It seemed a daft question. “Would the death of the Duke of Edinburgh affect the Scottish elections?” asked a friend. I doubt it, was my immediate answer. There seemed no reason to think that the voters, having paid their respects, would have cause to revise their intentions. And why should they? There will be a period of mourning, a pause on Saturday when the funeral takes place, and then, as Dr Johnson once said, it’s back to the slaughterhouse. No one, least of all the duke, would expect anything else.
Except that he leaves two legacies — one constitutional and one personal — that go to the heart of the political debate, and may, obliquely or directly, seep into the campaign. The first is about continuity, and the duke’s unflinching support, over 70 long years, for Queen and country. I liked the Archbishop of Canterbury’s description of his “remarkable willingness to take the hand he was dealt in life”, but it was a bit more than that.
You cannot entirely discount the qualities of loyalty and service which he, from a rootless and alien background, brought to the Union cause. I was trying to imagine what he might have said if he, rather than the Queen, had been asked to comment on the independence referendum in 2014. She suggested people should “think carefully” about the outcome. He would probably have put it in saltier language. As an emblem of the solid values of the Union, the duke and his life remind of us of the stability of an institution that has seen us through good times and bad.
The second is impatience; his ill-concealed irritation at easy answers and poorly thought out positions. Michael Cole, former royal correspondent for the BBC, wrote about his “bottled anger” and the way he so often wrong-footed anyone expecting an anodyne exchange of views. It meant he frequently left people nonplussed, including me. I was introduced to him when I was with the Scottish Arts Council. “Are you in charge of unmade beds?” he demanded. I realised — too late — that he was referring to Tracey Emin and contemporary art. “Sort of,” I stumbled.
On another occasion, at Holyroodhouse, he was presenting his Duke of Edinburgh Awards to a group of children, who looked as they might have struggled to get to the nearest bus stop, let alone lugged a rucksack to the top of a Munro. They explained what they had achieved, but instead of a routine pat on the back, he demanded: “Yes, but why did you do it?” An engineer, to whom he was presenting one of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s coveted gold medals, marking a lifetime of research and discovery, came away slightly stunned from his post-award interview with the duke. He had been subjected to an invigilation on his subject which ended with the question, “What was the bloody point?”
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I would quite like to have seen him in the audience during the Scottish leaders’ debate at the end of last month. Several of the questions to Nicola Sturgeon revolved around the way independence was dominating the election campaign. She was pressed to say whether her demand for a referendum, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, was really the most important issue of the day. Her answer was an equivocation. She confirmed she wanted a new vote in the first half of the next five-year term, but added: “assuming the crisis has passed”.
A Duke of Edinburgh question might have been: “Yes, but who decides when the crisis has passed?” Most experts have been telling us that the dangers of a third wave are still out there, and so long as Europe, the USA and South America are fighting horrendous levels of infection, we are still vulnerable to new strains of the disease.
As Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, put it: “None of us will be safe until everyone is safe.” Will Sturgeon, who has been the most cautious of all the UK’s leaders, always putting safety before recovery, be confident enough to tell voters in a year’s time: “It matters not that Brazil is still engulfed by the pandemic, Texas has opened its doors to the disease, Africa has yet to get a proper vaccination programme — believe me, Scotland is safe, and ready to determine its own future.”
Plenty of room there for probing questions from the duke — and he never took presumptions for granted. Asked, as a campaigner for the environment, whether he counted himself a Green, he bristled: “I’m not a tree hugger.” As a keen shot, a deer-stalker and an angler, he would not, I suspect, have signed up to the Holyrood party led by Patrick Harvie, though he was a more effective campaigner for wildlife than most. It was one of many issues on which he parted company with his son, the Prince of Wales, who, I suspect, has hugged the occasional tree.
I doubt whether, at the time of devolution, he was particularly keen on the idea of a Scottish parliament, unlike Prince Charles, who saw the point of respecting the popular will and said so, if only privately. The duke would probably have asked some more testing questions about the practical advantages it would offer, and who would deliver them.
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So when it comes — as come it must — to the issue of Scotland breaking away from the Union that he represented for so long, his questions would be the kind he might have addressed from the quarterdeck during his naval career: have you thought this through? How is it going to work? What are the benefits going to be? And at the end he might well have added: what is the bloody point?
