The Duke of Edinburgh was like a walking time bomb: you never knew when he would go off, or how explosive the results would be. He could insult anyone, at any time, without fear, favour or hesitation: foreigners, women, Scotsmen, journalists (of course), and eco-enthusiasts who thought it would be a good idea to lecture him on the subject of wind turbines.
He took a disregard for political correctness to new heights, and if the headlines that resulted from his indiscretions were to be believed, left a trail of diplomatic ill-feeling in his wake.
His most famous remark, which made the front pages of the tabloids the next day, came in China in 1986 when he was accompanying the Queen on her historic state visit. There he met a group of British overseas students and told them: “If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes.”
No matter what country he was in, he had a capacity for finding the most inappropriate thing to say. To an Aboriginal leader in Australia, it was: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”
To a Nigerian president wearing traditional robes, it was: “You look ready for bed.”
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As his “slitty eyes” remark made clear, Britons staying overseas were fertile territory for Philip’s salty views on the perils of abroad. When he met a British student trekking in Papua New Guinea, he said: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
The duke himself was well aware of what he was doing, and never showed any sign of regret, or acknowledgement that his remarks had caused offence.
He had himself noted his expertise in “dontopedalogy — the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it”. It was, he admitted, something that he had “practised for a good many years”. And practice did indeed make perfect. No matter the situation, no matter whom he was meeting, there was always a chance that he would come up with some quip which — on the face of it, at least — was designed to be spectacularly rude.
To a Scottish driving instructor he offered: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?” On meeting a designer with a goatee beard he said: “Well, you didn’t design your beard too well, did you?”
Despite everything, in particular the best efforts of some branches of the press to turn every verbal sally into a full-scale diplomatic incident, the effect of his remarks was usually no more than a certain level of synthetic outrage. Anglo-Chinese relations survived the “slitty eyes” incident intact: the Aboriginal people of Australia showed no signs of taking lasting offence.
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Sometimes, of course, his jokes were undeniably amusing as long as one was not at the receiving end, as when he opened an annexe to City Hall, Vancouver, in 1969 with the words: “I declare this thing open, whatever it is.”
His remarks were labelled gaffes, but it was a misnomer. Gaffes are accidental: Philip knew what he was doing. His aim was — usually — not so much to be insulting, as to break the ice with a well-timed, if ill-judged, joke.
Conversations between members of the royal family and the public can be stiff, awkward affairs, and dull in the extreme: Philip took the view that the only way to get people to loosen up was to offer some pithy, possibly outrageous observation to put people at their ease: although as Philip himself remarked more than once, the inherent danger in breaking the ice is that sometimes you fall through it.
The extraordinary thing was that as often as not the victims were not really affronted — it was just the press that chose to come over all po-faced. And the other half of the time? There were occasions when Philip straightforwardly set out to be rude; because he could. When he met the Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda in 2002, he asked him what he had done before entering parliament. He had been a student and a trade union official, he replied. “You didn’t do anything then,” Philip said.
He had strong views on a range of topics and did not hold back from expressing them. When he met the boss of a wind turbine company, he told him that they were “useless”, wholly reliant on subsidies and “an absolute disgrace”.
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On another occasion he met Sir Elton John and brought up the subject of his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin, remarking: “Oh, it’s you that owns that ghastly car, is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle.”
When, at a lunch for Battle of Britain veterans in 2015, he ordered the in-house RAF photographer to hurry up and “take the f***ing picture”, what might have been regarded as unforgivable rudeness in anyone else was just laughed off as Philip being Philip.
He got away with it because he simply did not care. The duke had spent all his life saying what he thought, and no one had ever stopped him. So he carried on. Plain-speaking and direct, or cantankerous and maladroit? It was all a matter of taste, really. But it got him through some pretty boring royal engagements.
Repeat offender
To a Nigerian president in traditional robes: “You look ready for bed.”
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To an Aboriginal leader in Australia: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”
To a British student trekking in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
To a British student in China: “If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes.”
To a Scottish driving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”
To a young female officer wearing a bullet-proof vest: “You look like a suicide bomber.”
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To a female sea cadet, on being told she worked in a nightclub: “Is it a strip club?”
To young deaf people in Cardiff, referring to the school’s steel band: “No wonder you are deaf.”
Pointing to an old-fashioned fusebox near Edinburgh: “It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.”
To a 13-year-old boy who told Philip he wanted to go into space: “You’re too fat to be an astronaut.”
To a Cambridge University car park attendant who did not recognise him: “Bloody silly fool!”
