The Prince of Political Incorrectness: Philip’s Reign of Insults, Barbs and Gaffes
By: Heat Street Staff
Royal watchers with a taste for irreverence and anarchy will have a little less to look forward to with the news that Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, is retiring from public life.
Philip, a Greek royal who became the Duke of Edinburgh on marrying then Princess Elizabeth, has a reputation for uproar, making close-to-the-bone quips that have seen the forces of political correctness repeatedly denounce him.
In wake of the 95-year-old’s imminent departure from the otherwise dull ribbon-cuttings and hand-shaking events he once so animated, Heat Street remembers some of his most notable encounters:
Cultural exchange
On seeing the President of Nigeria, who was in national dress, 2003, Philip quipped: “You look like you’re ready for bed!”
In 1993, he told a tourist in Budapest, Hungary: “You can’t have been here long, you haven’t got a pot belly.”
Greeting a British man trekking through Papua New Guinea (which has a history of native cannibalism), he said: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
On meeting former German chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1997, he called him “Reichskanzler” – a title last used by Adolf Hitler.
Helmut Kohl and Bill Clinton on Air Force One
Philip once remarked to General Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator of Paraguay: “It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”
On finding a British student in China in 1986, he said: “If you stay here much longer, you’ll go home with slitty eyes.”
He asked a group of Cayman Islanders: “Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?”
Examining native Ethiopian art in 1965, he said: “It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from school art lessons.”
In 2002 he asked a group of Aboriginal Australians: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”
Feminist theory
The Duke once inquired of a female naval cadet: “Do you work in a strip club?”
In 1987 he joked to a female solicitor (a British term for lawyer): “I thought it was against the law for a woman to solicit.”
He tactfully told a meeting of Women’s Institute in Scotland that “British women can’t cook.”
On the virtues of marriage, in 1988 he said: “I don’t think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing.”
Meeting a group of female MPs at a royal reception, he observed: “So this is feminist corner then.”
The special relationship
“Where’s the Southern Comfort?” – Philip on being presented with a hamper of goods by the US ambassador in 1999.
On the British aristocracy, he said: “People think there’s a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans.”
Assorted other bloopers
On meeting a group of deaf children next to a steel band, he said: “Deaf? If you’re near there, no wonder you are deaf.”
On meeting a schoolboy who invited the Queen to a town in Essex (a London suburb not known for its academics), he said: “Ah, you’re the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then?”
After being introduced to Cate Blanchett in 2008, he asked her for help with his DVD player, because she is “in the film industry”.
To a group of women at a community centre in Chadwell Heath, east London, (pictured, top) he asked “who do you sponge off?” (This was seen as particularly ironic, given that Philip himself has lived a life more or less funded by the British taxpayer).