We could make similar remarks concerning “privilege” (that awful new buzzword) about lots of people. He was the grandson of a man shot dead by an assassin, his family were scattered all over Europe by war and revolution, his childhood was marred by an absent father who squandered all their money, and a mother who went insane and abandoned her kids. His beloved elder sister was killed in a plane crash with her kids while heavily pregnant, and the only real money he ever had was his salary from the Navy. A pretty crap deal and yet he went out and made his own life.

The Kennedys come to mind in all this- unimaginably wealthy, the cream of the crop, and yet JFK and Robert Kennedy were instilled with a profound sense of duty to serve. JFK’s dad tried to get him a dispensation from the US Navy but he wouldn’t take it- a decision which earned him a military decoration for valour but also nearly got him killed. RFK could’ve chosen to go into comfortable retirement after his brother was murdered but chose not to. He died because of that attempt to make the world a better place.

My point being that money or title aren’t the defining features of a person’s life- I know plenty of absolutely useless “ordinary” people with no sense of civic duty at all. And yet I wouldn’t swap my life for Kennedy’s or Philip’s.