The Hindu : A prince with the gift of the gaffe

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 03, 2002

International

International

A prince with the gift of the gaffe

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON MARCH. 2. The Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, has done it again — throwing political correctness out the window as only he can, a skill which has earned him the nickname "the Duke of gaffe."

He grabbed the headlines today after he asked a "suited and cultured" Australian aborigine leader if his people still threw "spears at each other", a reference to a custom which is about as contemporary as Victorian prudery. The incident happened when the Duke and the Queen were visiting the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park in North Australia on Friday. William Brim, the cosmopolitan founder of the park to whom the question was put, was clearly taken back by what the media today dubbed as an "insulting" remark, but like a good host he let it pass and good-humouredly assured the Duke: "No, we don't do that any more."

Mr. Brim's tact saved a potentially embarrassing situation which, as The Times noted, "could so easily have plunged into the abyss of severe political incorrectness". The Guardian in a front-page story called the Duke a "liability" for the Queen and catalogued his previous gaffes which included telling British children during a visit to China that if they stayed there long enough they would all become "slitty-eyed".

"Prince Philip has succeeded in insulting the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Pacific islanders and Scots during the Queen's 50 years as monarch. Yesterday, he added Aborigines to the list," the newspaper said as it recalled how he upset a lot of Indians few years ago when during a visit to a factory in Edinburgh he pointed to a tacky fuse-box and said: "It looks as if it was put in by an Indian."

The "prince with the gift of the gaffe", as one newspaper called him, once famously asked a prominent Kenyan lady: "You are a woman, aren't you". And, on a visit to Cayman Islands, he asked a rich islander, apparently his host: "Aren't most of you descended from pirates". In a dig at the Queen's Scottish subjects, he asked a driving instructor: "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test."

Newspapers today were full of the Duke's "gems" which his aides have got into the habit of dismissing as "light-hearted" remarks with no offence intended. But someone at Buckingham Palace outdid even the Duke when in an apparently light-headed moment he faxed an 80-page document containing among other things the Queen's Australian itinerary to a McDonald's restaurant in Brisbane because, according to The Daily Telegraph, he "misread one digit of the Queen's hotel number in Brisbane."

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