Prince’s audience with man who loves insulting the royals
HE’S made sneering comments over the years about the Royal Family. So it was a surprise that Alastair Campbell (below) was offered an interview with Prince William, which the former Labour spin doctor boasted about yesterday on Twitter. Here’s a selection
ON THE ROYAL FAMILY...
‘idiotic statements by the Royal Family’s leading members [are] a constant boost to the republican cause. They’re fine opening hospitals. It’s when they open their mouths they get into trouble.’ In his column for the now-defunct newspaper Today in February, 1994 ‘there are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. one is that so many of the royals are thick.’ Today, May 1993
ON THE QUEEN...
‘The Queen is set to become Britain’s biggest tax “dodger” — paying as little as £2million on her vast fortune. And Prince Charles will get away with a tax bill of less than £1 million.’ (A news story he wrote for the Daily Mirror, February 1993, headlined: ‘HM THE TAX DODGER.’) recalling how his anti-royal views date back to when he was eight: ‘I feel no more or less strongly about the royals now than I did then, while many others have grown to share my views, including my Mum, who thinks the Queen and the Queen Mum were co-conspirators in Prince Charles’s adultery.’ Today, February 1994
ON PRINCE CHARLES...
‘of course one doesn’t wish to be offensive to one’s future king, does one?
‘But the day I need lessons on how to raise or educate children from someone who cannot hold his marriage together, does not see his own kids from day to day, delegates their upbringing to nannies and private school spankers, went to a spanking academy himself, needed the power of patronage to get into university, apparently wants to send his own sons to eton, the spanking academy, whose advisers all come from similar establishments and are similarly ill-suited to speak about the real world, and who courts his mistress with lavatorial suggestions, is some way off.’ Today, May 1994 Criticising Charles for not visiting the Queen Mother when she was ill, he described the Prince as ‘an overprivileged twit making jokes about women’s breasts while his granny lies in hospital’.
Campbell took offence at the fact the Prince’s sense of humour had ‘never advanced beyond the prep school lavatory’. Today, May 1993
ON PRINCESS DIANA...
‘I’D Assumed Di had a migraine because she’d been reading The economist. even well-educated intellectuals like Prince Charles and I find special reports on telecommunications in Thailand a bit heavy, but when you’re as low on the o-level count as Diana, they must be a real three-aspirin job.’ Today, November 1993 ‘While all around me are in love with Diana, I’ve tried to put the other side — that [Prince Charles] is a decent bloke who just can’t compete with her scheming ways.’ Today, May 1993
ON PRINCESS ANNE...
Referring to her wedding to Commander Tim Laurence: ‘Sorry to carp on about this, but if Royal Weddings aren’t for the purpose of cheering up a depressed nation, what on earth
are they for? To remind us of the sanctity of marriage? Like Margaret and the photographer? Fergie and Perky [Prince Andrew]? Foggy [Captain Mark Phillips] and Anne? Charles and the Delicious Destroyer [Diana]? The fairytale excuse won’t wash.’ Daily Mirror, December 1992
ON PRINCE PHILIP...
‘In HIS latest bizarre contribution to public debate, Prince Philip urges schools to publish league tables revealing how many former pupils are in jail, rather than tables revealing exam pass rates.
‘It is unsurprising that the Duke wants less attention paid to exam results.
‘He produced four children, provided them with the most privileged schooling that money could buy, yet the lot of them turned out to be intellectual dunderheads.’ Today, October 1993
BUT FINALLY, HE’S OUTSMARTED BY THE QUEEN...
Although confessing to be a ‘lifelong republican’, he concedes he ‘admires the Queen sufficient to put her in [his] recent book, Winners: And How They Succeed, as a peculiarly Great British winner’. He adds: ‘However, as I acknowledge in the chapter on the Queen, as I near my seventh decade, and she enters her tenth, she has seen us off, certainly for my lifetime, and well beyond. Fair play to her.’ IB Times, May 2016 Compiled by Sarah Chalmers and Ross Parker