Great Writing can reveal exclusively that the person purporting to be HRH Prince Phillip during a recent morale-boosting visit to the troops in Iraq was in fact Mr Bert Entwhistle from Bolton.
    `I were watching Countdown with my wife Gwen when the phone rang and this bloke asked me if I`d mind impersonatin` Prince Phillip for a couple of days. Well I thought it were for some charity do like, what with me lookin` a bit like his Highness, so I said yeh, no problem. It were only when he starts askin` me if I`d had any of these funny soundin` innoculations lately that I twigged som`at weren`t quite right. When I questioned the bloke a bit more he finally admitted that they wanted somebody who looked like Prince Phillip, to visit the troops in Iraq. When I asked him why the Prince couldn`t go to Iraq himself the bloke got quite shirty and said it was far too dangerous for a member of the Royal Family to show their face in a place like Iraq.
  Well of course I tried to back out, an` he were quite nice to start with, but then he said he could stop my Army pension and me and the wife`s cold weather allowance, so I had no choice really.
     Mr Entwhistle went on to explain how he was picked up a couple of days later and driven to a remote location in the countryside. Here he was given extensive elocution lessons and was shown how a Royal would act on an Official visit. Mock troops were lined up for him and he practised going down the line making small talk. Finally he was told that he would have someone from the Royal Household with him at all times during his visit to fend off any potentially embarrassing questions.
     `It went pretty well in Iraq,` Mr Entwhistle said. `I didn`t like the bloody flies much and there were one or two hairy moments, like when a squaddie asked me if the Queen had ever eaten fish an` chips wrapped in newspaper, but on the whole everything went off okay.`
      No one from the MOD was available for comment yesterday, and the a Palace would only say that it was always policy for members of the Royal Family never to turn down a request to visit Her Majesty`s forces when those forces were on active service oversees.
     Mr Entwhistle meanwhile is back home, with, we are led to believe, quite a healthy increase in his Army Pension....