Prince Philip had a walk-on part in the royal drama, but he played it to perfection

It is not disparaging of Prince Philip, who has died aged 99, to say he was always a walk-on part in the pantomime of monarchy. It was a part in which he was a star. Plucked from the ranks of lesser European royalty as the “suitable” husband for a queen, he was perfectly cast. Nephew of the king of Greece, safely naval and effortlessly gracious, he took to his assigned role as if to the manner born. He served in the war, but when his wife became queen in 1952, he gave up a naval career. While known as the Queen’s consort, he did not hold the title Prince Consort, one confined to Victoria’s Albert.

The monarchy in the 1950s faced not a crisis but questions inevitable for so archaic an institution in a state recently traumatised by war and transformed by a socialist parliament. A minor strain of republicanism ran through the House of Commons. Postwar meant modernity as well as austerity. The monarchy was still bruised by the forced abdication of the Queen’s uncle, Edward VIII, albeit soothed by the exemplary wartime conduct of her father, George VI. All the same, the monarchy could do without a shock.

The young queen and her husband burst on to a drab scene, dazzling yet aloof. At every turn Philip was present, almost comically two paces behind, hands firmly behind his back. He seemed already a fixture, a stage prop, a gentleman in waiting. Though with a quick wit to match his wife’s, he rarely broke cover. His occasional tactless one-liners may have sometimes caused offence, but they merely showed he was alive.

Related: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, dies aged 99

Nonetheless, modernity beckoned. While history might counsel caution, the times appeared to require change. By the 1960s the young couple, now in their 30s, took a gamble. They opened up their family to television, turning what had been a distant, impersonal monarchy into a new constitutional entity, a “royal family”.

Cameras were invited to share a royal holiday in Balmoral. This developed into increasing television coverage, culminating in a full-blown fly-on-the-wall titled Royal Family. It was a portrait of a supposedly ordinary family at work and play. Screened in 1969, it was watched by more than 30 million Britons. Many felt it had, as Philip hoped, ended the royal mystique. Others worried with David Attenborough, then the programme’s BBC boss, that they had risked “killing the monarchy”. The broadcast was followed closely by film of the bizarre investiture of a hapless Prince Charles as Prince of Wales, depicting a family anything but ordinary, indeed most odd. The Queen has refused to let the Royal Family film be reshown since the 1970s.

The deed was done. While other surviving European royal families were quietly retreating into the background and leading normal lives, Britain’s was being projected into the age of celebrity. A dozen or so putative “members” received pay and performed public duties. As the children grew up, every aspect of their maturing was subject to scrutiny, warts and all. The pain to the Queen and Philip was on occasions to be intense. How far the ever-shy monarch blamed her husband for this turn of events is not known. The best that can be said is that, if the gamble’s aim was survival, it worked.

A constitutional monarch should be a cypher, and their consort the cypher of a cypher. Stripped of all entitlement to politics or controversy, both partners must struggle to embody the nation in all its manifestations. In Edmund Burke’s terms, the job is to be not constitutionally “efficient” but “dignified”, an actor in a play scripted by ancient history and cloaked in the paraphernalia of statehood.

Philip’s life was thus lived in perpetual limbo, his every move, every remark, every glance reflecting on his wife. He enjoyed none of the scope extended to various predecessors. Mary I’s husband, Philip of Spain, at least expected to inherit the crown should she die. When her sister Elizabeth succeeded, he sent an Armada to claim the throne. William of Orange, after his Glorious Revolution, tolerated no nonsense from parliament. He demanded absolute equality with his reigning wife, Mary II, crown and all, and became king on her death. Victoria’s Prince Albert was made Prince Consort at her insistence, receiving state papers and sitting alongside his wife in all her work, public and private.

For Prince Philip the frustration must have been intense, but it only rarely broke surface in conversation with less than discreet friends. His outbursts were confined to such remarks as “I am nothing but a bloody amoeba”. He concerned himself with Charles’s education, at least to the extent of making him go to his old school of Gordonstoun, which Charles hated. Various rumours of laddish behaviour, possibly under the influence of his relative Lord Mountbatten, were never substantiated. Insinuations to that effect in the fantastical drama The Crown have been meticulously demolished by royal biographer Hugo Vickers.

The Queen had been careful, in 1952, to ensure that, should she die with Prince Charles still a young child, it would be Philip and not her sister Margaret who should become regent. But he did not attend royal audiences and received no state papers. Not for him the famous role of the monarch “to consult and warn” elected heads of government. Philip retained a clear understanding of the crown’s status, telling a Canadian press conference in 1969 that it existed not for itself but for the people. “If at any stage any nation decides that the system is unacceptable then it’s up to them to change it.”

Related: A life in pictures – Prince Philip

Philip’s one permitted initiative was the harmless Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme, reflecting his own passion for the outdoors, in which he took a direct personal interest. Even that had its irritations. He would fume in private about the “bloody” Health and Safety Executive, which tried at every turn to neuter the scheme and deaden his desire to inspire young people with a spirit of risk.

He remained silent under the strain of the Queen’s annus horribilis of 1992 and the death of Diana in 1997. It was as if the monarchy, pelted for once with bad publicity and bad luck, retreated to form, to stand stolid and boring. Hereditary monarchy is still the preferred basis of headship in six other north European states, all liberal democracies. As the constitutionalist Vernon Bogdanor has written: “A constitutional monarchy settles beyond argument the crucial question of who is to be the head of state, and places the position of that head beyond political competition. In doing so, it alone can represent the whole nation in an emotionally satisfying way.”

To Bogdanor a monarch is almost a shop-window mannequin. But compared with most aspects of the British constitution, the monarchy at present seems the least broken, the least in need of mending.

Philip’s person was integral to that phenomenon. He wandered the globe, supporting his wife in a job of mind-numbing dullness. There were no scandalous liaisons, no dodgy business associates, no absences or public distancing from court. He seemed genuinely to love the Queen and she him, though their love seemed strangely undemonstrative. He was simply there, a rock for a hard-working wife, a rather modern sort of man.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

• Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure discussion remains on topics raised by the writer. Please be aware there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.