Gyles Brandreth was a friend and confidante of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. He’s written about them extensively and he’s actually broken news about both of them in recent years. Brandreth was the first one who came out and said that QEII had bone-marrow cancer in her final year and the palace covered it up. He also said that the palace lied about QEII being at Prince Philip’s bedside when her husband passed. Well, for some reason, the Daily Mail wants to remind everyone of the time that Brandreth said that Prince Philip thought Charles would be a terrible king.
Prince Philip did little to hide his ‘disdain’ for Charles who he believed ‘lacked the dedication necessary to make a good king’, a royal insider has claimed. It is no secret that King Charles had a testy relationship with his father.
Their clashes during Charles’s childhood were dramatised for the hit Netflix series The Crown where the young prince was dressed down by his father for being ‘too weak’ after he struggled to fit in at Gordonstoun boarding school. While time healed the rift between the family members and by all accounts Charles and Philip were close in the Duke of Edinburgh’s final years, throughout adulthood they struggled to get on with Philip doing very little to disguise his feelings.
Writing in his biography, Philip: The Final Portrait, broadcaster and royal author Gyles Brandreth claims that during his meetings with the Duke in the 1980s and 1990s there was a ‘touch of exasperation in his tone – and often, too, a note of sarcasm’ when he talked about Charles. The Duke gave the impression that he would have liked his son to be more robust, less fey.’
Gyles notes that Philip often did very little to hide how he felt about the heir to the throne even when speaking to members of the public. The royal expert recalls a meeting with Philip in 1986 where the Duke was presented with three pairs of carriage driving gloves as a gift from the Playing Fields Association all in different colours. Third pair were a garish lilac colour which Philip held ‘disdainfully’ and said “I think we’ll give these to the Prince of Wales”.
Philip even allegedly felt that Charles lacked the ‘dedication necessary to make a good king’ especially after the death of Princess Diana. Speaking to Gyles on another occasion Philip acknowledged their similarities but noted their key personality difference was that Charles is a ‘romantic’ and he was a ‘pragmatist’.
“I think we’ll give these to the Prince of Wales” is hilarious. LMAO. Yeah, it was never a secret that Philip thought Charles was “soft,” and I’m not going to defend Philip there – Philip bullied Charles and tried and failed to “toughen up” Charles and it was always a toxic dynamic. But Philip was right to doubt Charles’s dedication. Beyond the toxicity about Charles’s “softness,” there was a real concern that Charles never had the temperament to be a good king. He always had a wishy-washy, dithering attitude, and he’s spent the past five decades enraptured with Camilla, to the point where he’s destroyed his relationships with his sons. Charles not only lacks the temperament to be a good king/leader/head of state, he lacks the temperament to simply be the head of his family and a loving father.
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