The Queen’s royal consort, Prince Philip, is renowned for making inappropriate comments and tasteless jokes. So, to celebrate his 90th birthday, we set out to make a list of his top 90 gaffes. But because there are only so many hours in a day, we settled on nine blunders, one for each decade of his life.
“You are a woman, aren’t you?”
— Accepting a gift from a local woman during a visit to Kenya in 1984
“If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes.”
— Speaking to a British exchange student in China in 1986
“If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and flies but is not an airplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”
— In an address at a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986
“You can’t have been here that long because you haven’t got a pot belly.”
— Chatting with a British citizen in Hungary in 1993
“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”
— Speaking to a Scottish driving instructor in 1995
“You managed not to get eaten then?”
— Congratulating a student on surviving a year-long hike through Papua New Guinea, in 1998
“It looks as though it was put in by an Indian.”
— Assessing a fuse box during a 1999 tour of a factory in Scotland. He later apologized, claiming he had meant to say “cowboys. I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up,” he explained.
“Well, you’ll never fly in it, you’re too fat to be an astronaut.”
–Giving some somber advice to a 13-year-old boy at the University of Salford in 2001
“Do you still throw spears at each other?"
–Speaking to a group of Aboriginal people during a 2002 visit to Australia
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