IT’S early evening at a Buck House reception for newly-elected Labour MPs. Prince Phillip approaches “very sincere, leftish MP” Joan Walley and, says Tony Blair, asks her where she represents. “Stoke-on-Trent,” she replies. “Ghastly place, isn’t it?” says HRH.

Since the day he swept Princess Elizabeth down the aisle, Philip Mountbatten has added to the gaiety of the nation.

He is the Gene Hunt of the royal family plain-speaking, no-nonsense, tough as nails and without a PC bone in his body.

Who could forget his outrageous remark to British exchange students visiting China in 1986, that if they stayed there for a year they would “go native and come home slitty eyed”?

Or his shocker in 2000 at a factory near Edinburgh, when he said a fuse box was so crude it “looked as though it had been put in by an Indian”. He probably meant cowboy. You certainly hope so.

It was him who cheerily asked a student who’d travelled to Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten, then?” and who reportedly told a Cayman Islander: “Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?"

It’s often claimed these so-called gaffes are offensive. But few of those on the receiving end have ever been reported as describing them as such; one Aboriginal leader, asked if his people still threw spears, says he found it funny.

However it comes out, with Prince Philip you feel the mot is always intended to be bon.

Philipisms stick out because we are so used to banality in public life, whether it’s from z-list celebs, self-serving politicians, or footballers who are too thick to string a sentence together. But his robustness does provide a very convenient smokescreen for the other side of Prince Philip, the caring, indeed gentle one, that is rarely glimpsed in public.

Philip may be the man who told British industry to get its finger out. He may be the man who crushed a hack by responding to his polite inquiry as to whether he had enjoyed his flight with: “Have you ever been on a plane? Well, it was just like that.”

But he is also the man who took the time and trouble to write long letters to Princess Diana when she was at her loneliest.

He attempted to buoy her confidence by reportedly telling her he couldn’t believe Charles would prefer Camilla over her and said: “If invited, I will always do my utmost to help you and Charles to the best of my ability, but I am quite ready to concede that I have no talents as a marriage counsellor!!!”

It was Philip who apparently persuaded William to walk behind his mother’s coffin at her funeral by saying: “If I walk, will you walk with me?”

It was Phillip; too, who tenderly placed his hand on his grandson’s shoulder at that awful event during the private seconds when the cortege passed under Horseguards Arch.

The biggest charges levelled at Philip by his detractors are that he’s racist.

Certainly the things he sometimes says would certainly sound odd coming from a younger man. But he’s not younger, he’s 88 and it’s hard to reconcile racism allegations with the news that his mother was declared a Righteous Gentile for saving Jews in the war and that his favourite TV programme was the Kumars at Number 42.

So much so that he and the Queen invited its stars, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal, to dinner.

“The Duke and I were trading a lot of jokes,” says Bhaskar, “And both of them laughed out loud. One of the butlers sidled up to me and said he is under orders to video The Kumars for the Royals.”

And if he does come across as too anti sometimes, frequently it’s with cause.

When asked whether he’d approve of a visit to the Soviet Union in 1967, Philip is said to have exploded: “The b******s murdered half my family!”

What can you say to that?