Why worship Prince Philip?

In this travelogue, Matthew Baylis, the novelist and TV critic and former Eastenders screenwriter, goes to Tanna, a Melanesian island, where, he believes, the locals worship Prince Philip. This sounds weird — to worship a man from far away, who knows little about them, about whose life they weave complex myths. But then again, some Melanesian people worship Christ, and yet others follow an American who might or might not have existed and who might or might not have been called John Frum. Baylis sets out to investigate.

Prince Philip, he says, has interested him since he was a boy. Growing up in Southport, near Liverpool, the 11-year-old Baylis was aware of Philip’s visit to Salford university in 1982 and one of his reviled gaffes. The Duke of Edinburgh said that ‘one of the downsides of eradicating disease and hunger was more disease and hunger’. Baylis saw the point that the Consort had been trying, possibly, to make.