So long and so colourfully did his late father wear the title that Prince Edward is still settling in — in the public imagination — as Duke of Edinburgh. It is a meaty label (bestowed at the wish of the late Queen) especially when Edward is now, by virtue of proliferating Windsor offspring, a lowly 14th in the succession, trailing the likes of Sienna Mapelli Mozzi, daughter of Princess Beatrice, and Ernest Brooksbank, son of Princess Eugenie.
No matter. The fourth child of Elizabeth II, who celebrated his 60th birthday yesterday, is a deserving inheritor of the exalted ducal tag. In royal terms at least, a grafter, undertaking 297 engagements last year, third behind the Stakhanovite Princess Royal and the King, Edward and his wife Sophie, an equally dependable ribbon cutter and charity patron, are a steady presence in a royal landscape churned into uncertainty by the war of the Sussexes, the Duke of York’s Epstein debacle and concurrent health worries surrounding the Princess of Wales and the King, whose cancer treatment forced his withdrawal from today’s Commonwealth Day service.
It was not always so. Edward’s infatuation with television production resulted in a gaffe-prone early period typified by the traumatic cringethon It’s a Royal Knockout which, 37 years on, retains the capacity to send appalled viewers scrambling for the remote. Sensibly, Edward saw the writing on the wall and, with the help of his unshowy wife, the product of a “normal” background, returned to the family business. Their low-key pragmatism is displayed in the forsaking of HRH for their children.
Edward’s capacity for humility — learning from errors, knuckling down and quietly getting on with a largely unglamorous life of public service — should be a lesson to his fellow dukes, of York and Sussex.