Prince Philip is a man of such longstanding duty that he only retired from public life three years ago, at age 96.
Now, a new biography of the 99-year-old royal says he views Prince Harry’s departure from senior royal family work alongside wife Meghan Markle as a "dereliction" of his grandson's responsibilities.
“He has struggled greatly, for example, with what he sees as his grandson Harry’s dereliction of duty," veteran royal biographer Ingrid Seward writes in Prince Philip Revealed, "giving up his homeland and everything he cared about for a life of self-centered celebrity in North America.”
In the book, which will be published in the U.S. on October 20 and was excerpted in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, Seward writes that Queen's Elizabeth's husband of 72 years "has found it hard to understand exactly what it was that made his grandson’s life so unbearable. As far as Philip was concerned, Harry and Meghan had everything going for them: a beautiful home, a healthy son, and a unique opportunity to make a global impact with their charity work.”
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“For a man whose entire existence has been based on a dedication to doing the right thing, it appeared that his grandson had abdicated his responsibilities for the sake of his marriage to an American divorcée in much the same way as Edward VIII gave up his crown to marry Wallis Simpson in 1937,” writes Seward.
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Philip is also dismayed by his second son, Prince Andrew, who has become a "global figure of ridicule," Seward writes, because of his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“For Philip and the Queen, their son’s failure of judgment was a tragedy," she writes. "Not only had he besmirched the reputation of the monarchy, but had become involved in something extremely distasteful and far more serious.”
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