Gyles Brandreth thinks the royal family is set to be “slimmed down”.
The 73-year-old former politician remembers speaking with Prince Philip about the evolution of the royal family during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and he predicted it’ll be downsized in the coming years.
Gyles – who was a close friend of the late prince – shared: “One of the interesting things that Prince Philip pointed out to me that in the past the royal family has always been quite small. And when he became Duke of Edinburgh in 1947 it was just the king and the queen and the two young princesses. That was it, really. That was the royal family.
“And now of course it became this larger thing altogether. But I think that going forward we are going to see, we are going to go back to a much slimmed down.”
Gyles explained how he thinks the royal family will be structured in the years to come.
He told Express.co.uk: “We will have the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, and we will have Princess Anne. We will also have Prince Edward, who is going to become the new Duke of Edinburgh.
“Then we will have William and Catherine for the next generation. In a sense, it will be a leaner machine going forward and I think the duke would have quite of liked that. Less to talk about, less to gossip about.”
Philip – who passed away in April at the age of 99 – reportedly thought that Prince Harry’s tell-all TV interview with Oprah Winfrey was “madness”.
The prince couldn’t understand what his grandson and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, were hoping to achieve when they sat down with the TV icon.
Gyles, Philip’s biographer, said: “I know from someone close to him that he thought Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was ‘madness’ and ‘no good would come of it’.
“I was not surprised because that is exactly how he described to me the personal TV interviews given by Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, back in the 1990s.”