Prince Philip is well placed to imagine his grandsons’ grief

The broadly welcomed admission recently by Prince Harry that he had sought counselling to help him to deal with his grief over the death of his mother, Princess Diana, when he was 12, presents a striking contrast with the stiff upper lip always favoured by his soon-to-retire grandfather, Prince Philip. Nevertheless, the Duke of Edinburgh is curiously well placed to imagine something of what his more emotionally open grandsons might have gone through after the shocking news from Paris in August 1997. When the Duke helped persuade the young princes to walk behind their mother’s funeral cortege, telling them, ‘If I walk, will you,’ he could draw on his own wretched experience of sixty years previously after his heavily pregnant sister Cecile and her family were killed in the Steene air disaster just across the Channel in Belgium. Prince Philip was sixteen at the time, and the terrible news was broken to him by his headmaster at Gordonstoun, Kurt Hahn.