The politically incorrect Duke

As an ex-Navy man, the Duke of Edinburgh is one for plain-speaking:



During a state visit to China in 1986, he famously told a group of British students: "If you stay here much longer, you'll be all slitty-eyed!"

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

More recently he joked that the answer to London's traffic congestion was to 'ban tourists'.

Speaking to a driving instructor in Oban, Scotland: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"

To an Australian Aborigine during a visit in March 2002: "Still throwing spears?"

On cuisine in 1966: "British women can't cook."

During the 1981 recession: "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed."

Sharing a joke with a blind, wheelchair-bound girl with a guide-dog: "Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?"

Commenting on modern stress counselling for servicemen in 1995: "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?' "

Responding to calls for a firearm ban after the Dunblane shooting: "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?"

Referring to an old-fashioned fusebox in a factory near Edinburgh in 1999: "It looks as if it was put in by an Indian."

Referring to a Cambridge University car park attendant who failed to recognise him in 1997: "Bloody silly fool!"

Talking to young deaf people in Cardiff about the school's steel band: "Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf."

During a 1984 visit to Kenya, he's presented with a small gift from a native woman: "You are a woman, aren't you?"

Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991: "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species in the world."

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

Speaking to a Briton in Budapest in 1993: "You can't have been here long, you haven't got a pot belly!"

Speaking to an islander in the Cayman Islands in 1994: "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?"

Speaking to a student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea: "You managed not to get eaten then?"

At a 1986 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 is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

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

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