Author Topic: Prince Philip: King of Gaffes  (Read 1254 times)

Diesel1

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Prince Philip: King of Gaffes
« on: September 22, 2006, 09:26:54 AM »
Some funny quotes from my favourite Royal

In May this year he angered deaf people during a visit to the new Welsh Assembly. While he was with a group from the British Deaf Association who were standing near a band, he pointed to the musicians and said: "Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf."

In 1996 he caused an outcry among gun law reformers when he said: "There's no evidence that people who use weapons for sport are any more dangerous than people who use golf clubs or tennis rackets or cricket bats."

He told a Briton he met in Hungary in 1993: "You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly".

In 1995 he asked a Scottish driving instructor: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test."

The Prince angered local residents in Lockerbie when on a visit to the town in 1993, he said to a man who lived in a road where 11 people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet: "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle."

During a Royal visit to China in 1986 he described Peking as "ghastly" and told British students: "If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed."

He said of Canada: "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves."

At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."

In 1966 he provoked outrage by saying: "British women can't cook."

Commenting on stress counselling for servicemen in a TV documentary on the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, he said: "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking `are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?'. You just got on with it."

Personal remarks have annoyed singing stars. In 1969 The Duke said to Tom Jones after the Royal Variety Performance: "What do you gargle with, pebbles?".

At a private lunch given 30 years ago he said he thought Adam Faith's singing was like bath water going down a plug hole.

Still throwing spears? (Question put to an Australian Aborigine during a visit in March 2002)

"It looks as if it was put in by an Indian." (in 1999, referring to an old-fashioned fuse box in a factory near Edinburgh)

"You are a woman, aren't you?" (in 1984, in Kenya, to a native woman who had presented him with a small gift)

"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." (at a 1986 World Wildlife Fund meeting)

"You managed not to get eaten, then?" (in 1998, to a student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea)

"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" (in 1994, to an islander in the Cayman Islands)

"Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." (in 1992 in Australia, when asked to stroke a Koala bear)

In 2001 he told a 13-year-old schoolboy he was 'too fat' to become an astronaut.

Pointing at 14-year-old Shahin Ullah during a visit to a London youth club: "He looks as if he is on drugs!"