can’t let it chase foxes”. I think he had been inhaling a bit too deeply at said establishment.

I can reveal here, for those who had not yet been made aware, that between 1956 and 1974 Phil would sneak off for 4 or 6 weeks, and appear in the chorus line at Butlin’s holiday camp in Prestatyn. He used the stage name Phyllis Edinburgh, but to the best of my knowledge his real identity was never discovered. He was a particular favourite, with his silky thighs and curvy abdomen, but one would have thought that the polo neck sweater that he habitually wore on stage to conceal the prominent Adam’s apple would have given the game away.