When Mohamed Al Fayed told the Diana inquest on Monday that Prince Philip was a Nazi whose family name was Frankenstein, or something like it, he was being - shall we say - a little unfair.
The Harrods owner claims the 86-year-old Duke of Edinburgh was the mastermind behind the international conspiracy to murder Diana by setting a French MI6 agent, armed with a dog and a battered Fiat Uno, on a collision course with her Mercedes in Paris on August 31 1997. "It's time to send him back to Germany," he said.
The duke isn't actually named after a character in Mary Shelley's 19th-century novel, though he is part of a family whose royal roots spread right across Europe. He is a descendant of the Danish-German house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, whose members have provided bespoke royalty to Denmark, Norway and Greece. Philip was himself born Prince Philippos of Greece and Denmark on June 10 1921 on Corfu. He certainly has a lot more German than Greek blood and does speak German.
While it is true that all four of his older sisters married German aristocrats - and were thereby barred from attending his marriage to Princess Elizabeth in 1947 - it is not true that he was brought up by Nazis, during his peripatetic and genuinely impoverished childhood. His mother, who became a Greek Orthodox nun, sheltered a Jewish family in occupied Athens.
Philip served throughout the war in the Royal Navy, taking part in the battle of Crete and the Allied invasion of Sicily. He became a naturalised British subject in 1947 and took the name Mountbatten, an Anglicised version of his mother's family name of Battenberg.
In the light of Fayed's allegations, Ian Burnett QC, counsel for the coroner, told the inquest it would have been "rather surprising" if Harrods had kept its royal warrant. "I don't care," said Fayed.
· This article was amended on Monday February 25 2008. The name Mountbatten, which Prince Philip adopted when he became a naturalised British subject, is an Anglicised version of his mother's family name of Battenberg, not Battenburg as we had it in the article above. This has been corrected.
