Blunder what he really thought on all those visits?
■“Do you still throw spears at each other?” (In Australia in 2002 talking to a aboriginal entrepreneur). ■“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?” (to a driving instructor in Oban, Scotland, during a 1995 walkabout). ■“It looks like a tart’s bedroom” (on plans for the Duke and Duchess of York’s house at Sunninghill Park in 1988). ■“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 1986 World Wildlife Fund meeting).
“I declare this thing open, whatever it is” (on a visit to Canada in 1969). ■“You are a woman, aren’t you?” (In Kenya, in 1984, after accepting a small gift from a local woman). ■“It looks as if it was put in by an Indian” (pointing at an old-fashioned fusebox in a factory near Edinburgh in 1999). ■“Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed” (in 1981 recession). ■“Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf” (to young deaf people in Cardiff, in 1999, referring to a school’s steel band). ■“If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed” (to British students in China, during the 1986 state visit). ■“Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” (to a wealthy islander in the Cayman Islands in 1994). ■“You’re too fat to be an astronaut” (to 13-year-old Andrew Adams who told Philip he wanted to go into space. Salford, 2001) ■“Yak, yak, yak; come on get a move on” (shouted from the deck of Britannia in Belize in 1994 to the Queen who was chatting to her hosts on the quayside). ■“British women can’t cook” (speaking in Britain in 1966).