4. Prince Philip, the husband to Queen Elizabeth II, is notorious for ill-advised, inappropriate, racist, and sexist remarks during his official visits
Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and stalwart consort of Queen Elizabeth II, has enjoyed a lengthy career of public diplomacy on behalf of the United Kingdom. In the capacity of his royal duties, Prince Philip, as of 2002, had accompanied his wife on all 251 official overseas visits. In the course of the Coronation tour from November 1953 to May 1954, the pair traveled 43,618 miles. In total, the Duke has partaken in over 19,000 official engagements. Yet, despite this estimable resume, Prince Philip is legendarily bad at public diplomacy, routinely, and often entirely unintentionally, insulting his hosts.
Moving beyond humorous and largely inoffensive, if nonetheless impolite remarks, many of the comments made by the Prince over the years have been deeply offensive and frequently overtly racist or sexist. During a visit with British students in China in 1986, the Prince commented that “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”, remarked that an old-fashioned fuse-box “looks as if it was put in by an Indian”, asked a Scottish driving instructed “how do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test”, told the President of Nigeria that his traditional culture attire made him “look like you’re ready for bed”, and whilst in Australia asked indigenous Aborigines “do you still throw spears at each other”. Meanwhile, he once noted that an ethnic female police officer wearing a bullet-proof vest looked “like a suicide-bomber”, asked a female sea cadet “do you work in a strip club?”, and during a papal reception in Edinburgh asked Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie if she owned “a pair of knickers made out of [tartan]”.