The Tact and Diplomacy of Prince Philip
Created | Updated Jul 25, 2002
As the Duke of Edinburgh, and husband of the British monarch, Prince Philip has earned the notorious reputation of putting his royal foot into his ever so regal mouth. Here are some alleged sayings of HRH on the international circuit1.
His Highness won the support of the Race Relations Board during his 1999 visit to an electronics company near Edinburgh, when he pointed to a fuse box and remarked, 'It looks as though it was put in by an Indian.'
This came shortly after he met representatives of the British Deaf Association at a celebration in Cardiff and told them, 'If you are standing near there2, no wonder you are deaf.'
As early as the 1960s, the Duke offered his support to the feminist movement by declaring that 'British women can't cook'. Around the same time, he won the respect of singer Tom Jones by asking him, 'What do you gargle with, pebbles?'
The Duke's understanding of the problems of the working classes was demonstrated at the height of the recession in 1981, when he remarked, 'Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.'
In 1993, the Duke comforted the residents of Lockerbie by telling them, 'People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.' His unswerving support for the Scots was also evident in 1995, when he asked a Scottish driving instructor, 'How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?'
But the Duke's affinity with the common people extends far beyond the confines of the UK. While visiting a Hindu temple on the 2002 Golden Jubilee tour, he displayed his local knowledge by asking a Tamil priest about his links with the Tamil Tigers3. Previously, during a trip to Canada, he was heard to say, 'We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.'
His Highness once told a Briton in Hungary, 'You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly.' Displaying his impressive knowledge of world history, he asked an Aborigine in 2002 if they were 'still throwing spears', and in 1994 asked a resident of the Cayman Islands, 'Aren't most of you descended from pirates?'
In his time he has also congratulated a student visiting Papua New Guinea who had 'managed not to get eaten'; and delighted a student from Ghana by asking, 'Isn't that where they chop down all the trees and breed like rabbits?'
Another shining example of the Duke's famous racial tolerance came in 1986, when he told a World Wildlife Fund meeting, 'If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.'
His Highness' finest hour, however, remains his legendary remark to British students in China - 'If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed.'
